Orientation,

Institution, & Destitution

By Rafael Cohen

The siphonophore is an order of aquatic invertebrate animals related to sea anemones, coral, and jellyfish. The most famous example of this order is the Portuguese Man O’ War. Part of what makes these creatures unique is the degree to which they fail to respond to traditional categories of individual versus group. The siphonophore is considered a colonial animal made up of many highly specialized so-called “zooids” performing diverse functions such as locomotion, reproduction, feeding, digestion, and defense. They reproduce through a combination of sexual and asexual means: there is an initial sexual reproduction between two colonies which results in a genetically unique larva, which then reproduces itself asexually. The resulting zooids are sometimes categorized as sub-individuals. The literature in this area resorts to complexly qualified definitions of individuality, including developmental individuality and genetic individuality. Zooids are genetically identical to the initial larva and so they are not seen as genetically individual, but they are seen as developmentally individual, but only up to a point. They maintain their division of labor and function together as a larger unit and they cannot survive alone, and yet they are significantly more autonomous than limbs. They simply defy the distinction between organism and organ.

The School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field is defined in part by its lack of legal status, just as the Siphonophore is defined in part by its lack of status as an individual. The activities of the School are carried out by the forums just as the activities of the Siphonophore are carried out by the zooids, whose common genetic identity is analogous to the shared experience of having received a transmission of psychoanalysis resulting in the ignition of the desire of the analyst. Determining whether or not the SPFLF (EPFCL) is achieving the status it proposes for itself is beyond the scope of my work today, but it remains a productive example. 

My question in the cartel on “The Analyst in the Institution” is: “What must fall in order for an institution to accommodate psychoanalysis?” The answer is obvious in a preliminary sense: the orientation to the ego and the imaginary must fall, and an orientation to the symbolic, the real, and the unconscious must arise, but it requires significant elaboration. From 1920 to 1922 the Berlin Polyklinik began working to carry out Freud’s wish of providing psychoanalytic treatment to those who could not otherwise afford it. In 1922 it was renamed the Berlin Psychoanlaytic Institute partly in order to reflect a growing investment in training new analysts, and this appears to be the first instance of a psychoanalytic institute. Etymologically, the word institute is linked to both governing and teaching, two of the professions Freud would later deem impossible (Analysis Terminable & Interminable, 1937). When theory and practice are institutionalized, in the sense of becoming a habit, norm, or standard, then they become rote, brittle, and obsolete. The institution itself is therefore, by a certain definition, already fundamentally incompatible with psychoanalysis, insofar as it requires constant reinvention. The work of our cartel has focused in part on the possibility of fulfilling an analytic function within an institution that does not aim to sustain any consistent relation to the unconscious. This is certainly an option but it is one that assumes significant barriers to a process that is already impossible enough. Another aspect of the work of the cartel has been to envision the possibility of an institution that could call itself psychoanalytic. My initial proposal is that an institution might be able to accommodate psychoanalysis, and to orient itself to the unconscious only if it has been through a certain progression of stages and reached a state of destitution, equivalent to acknowledging the impossibility of its own aims. I suggest three stages, or moments, partially in relation to Lacan’s three moments of logical time: an initial moment of orientation, followed by a moment of disorientation, and then a third moment of establishing a new orientation that is built on the foundation of loss.

The specific nature of the initial orientation stage is less important than its subsequent fall. To use the discourse of anglophone capitalism, the “mission, vision, & values” act as a form of identification that fails, regardless of whether it is primarily Imaginary or Symbolic. It becomes destabilized and continued function requires a process of working through. The moment of disorientation is marked by the collapse of habitual distinctions and categories, similar to the descriptions of the Siphonophore which, due to biological complications, are accompanied by the sudden multiplication of sub-categories and increasingly abstract qualifiers. Attempting to integrate incompatible data into existing theory is inevitably a process of loss. In order to begin to make use of new concepts and perspectives points of orientation must sometimes be dropped. Using familiar landmarks to orient oneself works well enough in familiar neighborhoods but when it comes time to explore further afield, in areas where documentation is lacking, or impossible, then creativity becomes necessary. Adam Kucharski (2025) writes: “as late as 1758, one English mathematician argued that negative numbers ‘darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple’.” Whether mathematician, biologist, analyst, or analysand, one is forced to question reified knowledge when confronted by the real. Likewise, Freud’s three “major blows” (Introductory Lectures, 1917) to “the naïve self-love of men” (Copernicus, Darwin, and the Unconscious) result in the decentering of the ego and the fall of imaginary mastery. The name that Lacan offered for the concept of “subjective destitution” illustrates the pain that accompanies the “making dark” of previously held convictions.

