Speeches should be neither long nor
short but of suitable compass
–Plato

22 February 1992

To the Analysts and Members of the School, A school of psychoanalysis can only authorise itself from the psychoanalytic discourse. The foundation of The Freudian School of Melbourne was the moment of such an authorisation.

Psychoanalysis dwells in language for the structural reason that the unconscious is born from it. Writing is the mark left behind by the act that discourse effectuates. It is for this reason that, since 1977, The Freudian School of Melbourne, school of psychoanalysis, has written psychoanalysis in Australia. Freud and Lacan indicate a direction. The initiation and transmission of the Lacanian discourse by the School gives us the ethical responsibility to further the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and to make the experience known in the traces of writing. To the present, the School has given its testimony in the field opened by Freud and recovered by Lacan, by carrying out its programme of work succinctly described in the Twelve Provisional Points of Foundation as its raison d'être. But there is much more than that, too.

Today, we resign from the School. It is also a time when we have come to realise that taking a distance is not sufficient. This, indeed, we have tried and only succeeded to do formally. In order to complete the act we should allow for the present, as well as for our presence, to become past and for the future to become present; otherwise, at this stage our presence would be more of an impediment than a contribution, a kind of blockage, a resistance. This conclusion is intrinsic to the place we have come to occupy, a kind of real forever eluding the symbolic, an imaginary clouding of a demand that does not cease to intercept the demand of others. The resistance of the analyst is, of course, a fact.

There are no theoretical differences with analysts and members of the School at the basis of our resolution; there are, instead, theoretical reasons. There is a time to conclude: the time to conclude our membership with The Freudian School of Melbourne has arrived. It is a time when we articulate the doing without our presence for the continuation of what we regard as the most important move in our years as psychoanalysts: the creation of the School and the formation of analysts. As analysts and founders of the School, our trajectory has covered three moments: a time of transmission and formation; a time of fading; and now we pass to the time of concluding.

The analytic experience stumbles between two ailments: to seek authorisation from others and to make out of aphasia and agraphia semblance of knowledge. These symptoms, fantasms of allusion to a supposed-reachable-object-of-jouissance, produce the imaginary consistency of the diffusion of psychoanalysis. As analysts, our testimony proceeds along a different path. The analyst only authorises himself from himself. To write the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis is the after-effect that praxis brings forth in the particular, insofar as to write is to outline the real in which each one of us leaves in his transient act the indelible mark of that which does not cease not to be written. The testimony of the end of the analysis and of the pass yield its surplus: the transmission of psychoanalysis.

We have sustained an original desire in the School for fifteen years through inspiration and work: a desire born out of the certainty of the possibility of transmission. We write our resolution without nostalgia and with no regrets. The School, as the product of our psychoanalytic act, finds itself in the position to avow that the future is to take possession of the present by putting it to work. Thus we have arrived at what we aimed at: the transmission of psychoanalysis and the formation of analysts; but our task does not end here. The School, today, is knotted by and through its work. The mirror of the Other removed, the School is consolidated differently, bearing the mark of a founder but in the process of making a cut - a cut that is imperative, generative. Through this cut we emphasise, by the act, our own fading, place of the semblance of the object a.

The desire of the analyst in the place of the semblance of the object a should leave the place of the cause empty. With our resolution leaving the cause as empty, we outline the distance and the difference between the object a as an empty place and the object a as the place of the fetish.

However, there is a problem of structure that so far works as destiny, inherent both to every act of foundation and to the founder. Concerning this, the history of psychoanalysis tells of a rather inauspicious repetitive movement. Our resolution with its outcome tries to avoid repetition with a different answer to that impasse.

Regarding the relationship between psychoanalytic institutions and founders we have received two different answers: one provided by Freud who, by remaining attached to the International Psychoanalytic Association offered himself as the guarantee of psychoanalysis, and the other provided by Lacan which resulted in the dissolution of his School, L'École freudienne de Paris. In 1977 we wrote, at the close of the 12 Provisional Points for the foundation of The Freudian School of Melbourne, that we reserved the right and the moment for choosing our own path. Our resolution to resign from the School is intrinsically linked with the transmission of psychoanalysis. This nevertheless engages us and those who want to pursue the task, to further work this different answer.

The analyst always has horror of the advancement of his act, hence the possibility of counteracting it is always present. The ethics of psychoanalysis, ethics of the well-said, demands that our answer should be put to the test. Therefore we leave the School. Without its founders, the School is the cause of its own growth. It will stand for what it does with the sole guarantee of the transference of the discourse of psychoanalysis carried out by its analysts and members.

The psychoanalytic discourse has been the reason both for the foundation of The Freudian School of Melbourne and for our exit from it. In our singularity as analysts and founding members, if we can, and if we are able to, we ought to promote the act of concluding, becoming that nothing that the analyst is when transference, being effectively re-directed, allows transmission to pass.

This is why it is not inconsequential to state, among many other things: that there is no Other of the Other, that there is no metalanguage, that the Other does not exist, that there is lack in the Other, that the sexual relation does not exist, that there is not- all, that the woman does not exist, that truth can only be half-said.

These imply that the analyst would do better to abstain both from jouissance and from believing in intrinsic ineffable goodness. In this way, not only may he then hold the chance to keep open the avenue of desire, and not of fear, as the only possibility for his act, but indeed he may advance towards the real.