Scilicet ; a real for the 21st century

The World Association of Psychoanalysis addresses crucial themes pertinent to both psychoanalytical practice and the contemporary environment in which this practice takes place. Since 2006, a publication has served as a point of reference for the preparation of the debate that culminates in the course of its biennial Congress. In this publication more than a hundred brief articles are grouped alphabetically in the manner of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. Written by members of the seven Schools of the WAP, this range of entries opens up a broad yet precise panorama on the theme under examination. True instrument of work, each Scilicet - the title of the series of these volumes - pursues the orientation of Jacques Lacan, who in 1968 created the journal of the Ecole freudienne de Paris, baptising it with this name. This title means: «You may know». If the cover of the publication conceived by Jacques Lacan in 1968 already advertised that within its pages «You may know what the Ecole freudienne de Paris thinks», then the volumes of Scilicet edited by the WAP could say «You may know what the World Association of Psychoanalysis thinks about the burning issues of psychoanalysis». This is what is at stake in each one of these volumes, the most recent of which the reader now holds in his or her hands. Presentation This volume takes up in a way that is multiple, diverse and singular - just like each one of the authors of these articles - an urgent question: How to conceive the psychoanalytic practice of our times, that of the 21st century, in a way that faces up to not only the profound crisis of symbolic co-ordinates that we are experiencing but also the growing agitation and disorder of the real? The present volume also introduces a substantial difference in relation to the preceding series. For the first time, Scilicet is also being issued in the English language. In this way, the diverse approaches to the theme of A Real for the 21st Century that you will find in these pages is now within the reach of those English readers eager to know about the transformations of our epoch and the responses that psychoanalysis of the Lacanian orientation is elaborating in order to confront them. This English edition entails a new wager for the WAP: to make known, beyond the frontiers of the Latin languages, the scope of a psychoanalytical practice that makes the real the guide of its action, as it responds to the changes imposed by our new century. As always, each one of us, as readers, will ultimately decide whether what is written in these pages resonates sufficiently for us and serves as a novel compass to orient us in our changing world. Leonardo Gorostiza. President of the WAP.