Integrator /Juan Carlos Volnovich /E.G.P.

My deepest gratitude goes to René Major and the French Preparatory Committee. I am doubly indebted to you. First, for your kindness in asking me to participate as an integrator of text of the works dedicated to psychoanalytic institutions. Secondly, because with this invitation, you have spared me the displeasure of attending in my beloved Buenos Aires, the meeting among the most decadent representatives of the International Psychoanalytic Association with Jaques Alain Miller. For this last, above all, many thanks!
Psychoanalysis deserves a better fate than has been afforded it to date by the institutions entrusted with administering the Freudian heritage and the Lacanian heritage. I have set forth here the common denominator of the works I have had the opportunity to read. The denunciation of the malaise produced by the organizations entrusted with giving expression in reality to the institution of psycho-analysis, the difficulties for the production of knowledge, for the transmission of theory and the formation of agents, the obstacles which impede imagining of new ways to wield power, these subjects run through nearly all the works presented. Thus, the discourses enunciated in the twenty-five works which circulated through the Internet are unfurled in the broad spectrum of ideological denunciation. Some, only some of them hold organiza-tional proposals. All appeal to the potentially institutive, transformative and innova-tive to face up to the most reactionary and entrenched of our discipline.
Two questions challenge us: Can psychoanalysis live outside the institutions? Can psychoanalysis live (if we define "to live" as "to produce knowledge") within the institutions?
Perhaps, in a first approximation, the answer lies in recognizing that psychoanalysis needs the institutions in order to live outside them or, perhaps, to live in the gaps, cracks, interstices which the institutions offer. Put in another way: the best of psycho-analysis has been done against psychoanalysis, that is to say, against the psychoanalytic "establishment". Because psychoanalysis is a very particular type of understanding: it fails when it triumphs and becomes institutionalized. When it fails, that is, when it eludes institutionalization, it triumphs. And this is because psychoanalysis is a discipline which is always in a struggle with itself. What we are dealing with is an ambiguous, a paradoxical understanding, since it tries to affirm itself at the cost of its very evanescence. It avoids consecration and recognition because it knows the risk entailed: adaptative capture.
Expressed in those terms, then, the question is not to attempt to ascertain what we psychoanalysts have to do with the institutions, but rather to learn what it is that the institutions are doing with us, since they are evidently not making us psychoanalysts. We are not being psychoanalysts; what we are doing, in actual fact, is instituting psychoanaly-sis. We are instituting psychoanalysis when we construct and reconstruct knowledge. We are instituting psychoanalysis when we take back the power we have delegated to others. When we ask ourselves where is the power; who is making the decisions that affect all of us; as a function of what interests and responding to which imperatives. When we ask ourselves what is our relationship with the power, of what power have we been stripped, what power do we wield, how do we wield it, against whom; that is when we are instituting psychoanalysis. We are also instituting psychoanalysis when we reflect upon our position vis-a-vis that anonymous and diffuse logic of the Money General Equivalent. When we ask ourselves how we operate with interest, income, profit and earnings, and when we clarify our position vis-a-vis the social class differences and the patriarchal order, we are instituting psychoanalysis.
We have never been more ignorant than we are now of the way our institutions penetrate us and determine us. Never before has our implication and our superimplication with psychoanalysis (even that characterized by apathy and disenchantment) reached these limits and never before has the analysis of this implication been more hidden and sup-pressed. Analysis of our avoidance of, and of our adhesion to theories, to the masters and to the organizations. Analysis of our "neutrality" and of our "commitment"; of our participation and of our indifferences; of our investitures and our disaffections. Perhaps never so much as today has it been more evident how the institutions (contexts which include us and texts which, in penetrating us, constitute us) are distorting that conceptual mosaic which we call psychoanalysis.
At best, it is too much to ask that the psychoanalytic organizations (by the mere fact of being psychoanalytical) should construct a set of ethics, a policy and an administrative method different from that which sustains society as a whole.
Psychoanalysis as an imaginary institution of society, its organizations and its agents, inevitably operate wedded to the logic of Integrated Planetary Capitalism. An evil which weighs upon us, it collaborates in perpetuating an order of submission, injustice and exclusion. However, each association, each school, each group, each individual sustains within itself, the antagon-istic force which announces and augurs the emergence of productive desire. This instituting, predominantly transforming force which the Estates General proclaim, is not original to our times, nor is it our creation. It goes back to the Freudian scandal of the turn of the century, to the appearance of Lacan, to Freudomarxism, to Confrontation.
For the Argentine psychoanalysts it was the establishment, in 1943, of the Psychoanalytical Association, with Marie Langer (a woman!) at its head. It was Pichon-Riviére bringing psychoanalysis to the mental asylum in 1949. It was the opening of the Lanús Polyclinic's Psychopathology Service (a psychoanalytical service in a general hospital) in 1956. It was Plataforma in 1971, it was psychoanalysis in exile and it was the help groups for the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

