Lacanian Compass Miami

Echoes II Lacanian Compass Miami

There is another kind of defense against the anguish that substitutes repression, which also manifests itself clearly as an acute form of resistance to knowing, as a rejection of knowledge, and that is the passage to the act. But here it is a rejection different from what we have noted in inhibition. We shall return at this point to defining the theoretical structure of the passage to the act. First, however, I would like to focus on some aspects of what we understand in psychoanalysis by passage to the act. For us it is first a clinical concept that has been separated from the notion of passage to the act introduced in the nineteenth century by criminology. This notion denoted impulsivity, which is the essential term - impulsivity of aggression towards the self or others, violent, sometimes criminal, often delinquent. In other words, pathological connotations of madness, insanity, or perversion are here a constant. Psychoanalysis does not reject this notion, but it includes it in a conceptual framework in such a way that by passage to the act we understand phenomena that are much more varied, and in particular are much more discrete and common. Consequently, the distinction between what is normal and what is pathological is no longer relevant here. However, a certain pejorative connotation continues to be associated with the passage to the act, in particular when it occurs during analysis, even though in this context they may not only be scarcely notable, but also nearly inevitable. This connotation that persists among us comes precisely from its manifest and obvious character of rejection of knowledge in favor of the act. GUY TROBAS