Cartels

Cartels, as introduced in the context of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), designate small, purpose-formed study groups designed to promote psychoanalytic research and transmission outside the hierarchical structures typical of institutions like the IPA. The term names a deliberately non-pyramidal organizational unit: rather than reproducing the authority-based, church-like formation that Lacan diagnosed in ego-psychology-aligned associations, cartels were conceived as sites where psychoanalytic doctrine — not institutional prestige or seniority — organized collective work. Their smallness is structurally significant: the intimate scale resists the imaginary dynamics of large group identification (the very dynamics Lacan associated with ego psychology's idealization of the analyst as ego-ideal) and keeps research anchored in the symbolic, in the work of the concept.

Within the broader institutional logic of the EFP, cartels function as one of three linked innovations — alongside democratic membership and la passe — that together attempt to instantiate a new model of psychoanalytic formation. Where la passe addresses the passage from analysand to analyst at the level of individual subjective transformation, cartels address the collective and transmissible dimension of that formation: how psychoanalytic knowledge is elaborated and shared without freezing into dogma or hierarchical authority. The cartel is thus the institutional correlate of the pass's theoretical ambition — it is the social form through which what la passe attests (something transmissible about psychoanalytic experience) can be worked over collectively and inscribed as teachable doctrine.

This concept appears in evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis as part of Evans's account of the institutional innovations of the EFP. It sits at the intersection of three cross-referenced canonical concepts. Against the backdrop of Ego Psychology — which Lacan diagnosed as reducing psychoanalysis to an apparatus of social conformity organized around the analyst's authority and the strengthening of the ego — cartels represent an anti-hierarchical institutional counter-move. Where ego psychology entrenches the imaginary relation of analyst-as-ego-ideal, cartels aim to dissolve that structure by distributing research labor across small, non-ranked groups organized around doctrine.

Cartels are also the institutional complement to La Passe: if the pass certifies the individual's traversal of analysis and their readiness to assume the analyst's position, cartels provide the collective structure through which that achieved knowledge is elaborated and transmitted. Together they embody the EFP's wager that Psychoanalysis as a discipline — defined in this corpus as a praxis organized around the real of the unconscious and not around cosmology, religion, or social adaptation — requires an institutional form that is itself consistent with its theory: non-hierarchical, doctrine-centered, and resistant to the imaginary capture that large institutional identification produces. Cartels are thus a specification and an institutionalization of the broader anti-authoritarian critique of the Psychoanalytic Institution that runs throughout Lacan's work.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown)

Another original feature of the EFP was the promotion of research in small study groups known as CARTELS.

The phrase "another original feature" situates cartels explicitly within a series of structural innovations unique to the EFP, marking them as deliberately designed departures from standard psychoanalytic institutional models; the descriptor "small study groups" encodes the anti-hierarchical logic at stake — smallness and the orientation toward research (rather than training or certification by authority) are what distinguish cartels from the IPA's organizational norms.