“I am very happy to see a very large number of young faces because (…) it is in (…) these faces that I place my hope”. These were Lacan’s words at a Lecture in Italy in 1974, when he associated youth with hope. What kind of hope are we talking about?
We’re reminded here of Émile Zola’s famous “Letter to Youth”, evoking the Latin Quarter, which was ablaze “with the proud passions of youth, the love of freedom, the hatred of brutal force, which crushes brains and compresses souls”. The hope Lacan speaks of is not a matter of lyricism, but of necessity – a necessity for psychoanalysis to exist and for there to be analysts.
A necessity of discourse, then, and it is precisely because youth, he says, is ‘sensitive’ to the dominant discourse that it can serve as a guide for understanding the present moment. Young people are sensitive to contemporaneity.
What can we learn from this? That we need to take account of the world as it is today, so that psychoanalysis is not ‘out of touch’ with the world and can survive. Lacan spoke the language of his time so that young people would come to his School. He spoke of cybernetics, he integrated the vocabulary of Marxism, and so on. He succeeded. He was “Lacan the opportunist”, as JAM put it, “because he was hooked up to his discourse and looking for ways to get it across”.
In his address to young people, Lacan, as he himself said, did not make any propaganda. Instead of illusions, what does he offer? Nothing other than the analytical offer itself.
This orientation has inspired the WAP Council and encouraged Schools to concern themselves with the place of young people in our School. It is a question of ensuring renewal in our Schools, and giving priority to the future, to the development of Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis in the world. Ensuring the presence of young members in the Schools, giving them an active place. This means taking into account the specific timeframe of their unique training path, which in our Schools is based on immersion. That’s why this policy also requires the presence of the most seasoned members, the AMS, to encourage young colleagues to make the journey that will enable them to enter the School, with the aim of passing on the experience of the School in a non-anonymous way.
The time to act is now.
Translation by Philip Dravers
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This untitled work by Argentinian artist Léon Ferrari dates from 1977. The dancing silhouettes evoke Jacques Lacan’s association of youth and hope, quoted in the Letter from the President.