SoU-001
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Neil: [00:00:00] As that introduction, music fades out, I'm going to say hello and welcome to this, the very first episode of subject of the Unconscious, a podcast about. Lacanian things and stuff. I am one of your co-hosts. My name is Neil Gorman, and along with me today is my accomplice, Isolda Alvarez. We are both practicing Lacanian analysts who've decided to make the podcast that you're listening to now and the point, the objective of this first episode is to introduce you, the listeners, to the kinds of things that we will be discussing on this podcast, and to tell you a little bit about us and how we ended up working within the Lacanian orientation.
Isolda, I'm gonna turn it over to you to get us started. Why don't you tell people how it is that you came to psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation?
Isolda: Actually, Neil, it was a contingency, it was a surprise my encounter with psychoanalysis happening while I was studying psychology at the university.
I had [00:01:00] always been interested in psychoanalysis, but never enough to fully explore that path, you know? Until I took a course on abnormal and pathological psychology. the professor of that class in particular, happened to be a psychoanalyst. He was a psychiatrist, but also a psychoanalyst. , At the time, I have to confess, I was going through a difficult period in my life.
And by the end of that semester, I asked him if I could schedule a session. And you're gonna laugh probably, , just to talk a bit about some stuff. That was literally what I asked him, like, Hey, can I pass by your office because I would like to talk about some stuff. And he kindly agreed and. That moment marked the beginning of everything and the beginning of my relationship, with psychoanalysis.
As time went on and I experienced the [00:02:00] effects of my own analysis, I came to realize, Neil, that I. Of all the perspectives and approaches I had to study during my training, this was the one I wanted to work with. Psychoanalysis did so much good for me that I came to trust it like deeply. I still do.
I'm not saying that the other, approaches or theories, they don't work. I'm just saying that for me, there was a huge change in my life and in the way that I related to. Life, others, and especially myself. That's why I choose this path. To offer a psychoanalysis to those who are struggling with issues that go beyond their will difficulties that persist despite their conscious efforts to overcome them.
Because to me, psychoanalysis is a practice that allows one not to suffer it too much. So that's my story. With psychoanalysis. What about you, Neil? How you ended up here? [00:03:00]
Neil: I really like your story because there's similarities to my own. For me, psychoanalysis was a surprise as well. I did not, I.
Set out to be on this path, at least not on purpose, and that's not how it worked for me. The way that I came to it was also in the university. I was in graduate school. I was in the first year of my doctoral program, and at that point, the first class that I had to take as part of that program was a class called The History of Psychological Theory, and that class was taught by a Freudian.
So he had a start by reading Freud, here I was reading the introductory lectures to psychoanalysis and finding myself thinking like, oh my gosh, there's so much in this that.
Makes a lot of sense to me, and I became very hooked. I was very fascinated after that. We read the ego psychologists a little bit less of a fascination for me there. And then after that we moved into object relations and I started [00:04:00] to read Winnicott and I don't think I've ever told you or any of our Lacanian friends about this.
Winnicott was my first love in psychoanalysis. I read Wincott and I was just like smitten. With what was going on in that, right? I was blown away by what I was reading when I was reading this guy. I remember very clearly reading the dedication in his book, playing In reality, the dedication reads this book is dedicated to my patients who have paid to teach me.
And I thought that is amazing. There was a another line that has always stuck with me that Winnicott wrote that it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found. And I thought, wow, that makes sense to me. And I read a ton of it and I can't remember where it was. I was trying to find it in preparation for this conversation today, and I wasn't able to, but I found somewhere this. Reference to Wincott [00:05:00] being on a committee or possibly going to Paris to look into something that was happening there.
What was going on is there was this guy named Jacque Lehan, and he was a part of the school, the SFP, and that school was trying to become a member of the IPA and the IPA. They weren't so sure about this place because there was this guy Lacan, there. He was doing these variable length sessions and he was training people, but they thought, well, maybe he's not training them.
Right. They asked Winnicott to go and check it out, like, , go look at what this Lacan guy's up to and then report back to us. Whatever it is that you find. And so what I remember reading was that Wincott. Met with Lacan and he wasn't hostile, he wasn't inquisitorial. It seems like he actually really liked meeting Lacan and that he thought that what Lacan was doing was actually psychoanalysis.
