#psychoanalytic discourse

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

“For psychoanalysis, the symptom is not a “disorder”, it is a silenced truth that needs to be heard. The symptom includes the paradoxical satisfaction that leads to suffering (“jouissance”).

“For psychoanalysis, the symptom is not a “disorder”, it is a silenced truth that needs to be heard. The symptom includes the paradoxical satisfaction that leads to suffering (“jouissance”). Treatment is a dialectical procedure, which brings to the surface the weight of jouissance that words carry. Words encircle the truth without the subject being aware of it. Grasping these two faces of the symptom – language and jouissance – allows the subject to read his story and to make it his again. Then he can let go of a part of his jouissance and become responsible for its remainder in a life that does not necessarily conform to common morality, but is no less lawful for it. The psychoanalyst, having been analysed himself, is one who has detached himself from this fantasmatic jouissance. Free of prejudice, he can then enable the patient to invent his own bespoke response, the one that fits him.“

Agnes Aflalo, The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis: The Rise and Fall of Cognitivism. Karnac. 2015.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The permanence of the unconscious...

The permanence of the unconscious, the primacy of the address of the other—one of the functions of analysis is to uphold these truths, and it is the duty of the analyst to guarantee them the respect which is their due.

Jean Laplanche - Essay on otherness. Routledge. 1998.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The analytic situation is the only place explicitly provided for in the social contract in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered…

The analytic situation is the only place explicitly provided for in the social contract in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered and to search for possible new identities and new ways of talking about ourselves.

Julia Kristeva - In the Beginning Was Love. Psychoanalysis and Faith. Columbia University Press (30 May 1988)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The analytic situation is the only place explicitly provided ... in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered

The analytic situation is the only place explicitly provided for in the social contract in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered and to search for possible new identities and new ways of talking about ourselves.

Julia Kristeva - In the Beginning Was Love. Psychoanalysis and Faith. Columbia University Press (30 May 1988)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Guiding principles for any psychoanalytic act

First principle

Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech. It involves two partners, the analyst and the analysand, brought together in a single psychoanalytic session. The analysand speaks about what brings him there, his suffering, his symptom. This symptom is hooked into the materiality of the unconscious, made out of things that have been said to the subject, that have hurt him, and things that are impossible to say and cause him suffering. An analyst will punctuate the words of the analysand and enable him to weave the thread of his unconscious. The powers of language and the truth effects that it enables, what is called interpretation, is the actual power of the unconscious. Interpretation is apparent on both sides, analysand and analyst. They do not both have the same relation to the unconscious, however, since one has already carried this experience through to the end whereas the other has not.

Eric Laurent. World Association of Psychoanalysis. 2004

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth;

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony. Thus the psychoanalyst knows better than anyone else that the point is to figure out to which ‘part’ of this discourse the significant term is relegated, and this is how he proceeds in the best of cases: he takes the description of an everyday event as a fable addressed as a word to the wise, a long prosopopeia as a direction interjection, and, contrariwise, a simple slip of the tongue as a highly complex statement, and even the rest of a silence as the whole lyrical development it stands for.

Lacan – Ecrits, 251-252. W. W. Norton & Company; (2007)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Lacan on the ethics of the psychoanalyst

Here, as in many places in his early seminars, Lacan presents his strong reading of Freud’s message, which he believed was being diluted or disregarded by the analysts of his time. Man is a wolf to his fellow man, Freud famously quoted Plautus in Civilization and Its Discontents, and his neighborly intentions are an amalgam of conflicting motives and fears. The analyst’s therapeutic zeal is no exception to this caution, risking as it does the imposition of his own fantasies and beliefs on a vulnerable patient. The ethical form of this Freudian message is reprised by Lear. When trying to intervene to correct a problem, how does the analyst avoid applying his own personal reality and personal desire to his patient? So Lacan’s emphasis, while going somewhat further in this direction, was not unique in its insistence that the mere attempt to do good, to help, can lead analysts astray: “At every moment we need to know what our effective relationship is to the desire to do good, to the desire to cure. We have to deal with that as if it were something that is likely to lead us astray, and in many cases to do so instantly. I will even add that one might be paradoxical or trenchant and designate our desire as a non-desire to cure” (1959–1960, p. 219).

Lewis Kirshner- Toward an ethics of Psychoanalysis: a critical reading of Lacan’s Ethics. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association. 2012.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

There are two people present, the analyst and the analysand. The first is invited to speak, to free associate, to speak about his suffering. He suffers from symptoms without knowing the reason why, and without yet knowing what he is suffering from. The analyst is expected to listen, to listen in a particular way...

Let us take things from the simplest angle, starting with the analytic session. There are two people present, the analyst and the analysand. The first is invited to speak, to free associate, to speak about his suffering. He suffers from symptoms without knowing the reason why, and without yet knowing what he is suffering from. The analyst is expected to listen, to listen in a particular way, beyond what is spoken, but is also called upon to respond. Even when silent for long periods, the analyst must also appear present. Between the two, there is thus a knowledge in waiting (un savoir en souffrance), a knowledge which is not known, according to Lacan’s definition of the unconscious. One speaks, without knowing what is said, the other knowing nothing in advance of this knowledge; but something will be produced, which will have some effect. You will have gathered here that I’m describing the phenomenology of what Lacan formulated with his formula of the subject supposed to know. Here we can refer back to Jacques-Alain Miller’s schema, called the “triangle of transference”, which indicates the association of three terms: the analysand, the analyst, and unconscious knowledge. 

 Up to this point, everything seems surprisingly simple. The questions arise when we try to define these terms in relation to each other. And these are the questions that Lacan endeavoured to answer throughout his teaching. Who speaks? The ego? The subject? What is the function of this speech? Is it to communicate, to be recognised, to establish a new dialogue? Or does one speak alone, and the other inserts themselves into this dialect? What is it to listen? What is it to hear? What is it that must be heard? How does one respond, or give no response at all, or even respond without delay; but then respond to what, when, and how? What are the means, and to what end? Is it to gain access to unconscious knowledge, to remove the symptom, to modify the mode of jouissance? And finally, what is it that allows someone to respond in an effective way? Is this something that can be learnt? What makes it possible to sustain such an operation? 

Anne Lysy-Stevens - Unconscious and Interpretation. Seminar held in Tel Aviv in November 2008.