If as much seriousness was put into analysis as I put in to the preparation of my seminar, well then, it would be so much the better. ... For that ... one would have to have in analysis, as Ihave …. the sentiment of an absolute risk. ¹ 1. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976 Trans. Cormac Gallagher Lesson of December 16 1975.

In contrast to this seriousness, this sentiment of absolute risk with which Lacan approaches his seminar in Paris, we have his account of a class, a type of psychiatrist encountered on his trip to America.

Good god, why ask oneself questions, and especially if they are any bit metaphysical when, god knows, after all everything is going so well, that you finish work at half past five, you have a whisky, you read a novel, usually a spy novel and you settle down in front of television.

Lacan continues:

I do not see why one should reproach what constitutes a social class for having its comforts, simply that it is for us to see what this involves, of course, in terms of inertia and of being too settled. ² 2. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X111 The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965-1966 Trans. Cormac Gallagher Lesson of March 23 1966.

This contrast between a sentiment of absolute risk and an inertia, a comfort, a "being too settled" is reminiscent of a contrast drawn by Freud:

Life is impoverished, it loses its interest when the highest stakes in the game of living, life itself may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a continental love affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind .... the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. ³ 3. Freud, S. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death II Our Attitude towards Death St. ed. Vol. XIV p. 290.

Lacan spoke of his sentiment of absolute risk in the seminar in which he addressed his longstanding transference to the writings of James Joyce, that monumental writer whose extraordinary relationship with lan- guage incited Lacan to question the function of this very creativity for Joyce as a subject. In the throes of his perplexity about Joyce were the ever multiplying creative possibilities of the Borromean knot but this controversial Joycean project was certainly not without risk for Lacan. As highlighted in the Dublin Papers in Volume 23 of the Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne to take an artist as a case is in apparent contradiction to Lacan's own teaching.

If, as Freud suggests, life loses its interest when the highest stake in living is not risked is it not also the case that, without the sentiment of absolute risk, without the seriousness spoken of by Lacan, psychoa- nalysis is likewise impoverished?

Jean Allouch in explicating what he designates as the Freudian method, points to a paradoxical risk in applying this method, a risk relating to its "quasi suicidal aspect". The paradox of this method arises from the requirement that, as Lacan writes ...

psychoanalysis is a practice subordinated to that which is most par- ticular in the subject and when Freud emphasizes this to the point of saying that psychoanalytic science must be called into question with the analysis of each case ... he shows the analysand the way of his formation. ⁴ 4. Lacan, J. in Allouch, J. The Secretarial Function, Element of the Freudian Method Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne 15 Ed. Pereira, D. D. 195.

Allouch continues:

... for those who put the Freudian method into practice this methodological trait sets apart something like two different "furnaces" [Ferenczi's term for the transference] which can produce new statements and formulate the problems raised by the analysis in their actuality. There is Freud's text ... above all a teaching; but there is also what can be gleaned from the applica- tion [unique in every case] of the method, which one calls analyti- cal practice ...

Every practitioner is put by Freud] in a position of having to stop short when it comes to knowing whether he welcomes what comes out of one or other of the these two furnaces as truths that are comparable or not in a way which is not only internal to each of them but in the encountering with their respective statements. The radical Freudian principle is to maintain them apart. Freud inscribes in his method a trait, which, when applied is likely to refute the results at any moment. Described in this way there is in the Freudian method a point which is quasi - suicidal. ⁵ 5. Allouch, J. ibid., p. 196.

The Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, Volume 24 give testament to that quasi - suicidal risk taken by analysts and members of the School, in applying, not a technique, but the Freudian method to their clinical practice, to their seminars, to their writing and to the functioning of the School itself. In pursuing a practice that seeks to avoid the inertia spoken of by Lacan, the contributors to this volume take the risk of encountering the impasses of the clinic today and the incompleteness of Lacanian theory with invention. Being marked by the residue of the psychoanalytic clinic they continue to work their transference to that clinic and to the texts of Freud and Lacan. In doing so they attempt to "declare their reasons" as demanded by Lacan. ⁶ 6. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIV 1976-1977 Appendix 1 The Opening of the Clinical Section Talk delivered on 5 January 1977 Trans. Collins, D. More than a flirtation, this affair of love with psychoanalysis, this love affair, being of necessity neither "continental" nor "American" must take its own risks in the reading and writing of psychoanalysis in Mel- bourne, Australia. Melbourne, named after a British prime minister in the time of Queen Victoria, is a city in which we are thus subjected to, spoken by the "Queen's English", with the attendant effects -risks- produced by that tongue in relation to our formation or deformation as psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis, of course was originally a conti- nental affair.

Included in this volume is a paper by Oscar Zentner, founder of the School as well as translations of papers and extracts from books by analysts from overseas-Jean Allouch, Erik Porge, Jean Bergès, Gabriel Balbo and Gustavo Etkin.

To conclude with just a few indications about the diverse content and style of these papers, the title of this volume, Invention in the Real, marks both a time in the history of the Freudian School of Melbourne and a direction with regard to its orientation to theory and practice. Cen- tral to this volume are papers written to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the School. Now three decades since the death of Lacan, this series of papers addresses The Lacanian Clinic Today and examine questions of Time and History in relation to psychoanalysis.

Controversies in the history of the analysis of children and the com- plexities of that clinic today are examined in Psychoanalysis and the Child and included in these papers are translations of extracts from books by Bergès and Balbo and Erik Porge on the psychoanalytic clinic of the child.

The relation between the arts and psychoanalysis is worked anew in papers on Analysis, the Arts and the Well Spoken and on Psychoa- nalysis and Death as homage is paid to literature, painting and other visual arts. Goethe, Dostoevsky, Mishima, Tanizaki, Bacon, Duchamp— these artists show the way for psychoanalysis in relation to desire, jouissance, sexuality and death. In this regard Oscar Zentner writes in An Architecture of Death from Tanizaki to Mishima in this volume that, "Literature has taught me in my work as an analyst that psychoanalytic practice is akin a practice of fiction." With a rare inventiveness, David Pereira in The Art of Interpretation-Drawing a Line renews the question of psychoanalytic interpretation through the interrogation of a series of paintings by one artist, creating thereby what is ultimately a fiction in which it is possible to hear something new about the art of psychoana- lytic interpretation.

I believe that it can be read in this latest volume of writings of the Freudian School of Melbourne that psychoanalysis is a practice which, like Bacon's painting attempts to "keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity"? In order to do so it demands seriousness and the sentiment of absolute risk in the pursuit of the possibility of invention in the real.

Linda Clifton

Notes

1. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976 Trans. Cormac Gallagher Lesson of December 16 1975.

2. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X111 The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965-1966 Trans. Cormac Gallagher Lesson of March 23 1966.

3. Freud, S. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death II Our Attitude towards Death St. ed. Vol. XIV p. 290.

4. Lacan, J. in Allouch, J. The Secretarial Function, Element of the Freudian Method Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne 15 Ed. Pereira, D. p. 195.

5. Allouch, J. ibid., p. 196.

6. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIV 1976-1977 Appendix 1 The Opening of the Clinical Section Talk delivered on 5 January 1977 Trans. Collins, D.

7. Cited in this volume by Pereira, D. Must Every Analyst Recapitulate the History of Psychoanalysis in His Own Way? no. 14.