ARGUMENT

Psychoanalysis aims at the restitution and reconstitution of the subject’s history; the history by and through the Other that lives in the subject and constitutes its singularity.

What is singular is individual: psychoanalysis is created anew with each individual analysand, even if contemporary subjects enter into analysis with the same primordial questions: What am I for the Other? What does it mean to be a woman or a man?

What is singular is unique: for each analysis a unique social bond is formed, driven by the analysand’s demand, the analyst’s desire, and transference in between.

What is singular is bizarre: every analysis develops in the context of its era, the particular moment of history with all its idiosyncrasies.

Above all, the singular is symptomatic – it brings its suffering into psychoanalysis in order to proceed along the path of the unconscious, to traverse the fantasy and, perhaps, arrive at the nucleus of the symptom in order to take responsibility for it.

With that in mind, the Day of the Plurilingual Zone focuses on three main axes:

1)   The Symptom as Event of the Body

The effects of language on the body are present in a way that ranges from signifying mortification to the effect of jouissance that the signifier has on the body. Near the end of his teaching, Lacan brought the language and the body together in corps parlant, the body that speaks. The symptom is that of the body, a response to the no-sexual relation engendered by language. Through this very language, analysands bring to analysis their speaking bodies with all that pertains to them: a mirror image and an imaginary new ideal of the body, among others. If we speak with our bodies, what do contemporary bodies tell us?

2)   Sex and Gender

The sexual body today is more than ever submitted to the ideals, since sex and gender have been distinguished in the social discourse. Freud wrote that "anatomy is destiny" emphasizing the function of the cut in the being of the subject, the moments of the cut and also the desire which concerns the sexual difference of his time. Beyond the image of the body, the sexuation, as Lacan describes it, is a symbolic position of the subject. As a matter of course, in the way we as psychoanalysts treat the body, the question is about a singular jouissance and the sexual at the crossroads of real, imaginary, and symbolic. How does the subject respond to the question of the sex?

3)   The Ethics of Singularity

Today, either through the scientific discourse or the social domain, the body is brutally objectified, leading to the consideration of audacious acts for its transformation. Psychoanalysis today is strongly criticized for being a guard against such acts of the individual and the scientific discourse that creates the illusion of the resolution of all the subject's problems. However, a treatment of the singular from the perspective of psychoanalysis today, which can account for an unrepeatable and unique subjectivity, opens up the ethical dimension of psychoanalytic practice. How does the contemporary subject assume the responsibility for the choice of their own modality of jouissance?