Notebooks

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

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.

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.