Clinical Study Days 8: “Encounters with the Real”

More information on CSD8 at http://www.lacaniancompass.com/

ARGUMENT: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL
In his 1998 Seminar, “The Experience of the Real,” Jacques-Alain Miller remarks that to explore the concept of the Real, we shouldn’t formulate the question “What is the Real?,” as that puts the question of the Real in the domain of Truth. Truth and the Real exclude one another.

In the trajectory of Lacan´s teachings, the Real is first situated outside the analytic experience, as it is the unconscious, as a personal history to be recovered through the psychoanalytic experience. Later, after Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), the Real is situated in the signifier, where the unconscious is no longer history, but knowledge. This is the first algorithm. However, in his final teachings Lacan articulates a Real which is not in the signifier, which is beyond meaning and knowledge. In this second algorithm, the Real is outside discourse or speech, present as an indecipherable kernel in the symptom.

The notion of the Real in Lacan has more than one approach. Throughout his teachings, we find sentences like “The Real always returns to the same place,” and “The Real as impossible,” and, “Pieces of Real.” Moreover, when he talks about “Encounters with the Real,” he is referring to the contingent aspect of the Real, the unexpected happenings that may emerge both in life and in the analytic experience.

For these Study Days, we invite our guests to present clinical cases that say something about these encounters with the Real, which can tell us about what is, in the final word, outside speech.

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Scientific Committee of the CSD8 invites you to present a case presentation at this meeting, where the theme of the Study Days “Experiences of the Real” should be addressed. Papers should be both at most 20 minutes long when read aloud and at most 15.000 characters with spaces in length.

Papers should be submitted not later than November 17, 2014. We appreciate your interest and collaboration on the Clinical Study Days, and we are looking forward to receiving your papers and to seeing you in Miami Beach.

Please send your texts to the CSD 8 Scientific Committee at arenasalicia24@gmail.com.

Scientific Committee
Alicia Arenas, Chair
Maria Cristina Aguirre
Juan Felipe Arango
Pierre-Gilles Gueguen
Fernando Schutt
Thomas Svolos
Karina Tenenbaum