It was different than the Orthodox way that had been practiced in the IPA, but he's like, no, this guy's [00:06:00] onto something. I'm not quite sure what it is, but you know, I'm, I'm okay with it. It turns out the IPA didn't agree with Winnicott, and they decided that they were not okay with what Lacan was doing. And that led to a bunch of stuff, many of which we may talk about in future episodes of this podcast because I know both of us share an interest in that history
but, Lacan Was ex communicator from the IPA. So , I read this and I thought, Ooh, this is interesting.
This is. Juicy. I wanna know more about this, right? And, I'm Going online. I'm googling Lacan and I'm clicking links, and I'm discovering that people have a really strong reaction to Lacan. Some people tend to like adore this guy. They think he's amazing, he's the greatest. And other people revile him.
He's a charlatan. , He's deliberately obscured and doesn't actually know anything at all. This makes me even more curious. I'm like, oh, I want to know about this guy. [00:07:00] So I ordered in a copy of the Écrits from Amazon. It showed up and I remember this, well, I remember getting it and opening it and starting to read that first chapter on the Purloined letter, and I'm reading and it's not really making a lot of sense.
And I think, you know what? I'll just stick with it eventually. It's gonna make some sense. You know, I'm, I'm in grad school. This is a thing that I can do. I can read difficult stuff. I keep going and I keep going and it's not happening. It's not making sense. Nothing's clicking. And I was, then I skipped to a different chapter.
I'm like, oh, you go to a different one. Same thing. You know? Okay, let's try another chapter. I think I read like the function in the field of speech, and I'm like lost in that and I'm like, what is going on here. And for some reason. Even though I didn't get it, I wanted to get it. I was, I thought there's something here.
Well, after completing my graduate studies, I had decided at that point that I wanted to go into [00:08:00] analysis and I was looking for a lacanian psychoanalyst in the Chicago land area, and there was nobody, I couldn't find anybody, and so I found the website of the Lecan Compass, the organization that you and I are both a part of.
And I used a link on there to email whoever was the secretary at the time, and that was Tom Svolos. And he answered my email and he said, why don't you give me a call sometime and, I'd like to ask you some questions about your interest in Lacan, and then I'll see what I can do for you.
And so I called him up. We talked for a long time. At the end of the conversation, he said, you know, I don't know anybody in the Chicagoland area who's a Lacanian psychoanalyst and what I could offer you, if you're interested in trying out Lacanian psychoanalysis, you could fly to Omaha where he is, and we'll do as many sessions in a day as we can.
And I was like. Really? And he, he said, yes, absolutely. And so I, I did this. I got on an airplane, [00:09:00] I flew from Chicago to Omaha. I took an Uber to his office, and I think we did five sessions in one day.
Isolda: Oh, wow.
Neil: Yeah. Right. I mean, some of, they weren't all the same length. Right. Some were longer, some course somewhere shorter.
But, at The end of that, he said, so what do you think? , Do you wanna do this again? We Talked About the details, the logistics, the fee and the timing and stuff. And I, I said, yeah, let's do it again. And I did that. A number of times, I don't remember exactly how many times I flew to Omaha, but it, it was several.
And then eventually that turned into doing sessions through Zoom and going to Omaha, and then Covid happened, and then it was pretty much only on Zoom, but I've been in analysis ever since.
I had gone into psychoanalysis even though I didn't know it at that moment because there was a lot of things that I was having problems with and I didn't even know how to talk about it. And then by going into psychoanalysis, I think I learned how to talk about those things in a way that I couldn't before.
And then after learning how to talk about them. Things started to change for me [00:10:00] and my life before and after is different. And that has led to me feeling extremely committed to psychoanalysis and very grateful to it and to the people who continue to do things that, to make it available in the world as well.
And that was my entry into this. , I think it's interesting that we are both surprised by. Our interest in psychoanalysis and how we both came to it through the university, but then ended up continuing with it after we were no longer university students.
Isolda: Yes, it's, it's beautiful because even though each one of us has a quite singular and unique, encounter with psychoanalysis, there is a common thread, I guess if I could say it that way, about the desire, something that you just said. Desire to wanting to know.
