These family words, which sometimes speak to us and traverse us, and sometimes represent us on the stage of the world, fracture and decompose over the course of an analysis. They then take on an enigmatic resonance which makes them foreign to our own ears. Familiar par excellence, they become other: they reveal a zone of impact where we find ourselves pinned to an unexpected place: slaves to a tyrannical iteration, which, although familiar, stuns us when it reveals the strange satisfaction we derive from it.
The clinic that emerged during the last Journées of the ECF [1], showed the extent to which this other event of speech [2], the striking phrase, also stems from the intimate, which is “as a generally speaking, familial [3]”. At this precise point of percussion with the family language, something is woven that traces nothing less than the subject’s destiny [4]. The texts you will read here approach this crossroads, which will be the focus of the PIPOL 12 Congress.
In the case of Vanessa Springora, the secret that unknowingly unites [5] the family casts a new light on the father’s mad jouissance. The writer dares to pull a logical thread, through which she can finally read the consequences of the falsification of the Name-of-the-Father across three generations, and in doing so, initiate a work of subjectivizing the secret and the point of horror it conceals. For those in the position of analysand, the delicate approach to family secrets must give way to a livable appropriation of the opaque object revealed – and in the best of cases, turn this gain of knowledge into support.
A point of support is also what we, as psychoanalysts, address how families are today disrupted by the omnipresence of connected gadgets. A step to the side is necessary here, where we might otherwise be tempted to feed the complaints of specialists about the damage caused by an all-seeing world. Rather than policies of all out deprivation, psychoanalysis offers here a politics of the sinthome: what support, what ties through speech, can allow for what is invented and woven in these new spaces to find a chance of inscription in the place of the Other – and can occasionally function as a lever?
[1] 54e Journées de L’École de la Cause Freudienne, “Phases marquantes”, 15 et16 novembre 2025.
[2] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “Phrases marquantes en psychanalyse”, LWT, novembre 2024.
[3] Ibid. [Our translation].
[4] Ibid.
[5] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, trans. F.-C. Baitinger and A. Khan, The Lacanian Review, No. 4, 2018.
Translation: Polina Agapaki
Proofreading: Susan McFeely
