Preparatory Event of the London Society Towards the NLS Congress 2023 “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilisation”
On Saturday 11th March, we will continue our work towards the NLS 2023 Congress with a third preparatory event addressing its theme: Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilization. To help us explore some of the many pathways opened up by NLS President Daniel Roy’s Congress argument, we are delighted to announce that our special guest will be Dossia Avdelidi, who recently finished her period as Analyst of the School in the NLS and is a member of the WAP.
In his argument for the Congress, Daniel Roy asserts that “it is through anxiety that, for a subject, his discontent in civilisation […] can be read, by him, as a symptom in its singularity”. Distinguishing between mere discontent and the symptom in this way, psychoanalysis approaches anxiety not as a disorder to be muffled by medication, but as a constituent element of subjectivity as such. By focussing on the turning point in Lacan’s teaching of Seminar X (in which we learn that anxiety is the affect that does not lie), but also Seminar XI (in which it is linked to alienation and separation), Dossia will lead us towards the later articulation, emphasised by Jacques-Alain Miller, between anxiety and the real. How should we approach anxiety when it arises in the clinic, for example when the object a has not been extracted for a subject and they lack the option of a symptomatisation on the model of a phobia? How can we support such analysands in their invention of defences against an anxiety that overwhelms?
