Marco Mauas

Those were the days in Israel, the days and the years after Eric Laurent's seminar in 1993 on the "Preliminary Question to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis"¹ by Jacques Lacan. The formal scientific approach of this seminar was precisely the one capable of waking everyone up from his or her biological dream-since everybody has one.

Analysis is the main factor. T.A.G. Hospital case presentations paved the way to real public forums where we could test for the first time where analysis-the personal analysis of each one of those who were following Lacan's steps-was leading us. The text was approached by means of the notion of the letter. Formal sciences-and some of us were aware of them, but being aware does not mean being able to use them-were the real sea, the sea where to refloat our clinical ship, not to get drowned by "waves of sexual sense."² In this context every case was important to us. Until today, and let me paraphrase Jacques-Alain Miller in his commentary about Lacan's interview with a hospitalized psychiatric patient,³ we don't return from a case presentation seance without a chill. One doesn't simply pick up a case because it's intertwined with the exposition of knowledge, from the point of view of the patient that you are or were, nor from the patient that consented to talk with you in this very particular forum. I chose then, in this logical-ethical framework, to write about this curious young man of 32 years old. Here he was, in his third hospitalization, answering my questions while showing no surprise, with a certain conviction of what had happened-why he had attempted to commit suicide. What had happened? A conflict, inside another one that every time gets dressed differently... as a child in school, problems with the headmaster, also in the army with the military police and at the university.

[…]

1. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, NY: Norton, 1977.
2. Lacan J., Television, NY: Norton, 1990.
3. Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Enseignements de la présentation de malades" in Ornicar? 10 (July, 1977), pp 13-24.

Sue De Beer, detail from Making Out With Myself, video still, 1997

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