“Desire, Trauma and Otherness”

March 31, 2012

Room LT4, City University of Hong Kong

Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

The Hong Kong Society of Psychoanalysis presents “2012 Cartel Encounter – Desire, Trauma and Otherness”. In this one-day meeting, our members will present their projects and articles to reflect the half- year’s work in the Society. The meeting is free and open to the public. 

13:00 – 13:20 Registration

13:20 – 13:30 Welcome and Introduction

13:30 – 14:00 The language of the Other - Diego Busiol

Communication fails because the misunderstanding is structural. Despite the human presumption of mastering the language, we face every day the impossibility of a complete, satisfactory, mutual comprehension. Paradoxically, this misunderstanding is the condition for talking - it is our resource. There is no such thing as a natural language. Chinese, English, Italian: the language is always a foreigner. What we need is to cultivate a different disposition to listening, which only can drive us from the myth of Babel (where nobody is able to understand the other speaking) to Pentecost (where each one speaks his own language and is understood).

14:00 – 14:15 Discussion

14:15 – 14:35 Contemplative/Meditative Holding & Psychoanalysis  - Jeff Shu

This talk presents a cross-disciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and spirituality/religion. In therapy, we are often faced with a patient's brokenness/traumatized past. There is no point in fixing it. All we can do is to sit with the patient and his/her brokenness. The analyst’s task at that painful moment is holding. The author is trying to prove that the holding capacity of the analyst is similar to that of contemplation/meditation we find in various major religions in which the true self manifests and be held.

14:35 – 14:50 Discussion

14:50 – 15:20 Art and the Perverse Ethics of the Lapse - Peter Freund

Like the ego, the image as such is already a defense against its own beyond. In response to the deadlock, the practices of psychoanalysis and art each uniquely draw on the lapse (bungled action, oversight, breach) as a fulcrum for subjectivity. My talk will sketch the special and ultimately paradoxical status of the lapse as a creative mainspring and threshold of ethics.

15:20 – 15:35 Discussion

15:35 – 16:00 The Im/possibility of Absolute Otherness or Who’s afraid of Jacques Lacan– C Y So

Psychoanalysis is a working-through process to unfold the unconscious otherness. It is sometimes believed that the analyst can “point out” the analytic truth to the patient; the analyst is positioned as “the subject supposed to be know”. This is always the situation with the other types of psychotherapy, which is very different from psychoanalysis. This article intends to discuss the paradoxical setting of the analyst and his im/possibility of uncovering the truth of the otherness.  Unconscious otherness is a structural impossibility of the subject.  It is based on this im/possibility and also Lacan’s theory of “Analytic Discourse” that the meaning of psychoanalysis becomes more than a didactic and ethical operation. It is a process to create new signifiers. Absolute Otherness is the endless flow of signification in which new signifiers deconstruct the old signifiers.

16:00 – 16:10 Discussion

16:10 – 16:30 Round Up and Meeting End