Annual Conference: Homage to Lacan

2020: MADNESS ???

Saturday September 5th
This year's Homage will be hosted on Zoom
10.00am - 2.00 pm
FREE ADMISSION

“It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.”
S. Freud. Notes on a case of paranoia

“It is the business of reason to recognize the drama of madness, because it is in man’s relation to the signifier that this drama is situated.”
J. Lacan Ecrits

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”
Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The conceptualisation of madness, not simply reducible to nor contained within a diagnostic structure called psychosis, continues to pose questions to the method of analysis and to analysts. Is it amenable to said method in any approach constitutive of a possible treatment?

What is the relationship of madness to the manifestations of neurosis and the practices of perversion which clinical experience and everyday occurrence displays are far from devoid of a certain craziness?

Is the apparent irrationality of the phenomena of psychosis, the delusional expression and hallucinatory experience, actually devoid of a latent meaning notwithstanding the irrelevance of the manifest content to any generally accepted construction of reality? After all, if reality is a fantastic concept for mankind, what truth does madness potentially point us towards in considering the manner in which all are subjected to language and the consequent problematics of the “unconscious”?

The school reengages this year with these and many other questions which madness poses to us, in an ongoing appraisal of what a listening to the “martyrs” of language can produce when they testify with a truthfulness unobtainable from any other witness, no matter how reliably one might swear to tell their truth. The school invites others to engage in this work of questioning in response to the presentations by its membership.