The first Paris USA Lacan seminar (PULSE) in New York City was a success. During two and a half days, the one hundred sixty people enrolled listened to papers and participated in discussions bearing on the intellectual legacy of Lacan and his impact on a politics not of dreams, but of the real.

This success was made possible by the hospitality and the subvention given by Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. Professor Maire Jaanus, specialist of comparative literature and an informed Lacanian, worked with numerous university administrators and their staff in order to make possible an encounter between this great American university, the Université populaire Jacques Lacan and the Université Paris 8. The honored guests and keynote speakers were Marie-Hélène Brousse, Eric Laurent and Pierre-Gilles Guéguen. The guiding committee consisted of the aforementioned people, along with professor Ellie Ragland of the University of Missouri and Josephina Ayerza (editor of Lacanian Ink). Maire Jaanus for the USA and Pierre-Gilles Guéguen for Europe jointly assured the organization.

In addition, Eric Laurent was invited by Barnard College to give a lecture Thursday night in Barnard’s program “Culture and Ideas”, which invites the leading experts of intellectual life in the USA (Noam Chomsky, Lloyd Blankfein and Anthony Grafton are subsequent lecturers). His lecture on the theme “Psychoanalysis and our Time” brought together 240 people, who warmly applauded his demonstration of the importance of psychoanalysis oriented towards the real, at a moment when the “symbolic disorder” is accompanied by the advancement of ideals, bound to fail because utopist. In particular, he showed how psychoanalysis such as it is practiced in the Lacanian orientation (the intellectual movement headed by Jacques-Alain Miller) is knotted to the politics and cultural life of our times, and resolutely refuses a return – always possible – to nostalgic conservatism. It is, indeed, a question for psychoanalysis today to turn its attention towards innovative and sometimes surprising creations that give witness to a reconfiguration of the symbolic and the different forms of knowledge at work in civilization, in relation to what Freud called its “discontents”.

The Paris USA Lacan Seminar started the next day, and, until the end, kept a captivated audience, aroused by many questions. We separated Sunday at noon after a very dense program, punctuated only by a welcoming cocktail party and short coffee breaks in the luxurious Sulzberger Parlor, which houses the portraits of the women who successively have directed Barnard College, uniquely open to women.

Professor Maire Jaanus opened the seminar with a brief commentary on the necessity of including the psychoanalysis in the socio-political and cultural conversation of our civilization today. The work of the seminar focused on the announced themes: Lacan’s treatment of the norm and Oedipus; advances concerning questions of sexuation, regarding masculine homosexualities as well as the feminine position of being; the mutual exclusion between psychoanalysis and the scientific laws of the neurosciences, and the contribution of psychoanalysis concerning the “Mind/Body Problem”.

In addition to the keynote speakers, who each presented several papers, the guiding committee asked the following people to present their work: Fabian Naparstek, Dr. Jean-Pierre Klotz, Josefina Ayerza, Natalie Wulfing, Dr. Thomas Svolos, Professor Kjell Soleim, Maria Christina Aguirre, Alicia Arenas, Adrian Price, Alan Rowan, and Professor François Sauvagnat. They are all members of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
The audience was composed of eminent academics from a variety of disciplines, coming from different countries (notably Canada), doctoral students, psychoanalysts, psychologists, medical doctors, artists, and also those who have a personal interest in advances made in the field of psychoanalysis of the Lacanian Orientation.
An encounter took place Sunday after-noon, outside the Conference, with psychoanalysts from the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute, students and Faculty of the New school, and about sixty of the participants of the Conference, who moved towards Greenwich Village in order to prolong the work and discussions. It was with regret that we parted company, sharing the wish that another encounter of this type will be possible…Maybe at Barnard next year.

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen