The Effects of a Congress

A congress leaves traces, for each individual, for the School. This unique moment, when every two years the WAP brings together psychoanalysts from all over the world, continues, one by one, and in the School, to dig the Lacanian furrow. And it was no small coincidence that this XIVth Congress “Everyone Is Mad”, was held a few days after the publication of Seminar XV, The Psychoanalytic Act. It was an opportunity to celebrate “Lacan in the present”, and to situate the coming together of psychoanalysts in the WAP as a consequence of Lacan’s battle, as evidenced by his Founding Act.

The “being together”, our mitsein at a congress of the WAP, has a special significance. Working with others takes on, here, the true value of otherness. What seemed to embody the distant, other countries, other schools, becomes the closest. Putting the results of one’s practice to the test, by having them recognised, by addressing the Other. And we know from Lacan that making the Other exist is the only remedy for the prevailing gloom. This effort towards otherness is taken to a higher power here: learning to always talk better about our practice.

The parallel clinical sessions, contrary to the prejudices which deconceptualize the clinic, highlighted the Lacanian depathologization by showing that it does not erase the structure of language, while emphasizing the edges of the mode of jouissance. The term madness has regained luster, at a time when our society misunderstands it. In the 1930s, Lacan approached madness as a form of lived experience, and highlighted the indispensable nature of the patient’s Erlebnis, which means exactly not approaching madness as a deficit. Thus rediscovering the existentialist vein of this Lacan, proves all the more salubrious in a time when we tend to do without the value of experience, in favour of the imposition of a language or direct interventions on the body, short-circuiting the powers of speech.

If the declamation I, madness, speak that Erasmus in his In Praise of Folly placed in the mouth of a woman, remained unforgettable, it is because

beyond a satire of the world, “it passes the limits of universal discourse, it introduces an unprecedented way of saying. Is seeing this as a sensational anticipation of free association excessive? However, what is being in analysis other than having the license to muck around?” as J.-A Miller puts it.

The taste – Erasmus’ displayed pleasure for “whatever comes to the tip of the tongue”, the Freudian Einfall one could say – is that not what is being experienced at all levels in this Congress? Extracting the speech of the analysands, from the gangue of discourse, from ideology, from the spirit of the times?

With this recent experience behind us, we are already looking ahead to 2026. With “Woman does not exist”, a new series of three titles of the WAP congress began. A second aphorism “Everyone is Mad” followed to give its title to the XIVth Congress.

It is the foreclosure of the signifier of the woman, which justifies Lacan’s proposition Eveyone is Mad. Psychoanalysis objects to any idea of mental health: harmony is never in order for the speaking being. There will always be a mismatch between the real and the mental. Freud designated this as the navel of the dream: primordial repression is ineliminable because the sexual does not have a signifying solution. Lacan named it with this radical aphorism: There is no sexual relation.

In a logical way, this third aphorism of Lacan was the obvious choice for the title of the XVth WAP Congress.