Traumatic dissociation | Benoît Le Bouteiller

Traumatic dissociation: a topological reading of an effraction With Benoît Le Bouteiller (France/Brazil)

Traumatic dissociation: a topological reading of an effraction

with Benoît Le Bouteiller (France/Brazil)

Trauma confronts clinical practice with one of its major trials: dissociation. Whether it manifests spectacularly or through infinitely discreet signs, it marks a profound modification of the subjective structure. How can we think about these phenomena beyond the usual metaphors of fragmentation or splitting? How can our listening echo logics that do not simply pertain to meaning or narrative?

This conference proposes to deploy an innovative working hypothesis: approaching traumatic dissociation through the tool of topology. Drawing on a modeling that thinks in terms of spaces, surfaces, cuts, and continuities, we will seek to renew our understanding of subjective experience in the face of traumatic effraction.

Through clinical examples from his practice, Benoît Le Bouteiller will present his research on how topology offers unprecedented benchmarks for the analyst’s intervention.

The conference will revolve around three major axes:

• Understanding the subject’s trial: How does topology allow for the formalization of the structure of the dissociative experience? In what way does it help us grasp the logic of anxieties, repetitions, or “absences” without crushing the irreducible singularity of the one who suffers?
• Guiding the analyst’s practice: How can the analytical gesture operate? We will explore how a topological reading guides the direction of the treatment, beyond mere interpretation, to allow the subject to invent new modes of knotting and circulation.
• Clinical and ethical stakes: Being oriented by topology engages the analyst’s responsibility. It will be a matter of questioning the ethics underlying this practice: how to accompany the patient without imposing a norm of “repair”? How to support the emergence of subjective creativity where trauma seemed to have frozen and ravaged everything?

This double conference session is intended for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, psychopathology, and contemporary approaches to trauma, whether they are clinicians, researchers, or students.

Speaker

Benoît Le Bouteiller is a psychoanalyst and researcher. His work focuses on the articulation between Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis, topology, and the clinical and ethical stakes of contemporary practice.