7th International Convergence Congress
Psychoanalysis Inserted In The Polis. Basis, Practices, Perspectives
“Psychoanalysis continues. Founded by Freud and after the death of Lacan, it exists in its discourse.”
Such is the beginning of the Act of the Convergence Foundation (1998). Twenty years after this opening ceremony, we can state that Psychoanalysis is inserted in the world, in each city where its discourse unfolds; today, it is part of the culture, becoming an unavoidable reference in every thought that wonders about subjective suffering.
What can be said about the situation of psychoanalysis? It will be the task of this VII Congress to deal with this issue.
We live in a time in which the capitalist globalization does not stop producing increasing segregation phenomena: entire populations are cast away from the system causing famines, massive displacements and alienation. Millions of people live as refugees, and at the same time, more sectors of the population do not have access to work, education or health. This situation nourishes nationalist, racist and xenophobic movements. The dominant discourse, characterized by Lacan as capitalist discourse, tends to erase every limit, to wipe out the ethical boundaries towards which we should stop. This becomes evident in the social link violence, the planet depredation and also in the discourse of science, which leads to the foreclosure of the subject.
How is psychoanalysis inserted into this reality? We know that it arises from a particular sociohistorical moment, a moment in which the discourse of science allows the opening of the subjectivity field, which in time manifested its insufficiency regarding that real that it tried to approach. Today, is that same discourse going to fill up the field of subjectivity?
We cannot withdraw from this debate. When we claim that “psychoanalysis is inserted in the world”, it is not without the difficulties that come up in each place. It is evident that in several cities, psychoanalysts have joined the private and public health services, educational practices, the judicial sphere and the interventions in the collective. In consequence, it becomes necessary to study the advances this causes and the generated effects, as well as the obstacles that come up. This means, accounting for the basics and the perspectives of psychoanalysis in intension and extension, and at the same time, opening the debate on the various practices about the extension of psychoanalysis.
This Congress intends to debate all of the issues emerging from the insertion of Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in the city and also locate the external resistance to the field of psychoanalysis, which should not distract us from the internal resistance, which emerges from our own field.
The topic we have proposed as title hopes to function as a call for the members of the different Convergence institutions, practitioners of psychoanalysis which are not affiliated and university students interested in Freud and Lacan.
The proposal is a Congress in which we can maintain a dialogue about the different modalities we use to sustain the subject’s clinical work, formulating problems in the psychoanalytical practice today, in different geographies and diverse social conditions.
We are convinced that by keeping this subject’s clinical work today, we not only preserve the validity of the Freudian discovery but also maintain an ethical position in this world we live in.
