Trajectory(ies)
Jean Charmoille is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Paris, who is particularly known for the unique way he has folded his experiences as a lyric tenor into his clinical practice. His website www.sonecrit.com contains a distinctive array of his writings and other works.
Degrees
Psychology (1964), M.D. (1973), Psychiatry (1975), Child Psychiatry (1985).
Psychoanalytic and artistic experience
Personal analysis, Member of Editorial Board for the journal Apertura (1987), President of the Convention Psychanalytique (1995), Cofounder of the Mouvement Insistance (2002).
Every analyst faces the task of getting in touch with some thing that will cause something of the analyst to adhere in their praxis. Jean’s Charmoille’s personal analysis enabled him to come into contact with the possibility of the existence of this trace that is written by analytic experience, and which is never easy to bear.
The originating moment behind the specificity of Charmoille’s career occurred via a passage through the place where the effects of his psychoanalysis crossed paths with something “unheard” within the silence that inhabits the note of Don Juan’s famous cry in the finale of Don Giovanni. There was but one step from this place to the conclusion that this passage is what enables an enigmatic knotting between psychoanalytic experience and artistic experience. Charmoille’s research via seminars, lectures and other works in Europe and North America have been an ongoing act of taking precisely this same step.
Indeed, the knotting between his clinical practice and his experiences as an amateur lyric singer have led him to question the limits of limits of Descartes’ “thinking substance” (res cogitans) and “extended substance” (res extensa), and above all to explore that which precedes them unseen and unheard, namely what Lacan referred to as “enjoying substance” (substance jouissante).
Language, mother tongue and paternal metaphor are each and all radically called together and interrogated by the act of forging an equivalence between sound and meaning (son et sons), which in terms of the Freudian unconscious is what instigates a witticism and, in Lacan’s view, makes possible the contingent encounter of sex and speech.
Charmoille’s variations on these themes are not restricted to connoisseurs alone.
In 2006 he raised the curtain on his website sonecrit.com, which provides a stage for him to give voice to his research by means of videos, audio files and written texts, all of which constitute acts of “saying” that are habitually forgotten in their “said.”
Title: “Regarder écouter lire” (Look Listen Read) Claude Lévi-Strauss (1993)