Mm-hmm. And it's something that you can like trace or follow in, in every, . Every person that is quite related to psychoanalysis one way or the other. And I think [00:11:00] it's also the reason for the podcast.
This is offered or dedicated to people that has this, desire to wanting to know a little bit more, maybe not just about themselves, but also about psychoanalysis as a practice. What is psychoanalysis? Today, what, what are we doing related to these? When you talked about the, the sessions you did like five sessions in one day. It doesn't mean that every one that is going to a psychoanalyst has to do five sessions in a day. Each subject or each person that goes to analysis has a singular and different experience. . There's no standards. There's like just principles one by one, and I found that. Fascinated.
You know, I was in my own analysis and then I decided to read about it. I read Freud before, alone by myself when I was like, I don't know, 15, 16, something like that. At this moment, when I entered analysis, I was 20, [00:12:00] so I knew Freud and my family. I had an uncle. I have an uncle actually, that he's a psychoanalyst, so I knew about it a little bit, but after some sessions it was like, ah, I really like this thing.
How can I like work like that? I wanna do that too. And then, I ask around, and at the moment, um, a psychos says like, well, you know, there is a reading group here, the reading seminar 11,
I started reading seminar 11 and it was so enigmatic. Mm. What is going on here? How is this way to, you know, understand the suffering of a human being, to understand the, the relationships between human beings? It was fascinated. So one way or the other, as you said, there was this enigmatic thing about the.
Perspective that psychoanalysis offers about how can you read human phenomena? That got me like. Fascinated about it, and here I [00:13:00] am after many, many years still talking and reading and studying things related to the psychedelic stuff as we call it.
Neil: That is a big reason why we have discussed doing this podcast for several months at this point, and finally got to the point where logistically we could make it happen
I think both of us, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, have a desire to. Talk to people about psychoanalysis and it's not just only talking to people who are those who know a lot about it currently. 'cause there are those people and we do want to talk to them. If you're somebody who's listening to this and you are somebody who's been reading Lacan for 34 years, we hope that you get something from this for sure.
However, if you're somebody who. Is at a point in your life that is similar to the point that I was at before and Isolda was at before, where you're discovering this, it's new to you, everything that you're kind of coming into contact with seems maybe interesting to you, but it's also difficult [00:14:00] to kind get your bearings in.
Well, we wanna say something to you as well, and sometimes I think there's a tendency. To, to do one or the other. Right? It's like you're only gonna talk to the, the very experienced, knowledgeable people who can keep up with the super advanced vocabulary, or you're only going to talk to the novice who's just getting started.
And I don't think it needs to be that way. Some things will be maybe more geared towards the people who are starting out and some things may be more geared towards the people who've been on this path for some time. But you can talk to both.
Isolda: Yes,
Neil: it's not, it doesn't need to be mutually exclusive.
And I think that that's one of the things that we want to do here. And I know that you currently teach in a university. I taught a university for 12 years and we both are. People who practice psychoanalysis, and we both see this a lot, that there are people who will come to us, either students or analysands or both, and they want to know things.
They want to have a way to explore their desire, to [00:15:00] know something about psychoanalysis and hopefully we're gonna be able to create something that will help them accomplish that.
Isolda: Yes, Neil. Completely agree. I think, the, our own desire is kind of appealing and inviting others that might have a desire, as you said, to want wanting to know, but also to explore another ways and get in touch to whatever is happening in.
The psychoanalytic field. Not just in the US but around the world. , I think it's also important to kind of like convey that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a practice, not just a theory. I. Or a framework, kind of like a philosophical one, although it can be used as such, but I think in our feeling because of the way that we work for us, it's a practice and it's a practice that invites you not only to listen to yourself, but also to orient yourself by creating your own questions and , your own answers. The beautiful, [00:16:00] at least for me, the beauty of psychoanalysis is the invention. And so it invites you to create new things. Invites you to become aware of the unconscious and to make room for that part of yourself that remains unknown to you.
That's what I was saying. That is not about, consciousness or I want to do this, or I want to do that. That's the easy part. The difficult part is the part that you consciously want to stop, for example, and you can't. It keeps happening to you and it keeps happening to you.
, Outside of our, field, it's called patterns, but it is what we call repetition. , Maybe Neil, we ended up doing an episode about repetition. Today we're just presenting what is our intention here in kind of inviting people that wants to know a little bit more about the Lacanian orientation.
