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"Jacques Lacan continues to be the subject of the most extravagant interpretations, by turns idolised and demonised. But the context has changed: the heroic age of psychoanalysis has come to an end; we are witnessing the proliferation of psychotherapies – a thousand and one ways of alleviating contemporary suffering through practices that are increasingly regulated by the state. To recall, in these circumstances, what the Lacanian movement was all about is, first and foremost

In psychoanalysis, the symptom is the primary form of knowledge. It is not merely that it guides a specialist’s investigations with a view to treatment, as is customary in medicine, but that it constitutes in itself, to use Lacan’s phrase, a case file: insofar as it is the manifestation of an unconscious conflict, the symptom conceals a truth about the subject who bears it. Of all the symptoms with which our discipline is concerned, it is the hysterical symptom that enjoys th

A particular conception of knowledge in psychoanalysis emerges from a re-reading of Sigmund Freud’s "Note upon 'The Mystic Writing-Pad”’, which examines this technical invention in terms of its analogical relationship to memory. In it, the author reflects on two methods for preserving our memories from oblivion, each of which has its advantages and drawbacks. A sheet of paper offers a surface whose ideal receptivity is limited by saturation, rendering it incapable of accommod

A neuroscientist claims that eternal love belongs only to geniuses. Provocation, or clinical truth? This piece explores why duration, routine, and wear test every couple — and how, despite ourselves, every argument becomes a melodrama.

In this 1934 tango, Discépolo paints the portrait of a century where moral distinctions collapse: the thief is worth the honest man, the scholar worth the fool, everything jumbled together like items in a pawnshop window. A piece both disillusioned and fiercely lucid.

Proust and gender: this piece rereads the famous encounter between Charlus and Jupien — and the orchid scene that frames it — through the lens of Deleuze, Guattari, and Preciado. Between botanical allegory and a theory of desire, a look at what Proust invents, without naming it, about gender itself.

The function of the orgasm, for Reich, isn't a matter of a distant threat to sexuality: man is already sick, in his entire body. This piece explores what this semantic nuance — lost in the French translation — reveals about Reich's sexual economy, between Oedipus, neurosis, and his sweeping ambition to cure even fascism itself.

The incommunicable, according to Pierre Klossowski: a quote drawn from Les lois de l'hospitalité, on the meeting of two idiosyncrasies that recognize each other in what they can share with no one else — until one of them, exposing itself to the world, betrays that silent pact.

Addiction or disease? Narcotics Anonymous claims that addiction is a chronic illness; the WHO, meanwhile, stays silent on its severity. This piece questions that assumption in light of Peter Sloterdijk's more radical questions: where does the very idea of "addiction" actually come from?

Narcissism and the sea squirt: before becoming plant-like, this marine organism has a full nervous system — which it digests itself, once settled, never to move again. A biological fable, drawn from Llinás and Jules Verne, introducing the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism.

Compression, not understanding: this is the shift Lacan proposes in his 1967 address to psychiatrists. This piece explores how psychiatry, in seeking to "place the madman at the center," flattens rather than listens to him — and why the existence of the psychiatrist never implies the existence of the madman.