Congress Programme

P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S
IN TIMES OF PERVERSION
A P P I A NNUA L C ONG R ESS
Keynote Address: Leonardo Rodríguez (Australia)
Carmelite Centre, Aungier St. Dublin 2.
21.11.2015
association for
Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy
in ireland
Psychoanalysis
& Psychotherapy
in Ireland
“One of the paradoxical claims Lacan
makes about perversion is that while
it may sometimes present itself as a
no-holds-barred, jouissance-seeking
activity, its less apparent aim is to bring
the law into being: to make the Other as
law (or law-giving Other) exist. [...] The
pervert does not desire as a function of
the law – that is, does not desire what is
prohibited. Instead, he has to make the
law come into being.”
promise a future to compensate for
the awful discoveries of childhood – of
mutilation, loss, and death. And yet the
resistance (or perhaps even subversion)
that perversion offers to the father, to
the law, seems for others to promise
freedom. This ambivalence surrounding
the category of the perverse suggests
both the richness and dangers of using
the term.”
Rothenberg, 2003
Fink, 2003
“The emergence of perversion as a
description of behaviours and desires,
as discursive constructs, as fundamental
psychic structures, and as political
positions has been accompanied by an
increasing valorization of the perverse
for its analytic possibilities as well as
for its revolutionary potential. For most
earlier writers, there was little question
but that the perverse belonged to a
class of ills to be avoided or cured. The
Kantian pervert acts, to the detriment
of all, on inclination and pleasure
rather than the stricter dictates of duty,
soul’s reason. The Freudian pervert
fails to leave behind the polymorphous
pleasures of infancy for the narrower
utility of reproductive genital
sexuality. While the normal neurotic
wrestles with the inability to find true
satisfactions within the boundaries
of lawful encounters, the pervert
remains in a world left frighteningly
open by the father’s failure either to
close the door on early pleasures or to
–
The fantasmatic nostalgia
(emblematic perhaps of the 21st
century) for a time when ‘things were
different’: when the Other could
be counted upon for laying down
the law and attempting to govern
jouissance, insofar as it testifies to
an absence of the intervention of the
paternal function, may be regarded as
perverse. The pervert, the perverse,
and the field ambiguously covered
by the term ‘perversion’ can be
articulated with the social relation
and with psychoanalysis. The 22nd
annual congress of the APPI takes for
discussion and scrutiny the function
and field of psychoanalysis in times of
perversion.
front cover image:
Abigail O’Brien Black Bella 2006,
Edition of 1 + 1ap, Lambdachrome colour photograph under museum glass,
130 x 90 cm
P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S
association for
Psychoanalysis
T I M E S &OPsychotherapy
F PERVERSION
I N in ireland
A P P I A NNUA L C ONG R ESS
Keynote Address: Leonardo Rodríguez (Australia)
21.11.2015
Psychoanalysis
& Psychotherapy
in Ireland
association for
Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy
in ireland
Programme
08.45–09.00Registration
08.55–09.00 Chairperson’s Welcome
09.00–10.30
Panel 1 – The Pervert’s Guide to Identity, Semblance and
Pornography
Eve Watson – From Transsexual to Transracial: The Rise of
Identitarianism and Challenges to Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Marlene ffrench Mullen – Perversion – a Stretch between the Fundamental Fantasy and the Analytic Discourse?
Ray O’Neill – Fifty Shades of a: A Terrible Beauty is Porn
10.30–11.00 Coffee
11.00–12.15 Keynote Address
Leonardo S. Rodríguez – Questions Posed by the Analysis of Perverts
12.15–13.15 Panel 2 – The Pervert’s Guide to Comedy and Humour
Christine Gormley – Comedy and the Phallus: ‘You can put your finger on it’
Sara Devlin – It’s Only a Joke...Or is it?
Film Clip introduced by Ray O’Neill
13.15–14.00 Lunch
14.00–14.45 Gerry Sullivan – Perversion – Further Thoughts...
