Presentation of the School
Oscar Zentner
Papers of
The Freudian School of Melbourne,
Volume 1: Homage to Freud, 1979
Und wenn es uns glückt,
Und wenn es sich schikt,
So sind es Gedanken.And if we are lucky,
And if the circumstances are given,
Then there are thoughts.–Goethe
Quoted by Lacan at the beginning of "The Serinar on The Purloined Letter'"
a) To My Mistaken Teachers, those who allowed me to understand by their errors that the way was another. To name them; Dr. Enrique Pichon Rivière - psychoanalyst - teacher of a whole generation, to Dr. José Bleger - psychoanalyst — his most direct son. These teachers - to name the most outstanding ones — were the result of a mixture of
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creativity, Kleinism à la lettre plus a line of contemporary French thought that not for being mistaken lacked value, mainly Georges Politzer with his "Fundamental Principles of Concrete Psychology" together with a Merleau Ponty to the psychoanalytic neo-behaviourism of a Daniel Lagache. To León Rozitchner - philosophy graduate of La Sorbonne — who in the years 1964-1965 gave the seminars on "Fetichism in Freud and Marx" shaking the university discourse and whose no smaller merit was the translation of a book of inestimable value for the time "Après Freud" by Pontalis.
b) To the Error of a Group of which I was a Member, a group that con- fronted teachers and disciples in an already mythical discussion panel (composed of the above mentioned Pichon Rivière, Bleger, Rozitchner, among others in the year 1965 and that was the burial with all the honors to the mistaken teachers. The topic of the panel was the final ex- pression of that current of thought. The title in question was "On Con- crete Psychology". This originated both the hope and death of an epoch.
Then the years adrift in search for less concrete and less consoling truths. And it was on the carrion of the mistaken teachers that we, the carrion crows of knowledge, swooped, and from the bits and pieces of a fantastic reality called totality, took its parts to'enrich - each one accor- ding to the possibilities - our own way of access to he who knew how to keep for the truth its title of impossible; that is to say, unconscious. Freud, who knew how to let us know his words, pronounced his discourse - repressed by his disciples. But as we know in psychoanalysis, nothing is more indestructible than that which is repressed remaining unconscious.
It is upon the parricide of the mistaken teachers that another discourse is born. A discourse that endeavours to return the psychoanalytic originality following - against the current - the teachings of a true black sheep of psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan.
Two other important teachers for me, Dr. Ricardo Avenburg - psychoanalyst - with whom I read Freud by Freud for long years on Wednesday afternoons, and Oscar Masotta, 1 founder of the Freudian School of Buenos Aires who introduced Lacan's ideas as early as 1964 in Buenos Aires and with whom I studied Lacan.
c) Of the School, of the Psychoanalyst and his Crime, a School is a place that appeals to the truth. In this sense it implies at least two slopes: psychoanalysis, and the limits of its transmission. That is why every act of foundation signifies a beginning which, to avoid any regression to
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1 The author of this presentation ignored that a cancer put a final end to the life of Oscar Masotta on September 12th. 1979 in Barcelona, Spain, in the same moment in which the words 'a foundation is a sad act when one does not have any illusions in the future' were written.infinity commences with no other justification than the acts that create it. That is why every foundation ceases to be a continuation in order to become a rupture whose only credit must lean on a work whose rigour should be able to be examined under the light of day.
If everything is founded with work it is because our beginning in the symbolic is a rupture with the heritage which is nothing until we make it ours. It is 'de facto' that we put light to a legality that is then ours. It is in this work that the psychoanalyst authorises himself, then yes, to the legitimate of his being.
The founder was an orphan, and it is not enough to name him to create descendants. We have said that the psychoanalyst authorises himself, but it will be his peers who will legitimate him. This is the first truth that The School will allow him to verify, because the science that engages him - irrespective of how completed it is - will make him repeat in orphanhood an involuntary way that will make his learning didactic.
The School will ask of its members the only exclusivity of fully dedicating themselves to enrich its objectives with their contributions. Every subject though, will have to count with sufficient strength as to sustain his desire.
This introduction - although condensed intends to speak of the origins of our original debt. Our being psychoanalysts is irresolvably linked to crime; or isn't the discovery of the fact that we owe a death, that which awakens our psychoanalytic vocation? This debt reminds us of the parallel that Freud understood to clarify while talking on an- tisemitism, opposing it to christianity as a religion, that, being more modern in a radical sense, allowed in a way the recognition of parricide, displaced onto the death of the son, awaking less repulsion than judaism which, disavowing that death, increased the feeling of repulsion.
Freud taught us to distinguish that symbolic castration originates in the father, and showed that jewish religion while persisting in disavowing the death of the father, created, as a deficiency, the return of the repressed. The mutilation of circumcision is the attempt in the jewish religion to accede to the symbolic function.
This is precisely the dif- ference with christianity. Christianity accepts the crime and accedes to universality not only by the incorporation of classic Greek thought but also by the arrival to the symbolic function: This reference is not external to psychoanalysis. I will let Freud talk here to say that only religion could aspire to compete with psychoanalysis. Freud — who liked to repeat that the whale and the
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polar bear did not compete because they occupied different territories — subtly points out in this way that here the territory seems to be the same.
This parallel is not an analogy but a metaphor, that shows that the psychoanalyst must be formed on a double debt. A double debt in his case if he discovers that, in order to become a psychoanalyst, it is on the epistemologic death that he gives birth to his being. This is why we are here today, in the here and now (hic et nunc), directed to the anamnesis that our Homage implies. And if we are here and now, it is to repeat with Lacan that nowadays the psychoanalysts are on one side and psychoanalysis is in another revealing that it is psychoanalysis itself which does not leave survivors. This is why our Homage is on the death of him who could again answer the Sphinx; Sphinx that only permits the entrance to secrets obtaining a death.
A foundation is a sad act when one does not have any illusions in the future. 2
2 This paper has been read on September 1979. In January 1980 Di. Jacques Lacan announces the dissolution of the Ecole Freu- dienne de Paris. He starts the letter sent to the members of the Ecole in this way: "Je parle sans la moindre espoir — de me faire entendre notamment ....