Subjective destitution is, in part, a fall to specificity, a traversal from the universal to the particular. When the desire of the analyst is transmitted (and when the zooid takes on a specific function) difference is centered. The fantasy of universality is lost, and this marks destitution as a cousin of castration. The IF-SPFLF website states that: “The necessity for a School - as distinct from the multiple groups and associations - rests on the aporia of the analytic act itself.” An identity defined by the absence of a stable identity can result from this process of working through and reorientation, and this identity can function on a level wider than that of the individual. It would necessarily be an identity with an affinity for the unconscious and a disaffinity for the ego. Wilfred Bion wrote the following in response to a criticism that pointed to contradictions between his older and his newer ideas: “I think the expressions he rightly quotes from [my previous work] are wrongly framed, but wrong though the formulations now seem to me to be, they were good enough to lead me to my present formulations which I think are better.” In place of symptomatic fixity psychoanalysis offers the possibility of dynamic reorientation. We prioritize movement over stillness, flexibility over rigidity, difference over uniformity, and evolution over repetition.

On the level of the institution, these priorities inevitably impact the question of membership. The only way to approach this issue while sustaining a psychoanalytic orientation is to embrace the concept of extimacy. When it becomes clear that the categories of internal and external are paradoxically intertwined, then the attempt to micro-manage membership is revealed as nothing more than voyeuristic gatekeeping. Topology offers an alternative: the Klein Bottle, whose inner surface is continuous with its outer surface. Just as the Lacanian Field cultivates work both in intension (school) and in extension (forums), those who engage in that work could be seen as being both inside and outside of an institution. In order to accommodate psychoanalysis this hypothetical institution would need to function in accord with the structure of the Klein Bottle insofar as it acknowledges the futility of oversimplified mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Any attempt to determine fitness for membership must be structured around the aporia inherent in transmission. There is no way to know beforehand, and this is the point Freud makes when referring to Aesop’s fable, and describing his response to the patient who demands to know how long the treatment will take with, simply, an invitation to begin the treatment (“Walk!”). This is a clinical guidepost useful outside the clinic. An institution might, at a certain stage of its existence, decline to make spurious or pedantic distinctions between members and non-members and instead simply extend an invitation (or even a dare) to work and then see what happens. 

This is the paradoxical establishment of identity as an absence of identity. Anything else begins to look a lot like zealotry. An institution that could call itself psychoanalytic would then require an attitude of apostasy, or at least the relevant agility. If an institution is willing to consider, without panic, the possibility of dissolution, then it has taken a step towards ridding itself of zealotry, and towards accommodating psychoanalysis. Chuck Jones, the animator behind the Road Runner cartoons, once described Wile E. Coyote as a fanatic, quoting George Santayana’s definition: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” The coyote is the epitome of masochistic repetition, implementing uncreative and pre-packaged methods. He attempts to address dynamic problems with static solutions, disavowing castration and refusing the fall required for destitution as he walks further and further out into empty space... held up by nothing but thin air, and bound to crash the moment he looks down. The difference is that where psychoanalysis has done its work we can look down and see that we’re walking on thin air, we can say our work is a scam, or impossible, but as Lacan says in Seminar 24 “C’est une escroquerie qui tombe juste” which means that it is a swindle that “hits the mark” or, a little more literally: FALLS TRUE.