14.45–16.15
Panel 3 – The Pervert’s Guide to Transgression, Migration and
Politics
João Gabriel Lima da Silva – Lessons From the Bedroom:
Transgression and Subversion in the Perverse Position
Gerry Moore – Psychoanalysis in Times of Mass Migration
Carol Owens – The Personal is Political: the Political is Perverse
(Shame on you Jack Dawson!)
16.15–16.45 Tea
16.45–18.15
Panel 4 – The Pervert’s Guide to Guilt (Highsmith), Superego
(Bataille) and Bureaucratic Jouissance (Kafka)
Michael Holohan – Perversion, Transference and Guilt in Patricia
Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley
Nadezhda Chekurova-Almqvist – ‘I’m Just Doing My Job’:
Bureaucratic Jouissance in the Institution
Raphael Montague – Death in the Afternoon: The Strange Trial(s) of
Gilles de Rais
18.15–20.00
Wine and Canapés Reception
Abstracts
Panel 1 – The Pervert’s Guide to
Identity, Semblance and Pornography
Eve Watson
From Transsexual to Transracial: The
Rise of Identitarianism and Challenges
to Contemporary Psychoanalysis
The recent examples of Caitlin Jenner
(transgender) and Rachel Doluzel
(transracial) are helpful in exploring
some of the current discursive and
identitarian trends and practices in
identity, gender and sexuality. This paper
proposes that these trends and the forms
of subjectivities they inhabit are linked
to contemporary dominant paradigms
and their ‘investment’ in both equality
and difference. These identitarian trends
are challenging to psychoanalytic
practice today – how do these discursive
and cultural practices affect both the
analyst’s and the patient’s transference to
the non-locatable subject (in discursivelinguistic terms) who always exceeds
his/her corporeal delineation and for
whom identification is a stopgap to the
real while also paradoxically operating
as a socio-cultural link? The fact that
there are challenges to psychoanalysis
implies that there is also resistance.
What is the nature of this resistance?
Do we conceive of this as a subversion
of sexual difference or not? What are
the implications for psychoanalytic
practice?
Marlene ffrench Mullen
Perversion – a Stretch between the
Fundamental Fantasy and the Analytic
Discourse?
If many arrangements are possible
to respond to one’s solitude… how
do we think about perversion
psychoanalytically in the era of the
semblants, where it is said that desire
and love are no longer necessary to ‘faire
couple’? How do we diagnose? Do we still
diagnose at a time where each must find
their singular solution to enjoyment. Is
there still such a thing as transgression?
In other words, is this the moment to
rethink the status of perversion in the
elaboration of clinical psychoanalytic
practice? In this paper I will address
these questions in order to be able to
orient ourselves within social relations
where the signifiers ‘man’ and ‘woman’
no longer hold sway as signifiers of
difference.
Ray O’Neill
Fifty Shades of a: A Terrible Beauty
is Porn
Increased internet availability has
instituted greater normalisation of
pornography, evidenced in media
representations, and within clients’
sexual discourse. When desire is the
desire of the other, trying to keep up
with the sexual Kardashians involves
getting our porn on within a larger
discourse of what is sexually ‘desireable’. The Fifty Shades of Grey Zeitgeist
arouses shifts in how people are ‘now’
supposed to desire. In Ireland, this
year’s Valentine’s Day Fifty Shades of
Grey release coincided with an Irish
BDSM murder trial. The contradictory
(or not) messages glamorising the
film’s bondage, against trial reports
demonising alternative sexualities
whilst aligning them to mental health
issues, creates a treacherous sexuality
where an open minded desire-ability,
allied to pornography and on-line dating,
is determined against the threat of real
violence and murder. But nothing new
is ever discoursed, when St. Valentine,
the archetype of romantic and courtly
love, was martyred and clubbed to death.
In our cultural discourse, death and
sexuality, pain and desire, are eternally
chained and bound.
Keynote Address:
Leonardo S. Rodríguez
Questions Posed by the Analysis of
Perverts
A few questions arising from clinical
experience with perverse patients
require answers that are not currently
provided by our accumulated experience
and theoretical constructions. The
very status of perversion as a clinical
structure and its specific mechanism,
the symptoms in and of perversion, our
ethical stance vis-à-vis perverse sexuality
and its impact on the analyst’s desire
and the analyst’s countertransference –
these are some of those questions. They
emerged in the course of my clinical
work, and I have been studying possible
answers and critically examining the
relevant work of other psychoanalysts:
in particular Sigmund Freud, Jacques
Lacan, Hanns Sachs, Helene Deutsch,
Jean Clavreul and Giles Deleuze.
