Summary:
Psycho-analysis emerged as the science of modern man within the decline of metaphysics, the limitation of philosophy'' claims to immutable knowledge. Established by Plato as speculation upon eternal structures, followed by the subjectification of truth in Christianity, Kant, and Romanticism, philosophy became with Heidegger a knowledge of the event situated within contingency and history. As metaphysical imperiousness fades, psychoanalysis is recognized as an historical project, invoking a new understanding of truth and bringing up questions about friendship, charity, health and salvation.

Summary:
Is there a God of psychoanalysts or shall we accept what we well know that Freud said as the first and last word about the relation of psychoanalysis and religion? If we admit that our patients speak to the analyst as a guarantor of truth, a necessary Someone to whom they address the "oration", a being who is constructed by them, the reality of the Sujet Supposé Savoir is post- and not pre-discursive.
In the analytic practice arises a specifically psychoanalytic God. What would that God be like and how would he manifest himself? What relation would there be between him and the God of revelation, the philosophers' God, the God of Kant and the God denied by Freud? The answer should be sought in Lacan's thought. A Lacan who was always loath to call himself either believer or atheist and who expressed himself in terms that enrich this subject precisely because of the provocation he cast upon the two terms of that polar opposition.
Is God the reason and the cause of the existence of the world or is He an effect of the word that names Him and invokes Him? If the latter formula were true, we would not necessarily be falling outside the field of religion. We would be repeating what was already written in Patmos: "In the beginning was the Word". Lacan: "Before speech, nothing either is or is not [rien n'est ni n'est pas]. Everything is already there, no doubt, but it is only with speech that there are things which are-and things which are not".
To which we would add: The Other as locus of the word is instituted and draught by the sole fact that the subject speaks. In making use of the word, the Other is born as the locus of that word. This doesn't mean that he is actualised as a subject in his otherness: the Other is invoked each time someone speaks" (but there is no Other of the Other, the Other is fatally barred). To put it briefly: the Other does not exist, he is created by the appeal that calls to him. And this is why Lacan can end by saying: "There is a knowledge which is impossible to attribute to a subject who would preside order and harmony. God does not believe in God, which amounts to the same thing as saying: there is unconscious".
The analyst, as such, can say nothing about the existence or not of that which may be called God. He can only rely on what he himself does in a practice that ends in the dismissal of the "supposed subject of knowing".

Summary:
Like Freud, Schönberg purifies his Moses figure by strictly opposing the imaginary und the symbolic. A closer investigation however shows that Moses and Aaron subverts Schönberg's own intentions. This subversion is produced by something which Derrida calls the Òforce of rupture of the scripturalÓ. Seen from this angle, the problematic of Schönberg's work seems to anticipate the very modern question, linked to the horrors of the Nazi period, of how to deal with that which is beyond representation.

Summary:
This paper treats the failure as well as the paradox of representation staged in Schönberg's Moses and Aaron in terms of an extended commentary on the Second Commandment. For example, it shows how God is represented in the opera by the very voice that God makes impossible. In addition, it historically situates a critique of the imaginary father of fascism against both Freud and Schönberg's Moses, with their concern with the insufficiency of the imaginary and with the stuttering occasioned by the "Real," i.e., by an encounter with that which cannot be represented.

Summary:
In this interview, psychoanalyst and JEP co-editor Anthony Molino engages Christopher Bollas in an exploration of the radical turn in his recent literary output. Focusing primarily on his novels Dark at the End of the Tunnel and I Have Heard the Mermaid Singing, Bollas here discusses in detail his move away from the traditional psychoanalytic essay into the realms of fiction (and theatre). Finding the former suitable to "a much more radical form of theorizing" psychoanalysis, Bollas explores both the internal pressures to which he responded in resorting to the genre, as well as contemporary societal pressures and themes which the genre more readily accomodates. Among these are analyses of modern-day Islam's rise and revolt against the West, and of what Bollas sees as the loss of character in our globalised consumer culture: expressions both of the "catastrophe" that engulfs and pervades our culture, the determinants of which remain, for the most part, "unconscious".

Summary:
The author, inspired by movie scenes featuring a woman urinating - scenes that are becoming more and more frequent today - develops a number of considerations connecting a particular type of post-modern aesthetics of transparency ("showing all") with the scientific ideal of objectivity. What he calls "porno-objective distancing" is asserting itself in various art forms and has contributed to modifying the corporeal image of woman, tearing it away from the centuries-old tradition of the sublimed womanly body.

Summary:
In contrast to Freud, for whom the feminine subject is a subject of lack seeking to compensate for deprivation of the phallus, Lacan discovers a
feminine jouissance. Sexual difference, for Lacan, is not determined by anatomy but is fundamentally dissymmetrical, arising from different ways of relating to the phallus and to castration. The feminine subject approaches lack and the Other jouissance from the not-all and handles the semblance of the phallus in relation to the desire of the Other through masquerade or through supporting the position of the object cause of desire.