This issue of Sitegeist is dedicated, with a mixture of sadness, gratitude and admiration, to the memory of our friend and colleague Kirsty Hall, who died in May of 2015. Kirsty once mentioned that the word ‘bereavement’ derives from the reevers, medieval raiders who terrorized her native Northumberland. Her death has robbed us of a hugely energetic, creative and generous presence amongst us. Sitegeist itself would not exist without Kirsty's initiative, for it was she along with Philip Derbyshire who inaugurated it in 2008 as the house journal of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. That first issue is downloadable from The Site's website. She piloted Sitegeist through to her retirement in 2014, and continued to take a close interest even after that. Discussing in The Site how to remember her best, we decided on making this 12th issue of Sitegeist one dedicated to her memory, and to seek contributions from friends and colleagues.
Then came the question of what theme to choose? An issue on the topic of anxiety was originally mooted to co-incide with the publication in 2014 of the English translation of Lacan's Seminar X on anxiety. Kirsty had planned to write a paper for the issue. She had a long-standing research interest in fantasy and anxiety, and her book The Stuff of Dreams is subtitled ‘Fantasy, Anxiety and Psychoanalysis’ (Hall, 2007). What proved to be her last illness prevented her from completing a paper. So it seemed right that our deferred plans be reshaped into the edition published here. The contributors to this issue are all colleagues of Kirsty's, and their immediate response to the invitation to submit a paper speaks in itself of the esteem in which she was held.
Lacan, so often criticized for being obscure, sets out on the very first page of Seminar X and in the clearest terms, two of his most important theses for the seminar: that anxiety has a structure (a vital notion to anyone who has experienced being lost in and overwhelmed by anxiety) and that the structure is identical to that of the fantasy. Thus, a complex interplay of anxiety, fantasy and desire is evoked by Lacan throughout the
Seminar, showing us the hair's breadth that separates the framed object of our worst anxieties, and the object of our heart's desire.
Dany Nobus focuses in his comprehensive and eloquent paper on the concepts of acting out and passage a l'acte, to which Lacan devotes a central chapter of the Seminar. Nobus carefully traces through the Freudian roots of the concept and differentiates Lacan's various positions on the term at different stages of his work. He shows how Lacan came to explore most fully in Seminar X the place of acting out and passage a l'acte by formulating a table which relates the terms to inhibition, symptom and anxiety. He concludes his paper with thoughts on the necessity of passage a l'acte for the ending of analysis. Both acting out and passage a l'acte are usually seen negatively. Following Lacan, Nobus shows how passage a l'acte, which Lacan describes as an impulse of the subject's which results in a movement causing her to rush forward and ‘topple (s) off the stage (of history)’ (Lacan 1962-3 p1150), is, in other words, to put an end to the scene in which she has become engaged. He extrapolates the way in which this same impulse is in line with our final act as analysand in putting an end to a relationship with our analyst. As we will see, the destiny of anxiety in analysis and the end of analysis is a theme common to all our papers.
Werner Prall quotes Freud's comment in his Introductory Lectures, that anxiety is ‘a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence’ (Freud 1916-17 p393). This is a statement which Lacan echoes in introducing his own seminar on anxiety, when he opines that in the concept, all his former disquisitions meet. Yet in spite of this conviction of the central importance of anxiety, both Freud and Lacan wrestled with the concept throughout their development. Anxiety's ungraspable quality is effectively conveyed by Prall in his account of Kafka. Deftly weaving considerations of the life and work of Kafka, Prall makes important points about the functioning of anxiety in psychic life. For example, he shows how the intensity of anxious terror to escape the deep blue sea spurs Kafka's dream swimmer on to become a champion. The person with the greatest terror is the one most
desperate to get back to land, and the one who wins the race. Anxiety and the drive to master it are inextricably entwined. Prall thereby describes how Kafka can come to recognise that for all its painfulness, his anxiety may contain the best of him.
Mastery is a key theme in Paul Verhaeghe's paper too. In a paper full of invaluable pointers to a fuller understanding of our own position as analysts, Verhaeghe offers an analysis of the role of anxiety in transference for both Freud and Lacan. He characterises it as a dance of both parties around the necessary structural lack that is the failure of the paternal metaphor. Of course, the hopeful aspect of this disillusion is that it has within it the possibility of fluidity and change, in ex-change for the fixity and comfort of paternal authority. Contrasting his anxiety with a new analysand in the early days of his career, and the anxiety he feels today in a similar clinical situation, he derives his contemporary anxiety from an awareness of societal changes. Whereas his early anxieties were in the same register and location as those of the analysand—a neurotic anxiety, caught up in the transference matrix—nowadays, he contends, he experiences an anxiety based in the Symbolic. Such anxiety is correlative with the impossibility of our profession itself: the impossibility of embodying the paternal knowledge for a while without being duped by it, or without the analysand being duped by it. This new or sharpened awareness he locates in the overthrow and downfall of patriarchy and its replacement by a posited Big Brother horizontal authority. The ability of psychoanalysis to reshape itself continually has been often remarked. Verhaeghe's paper challenges us again to think how we conceive of our profession in this time of toppling certainties and concomitant clamouring anxieties which might threaten to overwhelm.
Reflecting on anxiety has evidently led our contributors into profound structural and existential questions about the very nature of psychoanalysis and our own humanity, both analyst and analysand. Haya Oakley, in The Site tradition of forging a dialogue between psychoanalysis and philosophy, looks to Heidegger's concept of Being-Towards-Death and the resultant anxiety which, according to him, is the only authentic response. She explores the way in which this kind of anxiety may be
manifest in the consulting room in the presentations of a hysteric, an obsessional and a psychotic subject. Outwardly so different, here her paper and that of Paul Verhaeghe closely resemble one another in delineating this dance around the void. They also share an analysis of the nature and function of psychoanalysis itself. Oakley asks probing questions about the purpose of analysis. Casting doubt on an easy conclusion that the analyst can assume authenticity by simple self-disclosure, as is sometimes set out in relational schools of psychoanalysis, she advocates a much more radical and complex agenda. In truth, both parties share a common humanity, but we do a disservice to our analysands if we locate ourselves too much in that place of similarity and commonality. Down that road lies interminable analysis. Oakley does not offer definitive answers, as befits her methodology of course! But she does offer a schema of what such an engagement looks like.
It seems fitting that in an issue compiled in memory of the whole life and work of someone who was a psychoanalyst along with many other things, and one who always herself raised questions about the operation of analysis, we should be brought into this territory. Kirsty's life and activities touched the lives of so many and on so many different levels. She leaves a legacy that will be an enduring one, but most importantly in the projects she started and left for us to continue.