Neil: So in response to that, I have two things that come to my mind. The first thing is. To say something about what I think of when I think of Lacanian [00:17:00] psychoanalysis as a practice. 'cause , I think it is a practice. Absolutely. And I've said that to a couple of different people and they've come back to me and they've asked me to go deeper. Say more. What do you mean? Because . , People use that word a lot in our culture. I think they'll talk about a meditation practice. And if you say a meditation practice, a lot of people have a sense of what that is.
Or they talk about a practice of journaling. And they'll have an idea about what that is. But then you say a practice of psychoanalysis, and the question is what is involved in that practice? Which I think is a really good question.
Isolda: Mm-hmm.
Neil: And for me, when I became an analysand, somebody who went to a psychoanalyst and said, I want to come and I want to talk to you, you're exposed to that first rule of psychoanalysis there, you can talk about anything.
Don't try your best not to censor yourself. Try to say what comes into your mind without thinking too much about it, or worrying about how it's gonna come across, or, or whatever. , [00:18:00] It's not, tell me about this thing, or, , here's a specific question for you. It's what do you desire to say something about?
And when you're on the receiving end of that, you can really talk about anything. The phenomenon is kind of weird. , So, you start to talk, and you talk and you talk, and then eventually you feel like you've said enough stuff and you stop talking. This is what would happen to me. Then not all the time, but a lot of times the analyst would not say anything back to me. They'd be quiet. And it wasn't like being quiet at me. It wasn't this mean kind of quiet, it was just I think at that moment I hadn't said something that made them want to interpret or respond. So you sit there for a while and you're like, okay, what do I do now? And. That's a question though. Do you see what I mean? This is where the practice starts, , as a result of this and exposing myself to this, I started to become progressively more and more interested in [00:19:00] what it was that I was saying and why I was saying it.
I started to become very curious about why am I presenting it in the way that I am presenting it? Because a lot of times , I'd go through my life and I'd say things kind of on autopilot. I was, just talking and trying to make things happen, and then psychoanalysis made it so that I couldn't operate in that very habitual way that I operate mm-hmm.
In so many other parts of my life. Without a problem in psychoanalysis, it doesn't work. Right. You, you're, I was confronted with, um. A different kind of conversation. And as a result of that, I really started to wonder about things. And I can recall somewhat vividly, there was a time after I'd been in analysis for a while.
I was out with my family and we were, we were doing something and I was not having a good time. And I found myself asking the question, why am I not having a good time? And, and I was like, whoa. This [00:20:00] sounds simple, but this was a big deal for me at the time because I probably wouldn't have asked myself that question, I think before.
Isolda: Hmm. And,
Neil: and being in psychoanalysis had attuned me to the idea that I don't know these things about myself. This is the capacity that comes out of it for me. It's a practice of being genuinely interested in subjective experience. And really being able to engage in that kind of interest, engage in that kind of curiosity in a way that leads to very surprising things. That is the practice, I believe.
Isolda: I think in the example that you, share with us, it, it shows us how psychoanalysis introduces a stop. A pause is, is weird what I'm gonna say, but you are able to make certain distant from yourself. To introduce a distance. Mm-hmm. Kind of, uh, when you stop and you say [00:21:00] like, I'm not having a good time, why? There is a distance there from your own experience that allows you to at least first formulate the question and eventually probably get some answers that maybe any other, experience or circumstances that wouldn't be possible, as you said, you would've been, keep going with the, uneasiness or the bad mood or whatever, and it was just another experience.
Experience, like without any possibility to question anything. So for me, as a practice, if you are asking me, well, as a practice, well practice what? What is a practice that introduces not just the idea that you are able to listen to yourself, but also to introduce certain distant from yourself and a pause.
We, we live in Neil, in a world that is in a rush 24 7. I mean, there's no time for anything and I think it's important to have like few moments to stop. A little bit, not [00:22:00] just to enjoy the, I dunno, sunset or whatever, but also to listen to yourself and kind of listen or read your own experience.
