Analysand
ELI5
The analysand is the person in therapy who does all the talking—and it turns out that talking is actually where all the real work of psychoanalysis happens, not in the doctor's clever interpretations.
Definition
The analysand (French: analysant; Lacan's preferred neologism psychoanalysand) designates the speaking subject who undertakes psychoanalytic treatment—not the passive "patient" who is acted upon, but the one who does the work of analyzing. The gerund suffix marks an ongoing activity: it is the analysand who free-associates, who produces the discourse in which the unconscious manifests, and whose speech constitutes the irreducible material of clinical practice. From Freud forward, the analysand's free-associational discourse is the primary analytic object; Lacan radicalizes this by insisting that "psychoanalytic experience and the theories to which it gives rise originate in Freud's clinical practice as itself grounded upon his analysands' free associations, namely, their speech" (derek-hook-et-al., p. 19), and that "it is not the dream itself, but what the analysand says about the dream that matters" (derek-hook-et-al., p. 118).
Structurally, the analysand occupies a specific position in the four-term schema (L-schema/four discourses): they are the speaking subject whose ego-level discourse conceals the unconscious Subject addressed to the analyst as Other. Knowledge (of the unconscious, of desire's truth) resides on the side of the analysand rather than the analyst—a fundamental inversion of the medical hierarchy in which the doctor possesses expertise the patient lacks. The analysand enters analysis constituted by a fundamental split ($): they speak without knowing what they say, employ rhetorical tropes without intending them, and unwittingly reveal unconscious structure through the failures, lacunae, and parapraxes of their speech. Their relation to the analyst is structured through transference, wherein they cast the analyst as the "subject supposed to know" the secret of their symptom—a positioning the analyst must eventually subvert. The telos of analysis is the analysand's traversal of this fantasy-relation, culminating in the "pass" (the moment when the analysand who has realized themselves in castration may rotate into the analyst position) or, in McGowan's economic reformulation, a change in the subject's relationship to their satisfaction rather than elimination of the symptom.
Evolution
In the Freudian period (return-to-freud seminars, Seminar I, Seminar II), the analyst-analysand relation is the contested terrain on which Lacan wages his anti-ego-psychological polemic. Against Ferenczi/Balint's intersubjective reciprocity—which conceived the relationship as between "persons" implying mutual recognition—and against Anna Freud's defense analysis, Lacan insists on the asymmetry and irreducibility of the dyad: "the analyst–analysand rapport is one in which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand and ignorance on the side of the analyst" (derek-hook-et-al., p. 9). In Seminar I, Lacan frames the analysand's free association as a paradox: "the analytic method, if it aims at attaining full speech, starts off on a path leading in the diametrically opposed direction, in so far as it instructs the subject to delineate a speech as devoid as possible of any assumption of responsibility" (jacques-lacan-seminar-1, p. 112). The analysand's acceptance of a "hic et nunc" interpretation is shown to reveal intersubjective reciprocity, not analytic truth (Seminar I, p. 38).
In the structuralist-ethics period (Seminars V, VIII), the analysand's position is increasingly defined through the structure of demand and desire. The fundamental question the analysand addresses to the analyst—even if not consciously formulated—is "What does he want?" (jacques-lacan-seminar-8, p. 194). The analysand's identification with the analyst is shown to be always an identification with signifiers, never with a person (derek-hook-et-al., p. 232). The analysand's discourse is the rhetorical surface where the grammatical unconscious is accessed, requiring analysts to master literary and rhetorical traditions (derek-hook-et-al., p. 159).
The object-a period (Seminars XI, XII, XIV, XV) sees the most elaborate theorization. The analysand is now the subject of the psychoanalytic act—Lacan introduces the neologism psychoanalysand over "analysed person" or "patient" to insist on the active, processual dimension (jacques-lacan-seminar-15-1, pp. 48, 33). The analysand is positioned as "essentially the one who speaks" and "the one who speaks and on whom there are tested the effects of the word" (jacques-lacan-seminar-15-1, p. 97). Crucially, "the subject who knows, who is not the analyst but the analysand, has been for a long time established within his own game" (jacques-lacan-seminar-12-1, p. 256): the analysand paradoxically knows how to handle the objet a, and the analyst must learn from rather than teach the patient. The end of analysis is formalized as the passage from analysand to analyst through the act, with subjective destitution of the subject supposed to know as its condition (Seminar XV, p. 69).
In the discourses/encore-real period, the analysand is positioned within the four discourses as the $ in the hysteric's discourse and as the speaker whose enunciation the analyst stands surety for with respect to jouissance (jacques-lacan-seminar-19, p. 126). Lacan himself declares "I am at the place of the analysand" (jacques-lacan-seminar-19, p. 81) and "since it is I who speak, it is I who am here in the position of the analysand" (jacques-lacan-seminar-19a, p. 17), performatively blurring the distinction for pedagogical effect. By the topology-borromean period, the analysand is characterized as one who "produces poetry" (jacques-lacan-seminar-25, p. 16) in contrast to the analyst who "slices"—the asymmetry now figured topologically rather than structurally.
Key formulations
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.9)
the analyst–analysand rapport is one in which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand and ignorance on the side of the analyst.