As you can see, in the history of Argentine institutive psychoanal-ysis, defeats have been more numerous than victories. But the force of this movement survives in our painful awareness of having been beaten, and it is not a part of the story that the victors of institutionalized psychoanalysis are writing every day to convert doctrine into dogma and the institution into a church.

We instituting psychoanalysts have survived the defeats, but our awareness of having been defeated is that of those who struggle here and now and everywhere, against totalitarian power and

knowledge, by respecting differences, by not renouncing unity, the strength which union gives.
In truth, there is no institutive psychoanalysis. There are, perchance, ephemeral experiences, brilliant, polysemous rays, events which erratically, and at strange times, shoot across the congealed pattern of that which has been institutionalized. There are, perchance, air shafts that rebel against putting up with the asphyxia that the capsule of things institutionalized produces.
However much it may be proclaimed, there is no such thing as the "end of the story", and psychoanalysis is not on the brink of disappearance, Accordingly, there is no final victory. Nor past defeats, because for many of us, to win is precisely this: to attempt that which we desire one more time.
The Estates General, this event which brings us together today, is the footprint to guide our steps forward to attempt, to desire one more time.
The Estates General. This type of experiences appear at certain times in history. Redoubled efforts are called for at those turbulent times when the critique of things institutionalized tends to become generalized. When the conditions in institutions become intolera-ble. When being fenced in will be countenanced no more. When indiscrimination and cannibalism join forces with a certain fundamentalism to drain production and suppress creativity.
Today, the Estates General are our active utopia: a desire for the possible which is built upon the overthrow of the existing.
Perhaps we institutive psychoanalysts are no better than the instituted psychoanalysts who declare themselves the absolute masters of psychoanalysis. Perhaps our originality lies in the fact of knowing that at each step we are moving along a road we have no wish to travel, we are casting our lot for something drastically new. That "something new" which is only born of a happy encounter and which changes society and produces mutations in subjectiv-ity. When we achieve transforming effects in the instituted order, we are instituting. We are instituting thanks to all we know of psychoanalysis. Thanks to all we know and despite all we know. By this I mean: despite the limitations with which psychoanalysis itself, bureaucracy and dogma, seek to neutralize us, in order to perpetuate the instituted order.
Neither, I suspect, is any person too much different from the society which generates him. Authoritarianism, the tendency toward sectarianism, inefficiency, irresponsibility in the presence of the suffering of others, these evils which characterize the bourgeois individualism, are also reflected in us. We institutive psychoana-lysts who want change or who, at least, refuse to be accomplices in the jubilation with which the transnationals of psychoanalysis attempt to foreclose on the issue, have not been vaccinated against the ideology of oppression. Perhaps our health consists of knowing that we are ill, not much less ill than the institutions which created us and which we wished to help dismantle. Perhaps our health consists of an unlimited reliance on the innovative and subversive power which fires this unfortunate world.