LCE4: « The Psychoanalytic Act as Act and Orientation » Alan Rowan

Our good friend and colleague, Alan Rowan, Member of the Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation (ICLO) and the New Lacanian School, was very kind to allow us to publish this paper on the Act, recently presented in Ireland and to be published in print in Lacunae, the journal of the Irish Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Volume 1, Issue 2). In his text, Rowan offers a description of the Act, grounded in a solid reading of several passages from Lacan’s Seminar XV on the Psychoanalytic Act, including the reworking of the Pavlovian stimulus-response concept with which Lacan begins the Seminar and issues such as the relationship of the Act to transference and the question of the effect or product of the Act. Rowan’s close reading of Lacan’s Seminar and elaboration of the impact of this notion of the Act on psychoanalytic practice, implications he articulates through a differential reading of Freud and Lacan as well as a tracing of the ways in which some of Lacan’s concepts have been further developed in the work of Jacques-Alain Miller (in particular, the difference between the transferential and real Unconscious), will help us as we orient our work in preparation for our Study Days on « The Psychoanalytic Act in the 21st Century. »