1 This issue follows up on the « radicalization » series opened up in issue 23.
2 Opening up this issue before the new articles of the series, Elliot Jurist’s paper – a double-format – represents this issue’s “Letter”. Both international and historical in scope, it focuses on the challenges faced by psychoanalysis today and sheds light on the internal ruptures it has faced over the last years. It offers a dialectical reading of these ruptures, understanding them as a confrontation between defenders of scientific vs. hermeneutical viewpoints. He raises the question: are they incompatible? He urges both researchers and clinically-oriented analysts to go through the depressive position and adopt a strong pluralism, closely articulating clinical material and theorization. By critically analyzing the debates opposing D. Stern to A. Green, and I. Hoffman to M. N. Eagle and D. L. Wolitzky, then to J. Safran, he stresses the risks entailed by confining psychoanalysis into a rigidly hermeneutical stance, ignoring that a scientific stance can be open to complexity.
3 E. Jurist defends a strong pluralism. His epistemological reflection offers a precious starting point to establish a living dialogue in our discipline, where the diversity of viewpoints needs to be taken seriously: overcoming excessive oppositions opens up new perspective both in research and clinical work. By questioning the central contemporary stakes faced by psychoanalysis today, he opens this issue with an illuminating, essential and courageous paper.
5 The Feature Section “Radicalization” continues the thread opened in our last issue with two new papers. Both emanate from the team “Psychoanalytic Clinic of the Subject and of the Social Bond” (LCPI, Toulouse 2 University), and seek to articulate the radicalization of individual subjects and the specificity of the social bond in which such a radicalization is embedded.
7 The first one, by Sami Chiha, Laurent Combres and Sidi Askofaré, sets out to examine the social choice of the words “radicality” and “radicalization”. The authors contend that this choice represents a particular postmodern nomination: they then confront it to the psychoanalytic understanding of nomination, as the seminal coordinate of the structure operated by the father. After scrutinizing the name “radical”, the authors demonstrate and illustrate – through clinical cases – how contemporary forms of fanaticism are correlated, through the types of jouissance upon which they rely, with the capitalist discourse wherein they find their ground and against which they paradoxically defend themselves. These forms, characterized by a rejection of the subject of love and of politics, lead the authors to wonder to what extent they can be considered as symptoms – that is, as manifestations of one’s singularity.
9 The second paper, by Diane Besson, Amos Squverer and Marie-Jean Sauret, starts from the specific relationship of radicalized subjects to religious knowledge – and more particularly to the signifiers of the Text. This relationship is strikingly fragmentary and decontextualized – the Text becomes de-anchored, or de-quilted. The authors show how this relationship to the Text involves a certain type of social bond. This decontextualization enables a deterritorialization which allows for a rhizomatic, globalized circulation of this fragmented knowledge. This hypothesis leads the authors to claim that globalization naturally harbors radicalization – one of its main symptoms.
11 The Regular Section “Public Health Issues” comprises two papers both dealing – through different approaches – with the relationship between patients and the public space. They give complementary visions on a central contemporary issue: how can we define psychical care in a fast-paced society such as ours, going through various mutations and transfigurations?
13 Camille Veit’s paper focuses on the evolving perceptions of psychiatry and the patient in our postmodern society. It shows in detail how capitalism has contaminated the field of psychical health: eliminating the dimension of the unconscious, it reduces the patient to a – purportedly self-determinating – user, thereby erasing the asymmetry which defines all relationships involving care. This paper sheds light on the numerous paradoxes generated by this logic of self-entrepreneurship applied to psychical care, which produces an impossible Ideal. Doesn’t such an alienation to the capitalist model expose the subject to a narcissistic rage, when confronted with the innumerable shortages of a system undergoing permanent budgetary restrictions ?
15 Michael Chocron’s paper explores the evolution of therapeutic settings within these social mutations of the healthcare offer. It analyses in detail the different forms of address to the Other put to work for autistic subjects in the Papotin paper. He shows how such ateliers allows its members to gradually think interiority and exteriority. Who will be the addressee of their written productions? Also, who attends these writing meetings? This group offers a way to think the social bond to subjects presenting a more fragile anchoring in their link to the other.
17 Finally, in a paper from the Regular Section “Clinical Explorations”, Yorgos Dimitriadis comes back to the “Noonday demon”, recently explored by P.-L. Assoun, by exploring a specific object-choice made by middle-aged men – that of young women in the bloom of their youth. He delineates the masculine passion for these young women through the lens of the Oedipal coordinates, and enriches it by drawing on Lacan’s remarks on the fetishistic dimension of the specifically masculine object-choice. At the time of a consumeristic collection of encounters, and an operative focus on performance, it is of great importance to insist on the psychical underpinnings of such orientations of desire in the noonday of life.
