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Title: Lost and found: the image in the drive

Speaker: Peter Freund is a media artist and curator based in the San Francisco Bay Area

(USA). He is Associate Professor of Art Practice & Theory at Saint Mary's College of California.

Freund edited and contributed to Trauma Desire Otherness (Hong Kong Society of

Psychoanalysis, 2013), which came out of the 2012 Cartel Encounter.

Summary: You cant step in the same river twice. So said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. For

psychoanalysis, the predicament is trickier: you can't step in the same river even once. Why?

When you approach to dip your toe in the water, you catch a halting glimpse of your own image.

The psychoanalytic tale of the so-called "mirror stage" dramatizes the image as neither

decorative nor communicative medium but as symptomatic cause of the ideal ego. In the

movement from ideal-ego to ego-ideal, the image becomes fundamentally tied in a knot with

words. We find this knot everywhere in culture today. Typically, with the aid of words, the

image functions as a defense against its own beyond. The image-word nexus in art, however,

may offer a special occasion for activating the unconscious as the core of our subjectivity.

Title: Acting for a reason, unconsciously

Speaker: YAN Lap-Tak, Registered Social Worker

Summary: The Unconscious is structured like a language. The logic of this language also

prescribes how one chooses to act. However, I shall argue that the nature of this inference for

action is a matter of articulation rather than of deduction.

Title: From the talking cure to the listening cure

Speaker: Diego Busiol is a practicing psychoanalyst in Hong Kong

Summary: In 1895, before the term psychoanalysis was adopted, the verbal therapy offered by

Freud was described as talking cure, or chimney sweeping. It was noticed that the very act of

talking could alleviate the symptoms by discharging the energy repressed. However, Freud soon

realized that the cathartic effect of talking was temporary, if not matched with an

adequate listening. Indeed, I propose that the birth of psychoanalysis has been possible

because of this shift from talking to listening. Listening is probably the term that best sums up

and captures the essence of psychoanalysis, and this different emphasis on listening rather than

talking is likely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from all other (more recent, but pre-

psychoanalytic) therapeutic approaches. But then: what listening? How to listen to the

unconscious?

Title: The Common Usage of Freuds Terms

Speaker: Leung Tsz Kin is a student of Psychology in the University of Salford, member of Hong

Kong Society of Psychoanalysis since 2012. He joined a cartel on Lacans Four Fundamental

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Concepts in Psychoanalysisinitiated by Diego Busiol and a weekly study group on Freuds

Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis moderated by Yan Lap Tak in 2012. His interest is how

Lacan sees human being psychoanalytically.

Summary: Hong Kong is not the birthplace of psychoanalysis. Hong Kongs language and life

style are hybrids resulted from western knowledge adapted through education. Local Chinesewho use terms and language, typically the way how Americans talk, that many of them are

originated from psychoanalytic theories. However, how much people are well aware of the

meaning of those usages of the technical terms, which are not developed in the context of

Chinese culture.

Title: Psychotic Discourse in time of Post-Ideologies

Speaker: Cyril Su is a founding member of the Hong Kong Society of Psychoanalysis and Lacan

Society in Hong Kong since 2007. He is a psychoanalyst in private practice in both Hong Kong

and China. In 2013, he starts the first Lacanian Cartel in Ningbo, China where he leads a weekly

lecture. In June 2013, Cyril talked in TEDxMoonlake conference about 3.0 Age and

Psychoanalysis. He also works with a German toymaker in developing educational toy.

Summary:

Language circumcises. It ritualizes the symbolic with a cut into the Real of patriarchal law.

Psychotic discourse encounters this cut as a foreclosure that the name of the Father is erased

before it authorizes the Oedipal drama. Psychotic discourse conforms to dissemination,

reflective ratification and symptomatic return to the cut. This is especially understood as a

symptom of the Post-Ideologies, a time when Master Signifier aka the Name of the Father is no

longer valid.