The European Journal of Psychoanalysis (EJP) and the Foundation of California Psychoanalysis (FCP) held a Symposium on the new book: Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan by Sergio Benvenuto. Benvenuto presented material from this important work followed by commentary on the text by a distinguished group of psychoanalysts, including: Fernando Castrillón, Patricia Gherovici, David Lichtenstein, Emma Lieber and Lou Rose. This Symposium took place online on January 16, 2021 from 10:00 am – 12:00 pm PST. The following are the texts as they were given at the Symposium.
Symposium
January 2021
Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan by Sergio Benvenuto
Conversations with Lacan
Sergio Benvenuto
*We are currently working to recover this text.
Questions in Response to Conversations with Lacan
Patricia Gherovici
Opening the book, looking at the title, knowing that the author had been present at Lacan’s seminar and that he had met him personally while a student in Paris, I imagined that Sergio Benvenuto would be one among the many memoirist who distill for posterity the memory of their encounters with the master. But then I realized that this was not at all the format. By conversation we are clo…
Comments on Conversations with Lacan
David Lichtenstein
Sergio’s exposition invites us to consider psychoanalysis in its history. And the invitation is addressed to us on several levels. Not only the history that is described by the arc of Lacan’s teaching and its aftermath, but also the history of the epoch for which psychoanalysis can be taken as a symptom, one we are certainly still a part of even if our symptomatic relevance to that epoc…
The Dilemma of Dialogue in Lacan
Lou Rose
Summary: The author discusses the idea of dialogue in the works of Sergio Benvenuto and Jacques Lacan. As the essay emphasizes, Benvenuto’s writing includes an exploration of the meaning of dialogue both for Lacan in particular and for Lacanian thought in general. Benvenuto indicates how Lacan’s approach to dialogue was reflected both in his mode of teaching and in his theory. Benvenuto…
Conversations with Conversations with Lacan
Emma Lieber
How can a book be a conversation? Or, rather, how can it be multiple conversations? How can these conversations be with someone who can no longer speak? And how can these conversations also be lectures, divided into the unlikely number of seven? Who is giving these lectures, where, and from what position? Or are the conversations themselves the lectures? Who is the proper audience of a …
Playing with Lacan
Fernando Castrillón
What are we here to witness? Yet another introductory text regarding Lacan? A reformulation of Lacan for a North American, English-speaking audience, formalizing his concepts, cohering an abridged and seamless totality that serves to alienate our esteemed theoretical cousins only further? Gladly, I am able to give a firm NO to all these questions, for Benvenuto’s book is one of the few texts in English on Lacan that dares to PLAY with him, to TOY with him, to take him at his word and then to take it further. A foreplaying, if you will.
