Tables

Jean Christian Delay (Dinamarch)

Closing

Well, I really think that several of you have said what I have in mind, but I will say it with my own words. I think there have been some very intense moments and probably the lecture which took place yesterday - and everything that happened afterwards - was the strongest moment of this Meeting. And I would like to say a few words about that, because I appreciated very much the choices of the people that were called in and also the fact that they came from outside of Psychoanalysis, and worked in their own way to deal with some of the most serious and difficult problems that we have in the world today, to make it possible for us to think about something that came from outside of our own field. And afterwards, I wished to speak with a number of my colleagues who were all shocked and practically terrified. In a way, they would have preferred that he had not spoken. This last point worries me a great deal, because I think what is characteristic about this Meeting - what is very unusual - is precisely the fact of trying to do analytical work being confronted with something intense, living, that we invite among us; also being provoked on the order of something terrible – a discourse that does not fit with…., but that we can still criticize, and I think that’s the important thing. I think that reducing that kind of thing to silence is dangerous for us, and we will close ourselves to the world outside of us. And, we need to also – sometimes – suffer …listening and then work it through. Not in a passive way, of course, but to continue - a way to do it perhaps, would have been to have chosen one or two colleagues who had read his works, who had created a field that was maybe less dual in that situation, yesterday. An idea connected to this is that, even if we are talking about the Death Drive, we have to remember how much Freud stressed, again and again – this has been said here before - that we can’t escape it and life is dependent on it. So, the connection has to be made. If we exclude the dimension of death we are alienating life. So, we have to insist on that. I want to thank you very much for this occasion and all the intellectual and emotional reactions that it has provoked, which are essential for us, and this is what makes this Meeting so different from so many other Psychoanalysis meetings. Thank you very much.