Alejandro Arciniegas

"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, to remember an...

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 the dual privilege...

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 accommodating new marks...