More than twenty-five years ago, Charles Melman published a short essay that probably went unnoticed by most. He went back to it three years later in L’homme sans gravité. Briefly, he evoked the notion of progress and noted our joy in the face of increasingly rapid technological and even social advances. This dizzying jouissance did not address – this was the warning in his text – a fundamental question: we are moving even more rapidly, but… do we know where are we heading? Our train is the Progress Express!
In his challenging query, we can recognize the enactment of the analytic discourse. Instead of emphasizing the adverb “rapidly” (remember that Lacan invited us to be wary of an adverb because it lies[1], he would say), Melman reverses the emphasis to the subject who drives.
Today, are we able to say where we are heading? Inebriated with the immediacy of our messages, of information, and of our screens, are we able to remember the essential? How to drive? This question is at the core of our work, since we invite our patients to consider the category of the real and to assume the consequences of an act, even if it presents itself as a “missing out” – Lacan reminds us of this in the seminar we are studying this year.
As we do in our psychoanalytical treatments, we must wonder about the trajectory of social mutations, or that of our group. We can enjoy the journey or let our work transference be a driving force and share with others our experience and research, considering, as we always do, our different geographical or linguistic contexts.
We will measure any possible progress in our discipline, not by the number of participants or the powerful technical means brought into play, but by the lessons we will draw – even in 2025, and for current problematics – from the inexhaustible work of Freud and Lacan, enlightened, as far as we are concerned, by the teaching of Melman. This is the train we do not want to miss.
Omar Guerrero
Vice President ALI
Translated by Lorena Strunk
[1] The adverb in the original text is rapidement which ends in “-ment”, to lie in French.