Panel 2 – The Pervert’s Guide to
Comedy and Humour
Christine Gormley
Comedy and the Phallus: ‘you can put
your finger on it’
“Tristram Shandy est le roman le plus
analytique de la littérature universelle.”
Despite this passing remark of Lacan’s
in 1966, relatively little has since been
written about Laurence Sterne’s novel
from a Lacanian perspective. This paper
will present a reading of the novel with
particular reference to the link Lacan
draws between comedy and the phallus.
Departing from Freud’s analysis of
smut in his landmark text Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, this
paper will examine the link between
the sexual and language in relation to
the bawdy humour of Tristram Shandy,
as well as that between the sexual and
writing specifically apropos of Lacan’s
claim that writing is what is written
on account of the sexual non-relation.
It will ultimately support Alenka
Zupancic’s claim that on the one hand
comedy is not without consequences
for the Other insofar as it contributes to
a separating of A and a, and that on the
other hand, comedy proper concerns a
demystification of the phallus.
Sara Devlin
It’s Only a Joke... Or is it?
In this paper my aim is to take a brief
look at Perversion – ‘loosely’, in relation
to humour. Comedy, Satire, Ironic device
and dark ‘gallows’ humour have been
used elaborately throughout recorded
history as powerful weapons involved
in the commentary and critique of
political, social and religious issues. Of
course how the satirist or indeed the
joker uses his creative talent and injects
it into his work as an effective tool to
put a message out into the world, may
be at times called into question. Is there
an end point or limit of transgression
to which a joke may not or perhaps
should not go? A point where poking
fun at a particular person or issue is
not that funny after all, in a broader
context. Where obscenity enters the
realm of the irreverent and the profane,
are we straying into the area of the
perverse? There are those who would
say that in the greater interests and
free spirit of expression there are no
limits, what Lacan might refer to as an
excess of Jouissance. Whereas it may be
impossible to entirely forsake pleasure
and psychoanalysis recognises this,
yet it does not support a drive towards
hedonism either. However, there is a
strong connection between comedy
and the perverse and they both set
challenges for institutions of power
which undermine human life and at the
same time complement one another in
achieving a desired effect. As human
subjects we are divided in and by the
language we use and so there is always
a disjunction between what we desire
and what society demands. Yet since
sublimation is a matter of ethics we
do have an opportunity to experience
liberation and create a space from which
it is possible to attribute certain values
to something outside what might be
considered the ‘common good’. If by its
very unbridled nature Jouissance has the
effect of cancelling-out the symbolic,
sublimation aspires to reconfigure it by
introducing ‘bits’ of Jouissance into the
realm of signification.
Panel 3 – The Pervert’s Guide to
Transgression, Migration and Politics
João Gabriel Lima da Silva
Lessons From the Bedroom:
Transgression and Subversion in the
Perverse Position
This paper aims to approach the
perverse individual’s jouissance as
being the position which affects the
lack in the Other, generally causing
repulsion and horror owing to the sole
fact that it shows neurotic fantasies
unveiled. However, a neurotic response
to the perverse could be not only
the reprehension as an abomination
and an appeal to moral values (that
is, a strengthener of the superego),
but it could be an opportunity to put
into question the very structure of
contemporary morals and desire. Put
differently, the objective of this paper
is to place the perverse not merely as
a deviant, but, rather, my proposal is
understand the perverse as someone
who is able to denounce the lack in
our still neurotic world and who poses
problems for our contemporary moral
values – particularly the bourgeois and
contradictory ones. The excess of the
perverse can lead us to question our
own way of jouir; his transgression can
somehow inspire a more radical way of
dealing with our political issues and his
subversive spirit could impel us to be
less lethargic with our own desire. For
the purposes of this exploration, beyond
the theoretical bibliography (Freud,
Lacan, Miller, Nobus, Valas), I will use
few contemporary clinical cases and
some pieces of contemporary literature,
especially the books of the Brazilian
writer Rubem Fonseca.
