Seminar in english offered by Gifric in Quebec City,Canada, in collaboration with the Circles of the Quebec Freudian School, the Chicago Study Group for the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis and Encore (Interdisciplinary Working Group on Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis - California).

The seminars are conducted by Gifric's psychoanalysts: Willy Apollon, Ph.D., Danielle Bergeron, M.D., and Lucie Cantin, M. Ps.

Summer 2005

June 6-10

Fourth Year Program - The Clinic of the Symptom

The symptom and its function

Why, at one point, does the dream not suffice to sustain what is insisting within repression? The dream as a chain of representations fails to support the return of the repressed, hence anxiety and symptom. In anxiety, the subject is faced with a jouissance unable to be represented. As for the symptom, it is the writing in the social link of the jouissance resisting repression.

The writing of the symptom

With the symptom, interpretation meets its limits because interpretation falls within the logic of the signifier. The symptom carries with it a dimension, irreducible using the logic of the signifier, that assumes the form of the writing of something else. In the treatment, how is interpretation stymied by the letter? And what about the bodily dimension thus put at stake by the symptom?

The symptom as a metaphor

The symptom introduces a formalism of writing. How, from the formal envelope of the symptom, can we deduce the fantasy of which the symptom is the bodily metaphor? Providing formal consistency to what the signifier fails to represent, the letter of the symptom carves out the furrows of the fantasy.

The manœuvre

In the treatment of the real at stake in the symptom, the analyst’s manœuvre is what operates the Freudian "pass" from the symptom to the fantasy. As Freud teaches, analysis organizes the treatment of the symptom by freeing up the rigorous modeling of which the symptom is the writing. What then appears is a formulation that calculates the subject’s singular relation to the irreducible that the writing of the symptom misses.

For more informations about the six years program and registration, click here