Life is quite short and yes, we are in a rush all the time, so why not? To introduce something different. For me, psychoanalysis, that's kind of the best like giveaway that I can take from and from the top of my mind right now, doing the same exercise that we invite our patients to do, kind of talk freely, which is very difficult. I've learned that in my practice sometimes when you go say like, no, just talk without thinking. People go like, what? You want me to talk about? What? Without what I mean how? Yeah. But that is precisely the point in which you're able to introduce that distance from yourself. So I think it's a practice that allows that.
Neil: Yeah. I think that, that's what happened , in the sessions for me. I would be talking about things and I mentioned that a lot of times the analyst wasn't saying things back because [00:23:00] there was nothing to be curious about. I had done a lot of what we might call subject of the statement. I gave a sort of well prepared something and, , there's, there's nothing to ask about it. But then I would say other things and there would be a question that would be asked as a result of something that I said, a great question.
'cause I don't know the answer to that question myself. And when you don't know an answer to a question, it opens up this new path.
Isolda: Yeah,
Neil: for something which I think you really accurately called a distance.
Neil (2): Yes.
Neil: In the experience of going out with my family and feeling really frustrated.
I could have just gone on like that, just feeling irritated and frustrated and so on and so forth, and gotten a kind of satisfaction or what we might call a jouissance to use a technical term from just feeling that way and. What happened when I asked the question is a new path opened up a path of desire?, A desire comes from lack, it comes from not knowing something. I didn't know why I wasn't having a good time. [00:24:00]
Isolda: Mm-hmm.
Neil: You know, that was a real serious, actual question I was asking myself in that moment, and I didn't have an answer right there to, to do it. I had to, I, I was thinking about it, but now since I'm thinking about why am I not having a good time, I'm not so.
Emotionally invested in the immediacy of not having a good time.
Yes.
, I get some distance from that experience of being frustrated and I start to, to think and language starts to be deployed so that I can formulate my experience and put it into words, and that has an effect. And one Question leads to another question and to, again, like I feel like I'm being repetitive.
My apologies for this, but that is the practice for me, it's being able to engage in this. More sustained. 'cause you're not gonna do it all the time. I don't do it all the time, but you there. It's much more accessible to me now than it was before I was in analysis. The this ability to tap into that kind of curiosity and , have it be something that then helps me discover, I.
[00:25:00] What it is that's missing from my life. And that leads to the question, well what do I wanna do about that? And
Isolda: Hmm. Yeah. But now that you mentioned that, that word I think is important because I think it's exactly the invitation of psychoanalysis. Uh, what if we, uh, just like let, like open the door for, to experience what is missing and so what, right.
Neil: If
Isolda: there's something missing. So what? Mm-hmm. Maybe there's precisely, despite the space for desire, maybe that's precisely the space for a question, for a different answer, for a creation. When people say like, uh, well, you have to reinvent yourself. That's not that easy as it sounds. I mean, an invention is something that didn't exist before, so hello is not that easy.
I think that this idea that. Us being aware and being, , capable of saying, I don't know genuinely. , I think [00:26:00] it helps, to alleviate the pressure. Of the contemporary world about this idea that you have to know it all.
You have to do it all. You have to just do it. You have to enjoy it. You have to. You have to. You have to. And then you introduce a moment in which you can like, whoa, what if I don't.
Neil: What
Isolda: if I don't know. What if I just experience something? It's not the same to experience and to think about it. So the relationship with your body changes too.
The relationship with your thoughts changes too. So I think it's kind of what we are doing these podcasts and maybe the following episodes we're going to touch based on things more related to the psychoanalysis itself or not. You tell us. Neil?
Neil: I know that we had, uh, discussed something as a, possibility of what it was that we would kind of aim at talking about next time. So maybe now as a, a good time to introduce that. Psychoanalysis and the way that it is [00:27:00] practiced today within a contemporary world with the, the problems of this contemporary world, it's very different than the way it was practiced in the Victorian era when Freud made his initial discoveries that led to the creation of psychoanalysis,
Isolda: let's go for it. I think that will be wonderful as a second episode, how second analysis works today versus at the different times in the past. Kind of an, , update about what is happening nowadays in the psychoanalytic field. And and why, also because it's not that the changes, because it changes, it has some reason and certain like logic too.
So yes, let's go for it. Next episode about psychoanalysis today.
Neil: Sounds good. Okay. Until next time.
Isolda: Thank you very much.
Neil: Take care.