Humanisation?: Psychoanalysis, Symbolisation, and the Body of the Unconscious

Unquenched desire, the dividing up of the drives, repetition, and symptom are the keywords for the effects that the unconscious, as deciphered by Freud, has on the body. Harmony is not on the agenda, but rather the discordance, unlinking, and arrogance of cynical jouissances. It seems that the discourse of capitalism is today increasing their deleterious consequences – with all of these demonstrative suicides, but also suicides as diverse as those of terrorists, Tibetan monks, those beleaguered by the capitalist enterprise, and all the hopeless of our time. Hence the question that Lacan posed concerning the possible "humanisation" of this denatured animal, about whom Freud did not hesitate to say that he is a wolf to man, even though he has always made community. What will the psychoanalyst say about possible solutions, he whose act excludes the call to norms of any kind?

Humanisation? is the 2013–2014 volume of the annual seminar held by the author at the Clinical College of the Lacanian Field in Paris.

Colette Soler practices and teaches psychoanalysis in Paris. She holds an agrégation in philosophy and a doctorate in psychology. It was her encounter with the teaching and person of Jacques Lacan that led her to choose psychoanalysis. She was a member of the École Freudienne de Paris and, following its dissolution, became the Director of the École de la Cause Freudienne, after which she was at the forefront of the movement of the International of the Forums and its School of Psychoanalysis.