Gerry Moore
Psychoanalysis in Times of
Mass Migration
Psychoanalysis emerged from the
parlours of Vienne with a theory of the
unconscious that challenged society by
demonstrating that we are not masters
in our own houses. This lesson about the
lack of personal autonomy took place
in a Europe where the Masters of society
were also discovered that they could be
toppled and dispensed with, all be it at a
great cost of individual human suffering.
The suffering generated by the horror
of the Great War created a foundation
for our understanding of trauma. It
provided a glut of symptoms on which
the emerging psychoanalysts could test
their hypothesis, develop their theories
and forge their careers. A second war
(WWII) created a whole new landscape
in Europe, and for a period of time
attempted to eradicate human rights and
freethinking. Psychoanalysis suffered
and many analysts’ Freud amongst them
became unintentional migrants. This
sparked a new era of thinking about
the structure of the human mind, in
the war orphanages of London and the
lecture halls and clinics of the USA.
Psychoanalysis was never to be the same
again. Post-war Lacan championed the
dynamic unconscious around a new
set of borders, language, desire and
jouissance.
Today a new wave is invading Europe,
refugees seeking asylum, marching
across borders and straight into our
psyche via social media and the new
prosthesis the smartphone. How can
we incorporate immigrants and what
kind of new psychoanalysis will emerge
and respond? This paper explores what
psychoanalysis says when boundaries
are shattered, when new laws need to
be brought into being when some new
or refined law-giving Other is urgently
required; urgency that the unconscious
deals with in a uniquely perverse
manner. Perhaps there is a place for a
creative subversive perverse talent that
challenge what is failing, what is washed
up on the beaches of Europe. Should
psychoanalysis, be subject to the tide,
drown in the shallows or ride some
favourable wave in rethinking social
bonds and responding to traumatic
encounters.
Carol Owens
The Personal is Political: the Political is
Perverse (Shame on you Jack Dawson!)
If we agree with Molly-Anne Rothenberg
that political action is always prompted
and shaped by the perverse fantasy
of wholeness, omnipotence, linear
causality, and/or the recovery of lost
essence, it follows that each individual
participates in this fantasy in his/her
own way to the extent that he/she is
involved in the political action and
according to his/her own structure
as parletre. In political action then,
the symbolic space becomes a field in
which the defences and jouissance of
individual psyches can be activated.
This paper examines the case of a man
calling himself Jack Dawson appealing
to left-wing activist groups in the UK to
mobilise a ‘survivor’ discourse around
paedophilia and paedophiles. I will
outline the problem as I see it: political
activism can mobilise on the one hand
the fantasy of equal entitlement to
jouissance (liberation for paedophiles,
say), while on the other hand it can deny
that jouissance is a problem (because
the personal is always already of the
political and thereby obfuscates the
paternal function with the Law).
Panel 4 – The Pervert’s Guide to Guilt
(Highsmith), Superego (Bataille) and
Bureaucratic Jouissance (Kafka)
Michael Holohan
Perversion, Transference and Guilt in
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr.
Ripley
How is it that a work of fiction can make
us feel guilty? In this paper I analyze The
Talented Mr. Ripley with an eye towards
the ways that character, narrative and
genre operate in the creation of a formal
affective economy whereby guilt is
produced in the text and transferred
onto the reader. I argue that the
transferential relationship between the
reader and the text takes a perverse form
and provides a key to understanding
what might be called the text’s perverse
structure.
The genre of the crime novel is
concerned with the commission
or solving of a crime, including
the question of a character’s guilt.
Highsmith’s particular talent lies in
creating a tight narrative link between
the reader and Tom Ripley, the novel’s
protagonist-murderer. The possibility
of the reader occupying this subject
position is produced as a structural effect
of the text. As such, the reader becomes
implicated in Ripley’s crimes.
