Psychoanalytical Notebooks is a journal of the London Society of the New Lacanian School and has been published since 1998. Its primary aim, from inception, has been to enlighten the English-speaking community of Lacanians worldwide. We have always embraced with great pleasure the generous contributions from Jacques-Alain Miller whose inspiring work continues to elucidate the later teaching of Lacan as part of the Lacanian Orientation. And we welcome a plethora of psychoanalytical elaborations by analysts from various Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, together with testimonies of ongoing work by colleagues from the London Society, which demonstrate the desire to work and analytical passions at work. PN is in this sense a crossroad where analytical articulations, testimonies of the Pass of the School, and live debates interlace and resonate, responding to the crucial questions of psychoanalysis today, including those of the clinic, love, femininity, politics, and ethics.
Autumn-Winter 2021
Issue 37/38
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, we are all talking about the One. Everyone is talking about the concept of the One.
Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38 joins the conversation, offering an array of accounts of the One that Lacan elaborated to orient us in our practice.
Lacan’s earliest teaching started with postulating the primacy of the signifier as the primacy of the Other. All speech and language pass through and come from the Other, the Other of language the subject is born into. The Other was for Lacan the source and the depository of signifiers that are external to a subject’s articulations, leading it to alienation.
In his later teaching Lacan was not satisfied with this circularity of speech. He sought a different answer to the question of the subject’s destiny as forged by the formula of alienation. This led him to construct a discourse where dissatisfaction could be inscribed. Dissatisfaction is one of many signs of jouissance of the body – whose exteriority and alterity are directly opposed to the symbolic dyad of S₁ and S₂ as responsible for sense production – Lacan’s One: Yad’lun.
It is not without a surge of enthusiasm in the new editorial team that we make one more effort to serve our English-speaking community with this double issue.
