Annual Research Lecture 2020

Speaker: Dr Bernard Chervet
Delivered via Zoom
 

Dr Bernard Chervet is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (Société psychanalytique de Paris - SPP) of which he is a former President. He is currently a European Representative on the IPA Board of Representatives and is joint Scientific Secretary of the Congress of French speaking Psychoanalysts ( Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française- CPLF) . His numerous and distinguished publications  cover a wide range of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic topics.

Psychoanalysis has modified the epistemology of science by first introducing the dream and interpretation as detours and tools of research work, then the tendency of the drives to return to a previous state, ultinately to the inorganic and inanimate state (Freud). It is not a question of distorting psychoanalysis so that it adapts to the classic definition of science and the scientist, but of making this definition evolve thanks to the contributions of psychoanalysis.

Searching and re-searching are induced by the experiences of lack which arise from the very nature of the drives, from their regressive tendency to extinction. The psychic work of libidinal co-excitation transforms these experiences into desires.

I miss, I am missing, I feel lack, therefore I search, I re-search and I desire.

These experiences are felt bodily and transposed onto external reality (including the reality of the psyche) which promotes the living apprehension of the body and the world (cf. the birth of the notion of space for Freud) but also the production of theories which provide explanations and causalities for the experiences of lack (cf. phobias and infantile sexual theories of castration).

I am missing becomes I miss something, I desire becomes I desire something.

Any theoretical elaboration therefore has two sides. It is at the same time an advance in the always incomplete field of knowledge and a psychic production whose function is to fulfil a wish for completeness.

With regard to the experiences of lack, any discovery contains a degree of serendipity and involves the body of the researcher. The action of dreaming, in which the life of the unconscious drive, body, language and representations of the external world come into contact, is an essential, often unnoticed, stage in the process of research and discovery. The reality test must follow this detour and include the reality of the dream. It always oscillates between the research for truth and the access to knowledge. It is a “deferred effect”, un après-coup (Nachträglishkeit).

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