APPI Congress 2019: ‘Is Trauma Real?’

Event Details
Saturday 16th November 2019
Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire

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“Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it – in the form of the trauma…?” Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

The traumatised analysand has been the focus of psychoanalysis since its inception, from the ‘shell shocked’ war veterans of Freud’s early clinic to the Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disordered clients of the modern clinic. However, the presentation has evolved in its symptomatology and the phantasy that binds it. In a society scarred by brutal acts of terrorism and destabilised by incomprehensible breaches of trust by institutional authorities, can the signifier still function as  a commandment “even in the field of jouissance”? (Soler, 2005, p23). How do Lacanian psychoanalysts differ from the other post-Freudians in the treatment of this neurosis?

Keynote address by Martin J. Daly, Psychoanalyst

Congress Programme PDF

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