Because Ripley is guilty but never
acknowledges it, the result is a freefloating quantity of guilt for which a
proper place must be found. Having been
formally implicated in Ripley’s crimes
through narrative identification, the
reader finds Ripley’s guilt transferred
onto him – or herself. In making it
possible to transpose guilt from the text
to the reader, Highsmith’s narrative isn’t
merely about guilt, but actively produces
it.
I argue that it is left to the reader to
take up the question of guilt in place
of Ripley. In this way, the text mirrors
the structure of perversion in its form
of address to the Other, as well as in
the pervert’s transference towards
the analyst (and vice versa). Having
produced affect in the reader through
the manipulation of the reader’s
transference, and inviting the reader into
an affective response, Highsmith’s text,
like Ripley, seduces the reader and leaves
him or her holding the bag.
Raphael Montague
Death in the Afternoon: The Strange
Trial(s) of Gilles de Rais
“Body clings greedily to body; moist lips
are pressed on lips and deep breaths are
drawn through clenched teeth. But all to
no purpose. One can glean nothing from
the other, nor enter in and wholly be
absorbed, body in body; for sometimes it
seems that this is what they are craving
and striving to do, so hungrily do they
cling together in Venus’ fetters, while
their limbs are unnerved and liquefied
by the intensity of the rapture. At length,
when the spate of lust is spent, there
comes a slight intermission in the raging
fever. But not for long. Soon the same
frenzy returns. The fit is upon them
once more. They ask themselves what
are they craving for, but find no device
that will master their malady. In aimless
bewilderment they waste away, stricken
by an unseen wound.”
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe
What are the possible conditions for
diagnosis in the trial transcripts of Gilles
de Rais? When there is a psychotic
phenomenon, if someone says there
is a psychosis, then he must show its
axiom. This must also hold in terms of
perverse traits and perverse structure.
This paper seeks to examine the function
of identification both in perversion as a
discourse (or circuit of discourse) and as
a subjective position, bearing in mind
the manner in which identifications are
articulated in terms of a message on the
signifying side, but also on the side of
jouissance: how jouissance dwells in the
symptom under the form of Unlust.
Nadezhda Chekurova-Almqvist
‘I’m Just Doing My Job’: Bureaucratic
Jouissance in the Institution
These days, we can find ourselves in
desperate situations. Behind a desk, we
ask for someone’s help only for it to
be kindly refused. Part of this refusal
may involve the words, ‘I’m just doing
my job’. They are often said quite
comfortably, without any sympathy and
even uttered rather professionally. This
paper explores how we can speak about
these (and other) phrasings/mechanisms
of jouissance in bureaucratic institutions
from a psychoanalytic perspective. I
will elaborate on these questions taking
examples from works such as Kafka’s
The Trial.
Biographies
Nadezhda Chekurova-Almqvist is a
psychoanalytic therapist based in Dublin
and a member of the Dublin Lacan
Study Group. She graduated from Sofia
University, Bulgaria with a degree in
Social Work, an MPhil in Psychoanalytic
Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and
an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
from Independent Colleges. She
regularly participates in study groups
and has given various presentations
including Working with New
subjectivities: The Barbarred Subject?
and A Name which is not Oedipus?
Subjectivity in a Society without Fathers.
Sara Devlin has recently completed
a Masters degree in Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy. She has a background
in Nursing and the caring professions,
having worked with both children and
the elderly. She is in Private Practice on
the North-side of Dublin and is shortly
commencing studies in Play Therapy
with children. She has a particular
interest in the area of cultural diversity
and perversion in its various modalities.
Marlene ffrench Mullen is a
psychoanalyst in private practice in Co
Wicklow for the last 10 years. She is a
Registered Practitioner of APPI and a
member of ICLO. She is at present Hon.
Secretary of APPI. She has participated
and tutored on the various programmes
for continuing studies organised by
APPI.
Christine Gormley recently completed a
clinical Masters degree in Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges
Dublin. She holds an M.Phil. degree in
Psychoanalytic Studies from TCD and
a B.A. in English and Philosophy from
UCD. She is a member of A.P.P.I. and
currently practices in a clinic in north
inner city Dublin.
