Open Seminar and Study Group
DasUnbehagen New York, Berlin School for Psychoanalysis, and in collaboration with Pulsion - International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics
“[…] the word structure is no better than
the word free association […]”
(J. Lacan, … ou pire)
A peculiar dissonance: Whereas no science or theory today would claim to be exclusively “structuralist,” would embrace “structure” as the first and last word on either the model or the real of its object, the term structure enjoys ample usage in psychoanalysis, especially where it defines itself under some influence of the teachings and writings by Jacques Lacan.
Does “Lacanian” psychoanalysis cling—for reasons perhaps justifiable—to a notion elsewhere seen as epistemologically obsolete? And then why? Or has the term simply fallen from a height of theoretical precision and rigor into the everydayness of language games where it is bestowed with a halo of gravity, and employed almost synonymously with “system,” “architecture,” “construction,” “inner core,” etc. Is “structure” able to afford such imprecision? And what happens to structure—or to that, what the concept once tried to catch—if “structure” can mean almost anything and next to nothing? Is the sexual structural? Which afterlife of linguistic structuralism is implied in using “signifiers”? What do we inherit from the “elementary structures of kinship” in anthropology? Which resonances with “mathematical structures” could be taken into account? What affectdoes structure “trigger”?
And perhaps most importantly, how do the so-called “clinical structures,” or the “way someone is structured”—expressions often used as if designating the property, the inner makeup of a person, mind, or psyche—relate to the attempt at divesting psychoanalysis from psychology by minimalizing its vocabulary and projecting it onto a plane that is determined by the notion of “structure” and only a few others?
This seminar aims to address these questions and elaborate on their relevance for psychoanalytic theory and practice today. We will cover pieces of the history of structuralism as well as of the history of the term “structure” preceding or surrounding it; we will think through the theoretical implications of structure for psychoanalysis’s relation to contemporary science; we will confront the structure (in Lacan) with the psychicapparatus (in Freud) as well as the grid (in Bion); we will ask about “clinical structures” and their relevance in analytic work.
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dr marcus coelen
psychoanalysis
new york / berlin
+1 347 232 5102
+49 156 79 57 01 16
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PD Dr. Marcus Coelen
Institut für Allgemeine und
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
