“What exactly is a speaking body? What makes a body human is indeed that it is a speaking body. The term “speaking” here is not an adjective that would complete a predefined noun, the body, by adding to it the act of speaking. The common error made by psychology is to think that speech is a cognitive function of the body, an acquired behaviour, although it is supported in an innate way within a profound structure of the organism. This is not the case. Neither speech nor language is reducible to cognitive functions, since these functions, considered as organic functions, depend on the already a priori relation of the subject to the signifier, to the structure of language, which precedes him as body and as being that speaks. Hence, a language is not learned, it is transmitted by the experience of jouissance which touches the body of the image.

“Speaking” functions also in the expression “the speaking body” as an active participle or present participle, equivalent in some cases to the gerund. This doesn’t mean that a being exists there a priori, to which the property of speaking is added. It means that this being, as Lacan points out several times, is a being only to the extent that he speaks. In the same way, we must also point out that this being is only able to have a body insofar as he speaks, insofar as he is speaking or spoken.”

Miquel Bassols

The psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis welcome one by one living bodies, hurt by the bewilderment or the debility forced by the discourses in which they are immersed. In this volume, which borrows its form from the dictionary, they decant their experience in order to make the speaking body resonate: Anatomy, Androgyny, Cosmetics, Exhibition, Lacanian Unconscious, Jouissance, Obesity, Ill-treatments, Pornography, Segregation, Selfies….

Psychoanalysis tends to make possible for each, according to one’s singularity, the invention of an alliance between one’s body and the resources of speech against the worst.

Eve Miller-Rose