1. Rationale

Why this journal?

C/C stands for Culture/Clinic. In France and in many other countries across the globe, psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation has developed in two directions: psychoanalysis applied to mental health and psychoanalysis applied to cultural matters. Ideally, these two approaches should overlap: in the clinic, analysts are faced with new symptoms, new desires, and new forms of jouissance that parallel and relate to developments in the cultural, socio-political, economic and scientific domains. Analysts have therefore developed a series of original approaches to new formations in society, politics, and the sciences. Likewise, academic research in all fields risks losing its pertinence, timeliness, and its possibility for originality when it is out of contact with the new psychical inventions discovered by analysts in the clinic.

Why now?

Existing publications in the Lacanian orientation both in Europe and the US essentially come from outside academia. This is true despite the fact that in the US, in contrast to Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis grew almost exclusively in the university environment rather than the clinic. Given the importance of articulating both fields of research, we propose to create a new Journal, drawing from the strengths of researchers from both these two worlds: Culture/Clinic: Applied Lacanian Psychoanalysis. C/C will be the product of a close collaboration between academic Departments, namely the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris 8 and the English and French departments of Barnard College with the Department of Psychology and Education at Teachers College Columbia University, New York City. Its contributors, though they will be academics, will also for the most part be practising analysts, and thus familiar with the clinic. As such this will fulfil C/C’s primary aim: to bring the findings of cultural studies and clinical practice to bear on one another.

A partnership between Columbia and Paris 8 – why?

The Department of Psychoanalysis

The Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University at Vincennes-Saint-Denis is the ideal sponsor for a new journal in the Lacanian orientation. This University was founded in 1968, and is where the first Psychoanalytic Department was founded in 1969 by Lacan himself. To date the department is still run by analysts who were taught and trained by Lacan. It is a pioneer institution and the centre of the Lacanian orientation in France. Original, new clinical techniques and attendant theoretical developments (such as, for example, the concept of ordinary psychosis and the practice of short analyses) have emerged from the work of the psychoanalysts teaching here. It is time for the work elaborated over several decades in this Department to be made available in the English language.

The Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris 8 also has strong links with the Freudian Field Institute network (and so is linked with its Clinical Sections, institutes which have provided clinical training all over the world for over 25 years) and with the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), founded in 1992 by J.-A. Miller. The WAP regroups the most important Schools of Psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation in South America, Australia, Europe, and has members in the US. Its Schools transmit psychoanalysis, ensures the formation of analysts, and guarantees their qualification and the quality of their practice.

C/C will provide an essential means of disseminating the clinical and cultural elaborations of Lacanian academics and practitioners in the English language, the only language in which such transnational debates can take place today. The members of these three global networks (the WAP, the Freudian Field and academics from or associated with Paris 8) are among the potential audience for this journal.

Barnard College and Columbia University

American interest in Lacan began in various literature and humanities departments across the country from Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and Hopkins to Stanford and Berkeley, among others (such as Missouri-Columbia or the Buffalo Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture). Currently, courses, focused either exclusively on Lacan’s writing or on Lacan and other fields or authors, exist in universities from the East coast to the West. Rarely does a course on theory or on cultural or humanistic studies exclude Lacan. That this interest is serious and continues to grow is attested to by the huge numbers of books on Lacan and culture published in America in the last two decades. This is not to say that there has not been ample and magnificent work on Lacan and culture outside of the US, but simply that this is how Lacan was first received and owned here. However, America has contributed almost nothing on the articulation of the clinical fields of psychoanalytic research with Lacanian cultural studies.

In this context and at this moment in time, the choice of Barnard College and Columbia University in NYC as the main link to the University of Paris 8 makes sense for several reasons. Columbia and Barnard represent a premier university and college within the metropolis with library and other intellectual links to the universities and psychoanalytic institutions across the country, which would be contributing to the journal. Maire Jaanus, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard, is well known for her major contributions to Lacanian Studies. There are long-standing links already in place between Columbia/Barnard and Paris 8. Lacan himself lectured at Columbia, and in 1990 Miller held a major conference at Barnard on Lacan’s Television. In 2003, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen and Russell Grigg gave courses at Barnard respectively on Lacan and Film and Lacan and Psychosis. Eric Laurent and Marie-Hélène Brousse have both lectured at Columbia and elsewhere in NYC as well. The Columbia Graduate School itself has become increasingly hospitable to Lacanian ideas and courses on Lacan. Therefore, and as there also are a great many analytic groups in NYC (NYFLAG, NOMOS, Après Coup…), Barnard/Columbia and Paris 8 are the ideal partners for this project. The collaboration of institutions at the centre of analytic elaboration in both the US and France will guarantee a large number of readers of and contributors to C/C in the US.

2. Aims and Scope
The aims of the journal are implicit in its title.
· The journal will be about applied psychoanalysis, not pure psychoanalysis (i.e. didactic psychoanalysis). In other words, the Journal is about psychoanalysis as applied to different discourses - or different forms of the social bond. It can be said to be a clinic of discourses. · The Journal is about culture and clinic. More explicitly, the idea is to apply the methods of Lacanian analysis to culture in order to isolate the new forms of the discontents of civilisation in the second millennium.
As to the scope of the journal: articles will deal with topics ranging from the formation of new symptoms, the place of religion, the variations of the superego, the new structures of the family, new lifestyle choices and sexuality, to the mutations of the objects of art and the mutations of the discourse of the master. Philosophy will also be given pride of place, as indeed psychoanalysis and philosophy are the two intertwined strands of France’s very rich intellectual tradition (as can be seen in the philosophy of Badiou or Derrida for example).