DISCONTENT AND ANXIETY IN THE CLINIC AND IN CIVILISATION An introduction to the NLS Congress 2023

Daniel ROY

The title I propose for our next Congress, which will be held in Paris in May 2023, comes directly from a passage in Lacan's text entitled “The Third”, which is his lecture delivered in Rome on 1 November 1974.

Here is the passage: “Nevertheless, all our experience is based on the discontent [malaise] that Freud somewhere refers to as the discontents of civilisation.”1 The paragraph that follows specifies the direct causal link between discontent, in Freud’s sense, and the whole of the analytic experience:

What is striking is that the body contributes to this discontent [malaise] and in a way in which we know very well how to animate in animals, so to speak, when we animate them with our fear. This does not simply mean – what is the basis of our fear? What are we afraid of? Of our body. This is what the curious phenomenon I spent a whole year on in my Seminar, which I called Anxiety, shows. In our body, anxiety is situated precisely somewhere other than fear. It is the feeling that arises from this suspicion that comes over us of being reduced to our body […]

The whole text you find here:

Introduction by Daniel Roy

Registration for the NLS Congress is possible here: REGISTRATION

The NLS Congress will take place via Zoom. There will be the possibility to experience the congress together in the Klaviergalerie, Kaiserstraße 10.

Mathias Althaler will translate into German.

If you want to participate in this way, please register in addition to the registration in the NLS here: Register