Itxaso Muro Usobiaga – Chief! What do we do with what doesn’t fit?

That which the scientific method cannot measure, is irrelevant, or does not exist. “What we cannot measure, we cannot work with,” said a professor of behavioural psychology when I asked her what she was doing with what repeatedly returns. But in the same classroom I learned that correlation is not the same as causality, a common confusion in many studies that have scientific pretensions and claim to have found a panacea. Our job as analysts is to go fishing, with the patience of a line angler, for what escapes the nets of the scientific method, and neuroscience today. That which is lodged beyond the pleasure principle, and does not correspond to any organic constituent, that which cannot be explained by a substance.

The authors within this Newsletter remind us of some of these catches: gaming addiction, the mistakes that give a breath of fresh air to existence, free will as alien to machines, the transference, the object a, jouissance, the unconscious as a void, impossible to locate in the body. Very many manifestations of the life of the parlêtre… and Roca recalls what Hegel had written, “the observation of the Central Nervous System as a concrete support of the organic aspect of the consciousness of the self, of the Cartesian res cogitans, is nothing but the observation of a cadaver, of a being devoid of life, because the Central Nervous System is not the presence of self-consciousness.”

Happy reading!

Translation by Raphael Montague