Mike Holohan has an interdisciplinary
background in psychoanalysis, literary
theory, and philosophy. He earned
his doctorate from the University of
California Santa Cruz, Department
of History of Consciousness. His
dissertation explores the role of
rhetoric and figurative language in
the construction of psychoanalytic
theory. Michael has lectured at Dublin
City University and the University of
California Santa Cruz. He is a writing
tutor at the Technical University
of Munich and is undergoing
psychoanalytic training at University
College Dublin.
Gerry Moore is a lecturer in
Psychotherapy and Mental Health
at Dublin City University where he
teaches on the Masters and Doctorate
programmes in Psychotherapy, mental
health and psychology. He is a registered
practitioner member of APPI, has served
on a variety of APPI committees and
authored, published and presented
papers on a variety of topics in the
fields of mental health, addiction,
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
services.
Ray O’Neill is a psychoanalytic
psychotherapist working in private
practice in Dublin and Cork. As Ireland’s
only resident male published Agony
Aunt, Ray writes significantly (and
sometimes with significance) about
love, relationships, and desire in the
21st century. He recently completed
his doctoral research on how likekind desiring men’s subjectivity,
desire and identities have culturally
and psychoanalytically come to be
structured by/around/through the
signifier homosexual, especially within
contemporary pornified sexual hyperreality. He is currently undertaking study
in cross-cultural sexual therapeutic
models with Authentic Eros in New
York.
Carol Owens works in private practice
and conducts clinical supervision.
She has lectured on many aspects of
Lacanian Psychoanalysis (TCD, DCU,
Independent Colleges Dublin) over the
past 10 years. She is the founder and
convenor of the Dublin Lacan Study
Group. She is a Registered Practitioner
member of the APPI and current Chair
of the APPI Scientific Committee
and member of the APPI Training
Committee. She has presented her
research at congresses in Ireland and
further afield. She has published work
in the fields of Critical Psychology,
Zizekian studies and Psychoanalysis.
Forthcoming publishing includes an
essay on Anhedonia, Bulimia and Film,
in P. Gherovici and M. Steinkoler (2016)
Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy,
C.U.P. [email protected]
Dr Leonardo S. Rodríguez is a
psychoanalyst, a founding member
of the Australian Centre for
Psychoanalysis, an Analyst Member
of the School of Psychoanalysis of
the Forums of the Lacanian Field,
an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with the
Department of Psychiatry, Monash
University, and the Coordinator of the
Master of Psychoanalysis program,
Victoria University. He has published
Psychoanalysis with Children (London
and New York, Free Association Books,
1999) and numerous book chapters and
articles on psychoanalytic theory and
practice in different languages.
Address for correspondence:
[email protected]
João Gabriel Lima da Silva is a Ph.D.
researcher in the Psychoanalytic
Theory Postgraduate Programme at
the Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro. He published the book O Castelo
da experiência: Walter Benjamin e a
literatura [The Castle of Experience:
Walter Benjamin and the Literature]
(Appris Ed., 2015). He has presented
papers in the Human Rights, Literature,
and the Arts and Social Sciences
Conference (USA), and in Rousseau’s
Tercentenary Conference organized
by Colorado College (USA), and at
Middlesex University (UK).
Gerry Sullivan is a member of the Centre
for Freudian Analysis and Research
(London), and has a private practice
in London. He was a member of APPI
when living in Ireland during the 1990’s
(and more informally during the latter
half of the 1980’s) and is currently
a Psychoanalyst with the Centre for
Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR
London).
Eve Watson, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic
practitioner working in a Dublin city
centre practice and has been lecturing in
psychoanalysis for the last ten years in
various Dublin colleges. She is published
in psychoanalysis, critical psychology,
sexuality studies, poetics, film and social
theory and is currently co-editing a book
with Dr. Noreen Giffney entitled Clinical
Encounters: Psychoanalytic Practice
and Queer Theory due to be published
in 2016. She is a registered practitioner
member of APPI (Association for
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in
Ireland), an associate member of IGAS
(Irish Group Analytic Society) and is
also a member of the Editorial Board
of Lacunae, the APPI International
Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is also
affiliated with the American-based APW
(Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups)
and co-organises conferences and events
such as the annual Irish Psychoanalytic
Film Festival which has its seventh
running in January 2016.