Ernest Jones, in his funeral sermon on Freud's death, asks the following question: 'How can those to whom he was the centre of life go on finding sense in life?" ¹ 1. Etkin, G. "The Decentration' Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, Oscar Zentner (ed.), The Freudian School of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1987. We know only too well what became the possibilities for a psychoanalysis whose future was anticipated with such a question. Etkin notes that 'It was for that reason' - by which may be understood, the very phrasing of a question - 'that later he — Jones — centred himself upon Freud's life - and became a pilgrim of what he understood as Freudian knowledge.' ² 1. Etkin, G. 'The Decentration' Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, Oscar Zentner (ed.), The Freudian School of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1987.

The Freudian School of Melbourne, in holding the first Homage to Freud in Australia in 1979, and in 1991, ten years after the death of Lacan, holding a Homage to Lacan, anticipates and enacts a different future for psychoanalysis in Australia. An enactment of the real of the unconscious as a transference of work - a work which situates itself in relation to the Lacanian unconscious in the field opened by Freud. There is at play here a transference which proposes a different question, a question to be elaborated in relation to the significance of a Homage to Lacan within a Freudian School.

Lacan died on 9 September 1981. Why is a Homage to Lacan held around the anniversary of a death? We situate a Homage in reference to death for the reason that death renders pertinent the question of whether it is possible to separate a master from a teaching or theory. A Homage, then, fundamentally bears upon the function of the symbolic and the efficacy of this function in psychoanalysis. Lacan asks: 'What are these rites really, by which we fulfill our obligation to what is called the memory of the dead - if not the total mass intervention of the signifier, from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell, of the entire play of the symbolic register?" ³ 1. Etkin, G. "The Decentration' Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, Oscar Zentner (ed.), The Freudian School of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1987. He further notes that the work of mourning is accomplished at the level of the logos rather than group or community, although a School of psychoanalysis is faced with the task of sustaining such a discourse over and above that of the group.

This is to say that there is transference via work rather than via a global association. In this way there is an effect of surplus produced by what supplies the lack, giving rise to a social and linguistic exchange that is a form of discourse we call writing. A Homage, therefore, inscribes a symbolic debt to a theory in such a way as to de-suppose a master - effecting a separation of that theory from a master. A Homage as testament to the work that can be produced when, as Lacan noted, his image was not there to act as a screen. In this resides the possibility of sustaining a transference productive of writings which advance a theory rather than revere a master. The passage of ten years since the death of Lacan has revealed the Freudian School of Melbourne to have produced a work which, rather than incarnating the discourse of a deceased ancestor, invents Lacanianism in Australia, the effects of which are more than evident today.

Finally, how might we understand a Homage to Lacan within a Freudian School? Psychoanalysis as it was invented by Freud discovered the unconscious. This invention is worked by Lacan in the breadth of a commentary on the text of Freud, in light of a logic proper to it. A Homage to Lacan within a Freudian School underwrites the fact that, since Lacan, the unconscious may be situated as the product of an encounter between the Freudian unconscious and the Lacanian real. Such an encounter resists: on the one hand, the 'hypnotic symptom' as that towards which the experience of the unconscious slips when it is not articulated within the primacy of a theory; and, on the other hand, psychoanalysis coming to occupy for itself the place of cause through the artifice of an unified field.

There is a Homage to Lacan in attempting to articulate a formation of analytic experience as a structure which borders on that of the impossible to unify, against the idea that such experience is ineffable. It is this movement of psychoanalysis away from the alibi of ineffability that produces the obligation - in the form, if one can one ought - to give account of the psychoanalytic experience - the duty of both the analyst and the School.

The present volume contains works which respond to this obligation to give account of the psychoanalytic experience. The papers by overseas analysts: Eric Porge and Joel Dor from France, and Gustavo Etkin, who visited and worked intensively with us, and Ivan Correa from Brazil, are the product of an ongoing dialogue between The Freudian School of Melbourne and analysts from other Schools. Such dialogue situates itself precisely in that place where unity, as the mask of that which is impossible to sustain, absents itself.

Notes

1. Etkin, G. 'The Decentration' Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, Oscar Zentner (ed.), The Freudian School of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1987.

2. Ibid.

3. Lacan, J. Desire and the Interpretation of Desire.