It’s done. We have entered a new era. Anyone who has not noticed it does not know how to read the event. Everyone will have, however, been touched by it. Something happened with the 44 th Study Days of the École de la Cause freudienne, Being Mother, Maternity Fantasies in Psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis, and its manifestations, have caught up with time. This was already the case. It might not have been known. It did not always find a way to be said. This time, it was seen. Felt. Manifested.
It didn’t deceive.Three thousand one hundred people. 3.100 people. All of them, sitting from beginning to end of two full days. Glued… and above all lively, at a Congress! And even if it were only a matter of number. It is not the number that drives the comment. It’s the content that produced the number.
There was great rigor in the research and development of psychoanalysis and the Lacanian clinic during the first day of simultaneous sessions. It fulfilled its function as an aggiornamento of the real of the subjective dimension of motherhood, in times when science is distancing it more than ever from those invariants that used to be considered “natural” and when a diversity of new forms of parentality are being born.
It was demonstrated there that psychoanalysis – when it does not make itself the relay of ideologies – is apt to accommodate both its points of impasse and its necessary inventions, right where the so-called maternal instinct is now a lapsed illusion. It’s the dignity of the relationship of psychoanalysis to maternity that has been recovered, against the sometimes malicious misunderstanding of the refrain of a so-called culpabilisation of mothers.
To simply describe the plenary sessions would reduce its dimension of profound syntony with its object, and its times. The full range of media supports were called upon (music, film, theatre, interview, conversation, video, live creation…); artists as well as scientists, in their own and diverse expression, alongside testimonies from those who have pushed their own analyses to its end; all of this was strung together with no dead time, with no forcing, with the lightness and the “natural touch” that only lengthy and intense preparatory work allows. There was not a trace of repetition, and as a whole – following a single line of orientation – with a diversity that turned each sequence into an event, each different from the next, perfectly pitched to contribute its singular building block to the edifice of the question to which these Study-Days were devoted. It was civilisation itself, marked by a certain ethics, that began to resonate and seemed to converse around the topic of motherhood. What was striking was the mix of depth, seriousness, and laughter that emanated from it, in an amazing synchrony. Not a complete show, but concordance – against the background of the impossible – with the different facets of the prism of the real.
Nothing will be as before: it was not enlightened opinion that was affected, it was opinion full stop. I am extracting here the goal that Christiane Alberti had set for herself. It has now hoisted itself up to the level of aphorism, which indicates that psychoanalysis and its epoch have met.
The vast research carried out before the congress, which was circulated electronically via the blog etremere.fr and, once again in tune with this mode –multimedia and of countless axes – led to it and made it possible.
Well, it is also psychoanalysis –and its presentation on the world stage – which will thus find itself altered. François Ansermet and myself, directors of the next Congress of the NLS in Geneva, will lift it to the rank of a Moment of Crisis [1] – in its dimension of possible opening towards something new. We will rethink and modify the whole organisation of this congress starting from this.
Orienting ourselves by Jacques Lacan’s motto: “Do as I do, do not imitate me”!
Yves Vanderveken
Transl. Florencia Shanahan and Adrian Price
