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The chair, Dr Raquel Goldstein, opened the panel by commenting very briefly on its purpose, ‘to widen the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis along its edges’, this endeavour being imperative due to the concerns emerging from praxis.
Myrta Casas, the first speaker, presented her paper, ‘Discourse and the psychoanalytic method’, based on both semiotic and pragmatic views. The author's proposal, synthesised in Benveniste's epigraph, clearly illustrated her ideas: discourse should be considered simultaneously as a message and a tool for action. Analytic transference is the element that enables the actualisation of the object both in the structuring and in the symptomatic aspects of subjective organisation. It is in the analyst's speech, she said, bearing all the properties inherent to discourse (word, gesture, intonation, syntax and silence) that the dimension of the object may be inferred, by causing it to get closer through the act of speaking.
Though Casas acknowledged the roots of discourse in various disciplines, psychoanalysis paves its own way, where the symbol acquires an entirely new connotation regarding the divided subject and the unconscious wish. From Casas's perspective, discourse, inhabited by the (unconscious) subject, is defined as a token of intertexruality where the dialogic vicissitudes develop an essentially dynamic and productive profile.
In her presentation, Casas articulated different theoretical lines of thought: Winnicott's ideas on the (unconscious) subject's need to create and lose the (transitional) object; together with Lacan's conceptualisation of the role of the Other and the three elements in Peirce's model (body—sensation and perception; object and interpretant). The subject gradually creates (is created as) an interpretant, while the icon and the index display the circulation of wish. She emphasised that in this interplay, ‘the presence of the wish in the Other is essential to materialise the work of the drive in its circulation (a