This inverts the medical model of the expert-clinician/ignorant-patient and grounds the entire Lacanian ethics of listening; it is the founding axiom from which the critique of ego psychology's suggestive authority is derived.
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) (p.48)
The psychoanalysand as I recently introduced the word, a pinpointing that spread rapidly, which proves that it is not inopportune and that moreover it is obvious.
Lacan's introduction of the neologism 'psychoanalysand' over 'patient' or 'analysed person' is a decisive terminological-clinical move: it inscribes the active, doing dimension of the one who speaks throughout analysis, displacing the passive connotation of being-analysed.
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) (p.97)
how contest the fact that the psychoanalysand, in his place in the discourse is at the place of the subject? Whatever reference we arm ourselves with to better situate him, it is naturally in the first place with the linguistic reference. He is essentially the one who speaks.
This is Lacan's most compressed structural definition of the analysand: not a psychological category but a logical-linguistic position—the one who speaks and on whom the effects of speech are tested, occupying the place of the subject in discourse.
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) (p.256)
the subject who knows, who is not the analyst but the analysand, has been for a long time established within his own game
This reversal—the analysand as the one who knows how to handle the objet a—is central to the late Lacanian theory of the analytic act and the desire of the analyst: the analyst must learn from the analysand rather than teach them.
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.115)
The illusion of creating an autonomous ego shipwrecks the analysand's discourse on the shore of the analyst's meaning.
This is Lacan's sharpest clinical formulation of the damage done by ego-psychology's normative ideal: the analysand's speech is foreclosed precisely when the analyst imposes an autonomous-ego ideal as the goal of treatment.
Cited examples
The Rat Man case (Freud, 1909) (case_study)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.61). Lacan reads the Rat Man as paradigmatic: the analysand's obsessional symptoms are 'encrypted testimonies to his father's past monetary and amorous sins,' showing that the analysand's task is to confront the symbolically transmitted debt that structures their desire. The attainment of 'singular correspondence' between symptom and debt is the sine qua non of therapeutic termination, placing the analysand's subjective work at the centre.
Margaret Little's case of hic et nunc interpretation (International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 1951) (case_study)
Cited by Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique (p.38). Lacan uses Little's case to show that the analysand's acceptance of an ego-to-ego interpretation is a function of intersubjective reciprocity rather than analytic truth: 'The subject was perfectly justified in accepting Margaret Little's interpretation, for the simple reason that, in a relationship as intimate as that which exists between analysand and analyst, he was sufficiently aware of the analyst's feelings.' This undermines the evidential value of the analysand's change of state as confirmation of interpretation.
The musician-analysand with cardiac arrhythmia (Lacan, 1956 seminar) (case_study)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.115). A musician-analysand who could not 'put her heart in it' developed severe anxiety accompanied by benign heart arrhythmia as a symptom. Lacan uses this to demonstrate how a key signifier enslaves the analysand through somatic and inhibitory effects, illustrating the primacy of the signifier over biological function in clinical work.
Patients becoming versed in psychoanalytic jargon ('Patients became just as versed in psychoanalytic jargon as their psychoanalysts donning interpretations like ready-to-wear') (social_theory)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.110). Lacan uses the social phenomenon of analysands arriving pre-armed with psychoanalytic vocabulary as evidence that interpretive efficacy depends on surprise and asymmetry. The cultural absorption of analytic jargon destroys the element of surprise that makes interpretation effective, showing the analysand's position as historically contingent rather than fixed.
Boothby's personal analysis with Dr Barbara Frankel (memoir account of lying on the couch) (case_study)
Cited by Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide (p.39). Boothby narrates from the first-person position of analysand—lying on the couch, attempting free association after his son's suicide—demonstrating from the inside the analysand's experience: the resistance to speech ('Every impulse to speak catches in my throat like a fish bone'), the effects of the analyst's silence, and the way digressive childhood memories function as avoidance of the traumatic real.
The analysand who withheld biographical information about venereal disease from the analyst (case_study)
Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.248). Lacan uses this example to illustrate the analysand's primary fear: not that the analyst will deceive them, but that they will deceive the analyst (leading the analyst to attribute an organic cause to their disorder). This structural reversal—the patient managing what knowledge the analyst has access to—reveals how the analysand actively shapes the epistemological conditions of the analytic relation.
Ruti's autobiographical account of entering analysis ('I cried every day... I was paying someone, going deeper into debt, in order to cry') (case_study)
Cited by The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (p.22). Ruti's first-person account of entering analysis anchors the theorization of trauma and its working-through in the concrete experience of the analysand: the analyst who maintained strict non-disclosure about her terminal illness allowed Ruti's anguish to remain analytically legible rather than being silenced by comparison with greater suffering.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether the analysand is primarily the locus of unconscious knowledge (and thus the bearer of truth the analyst must receive) or primarily a product manufactured by the analyst's structural operation (the analyst 'produces the psychoanalysand like an Austin').
Lacan (early-to-middle period, 'Freudian Thing'): 'unconscious knowledge, knowledge of the unconscious, resides on the side of the analysand rather than the analyst. This is something the analysand should be brought to appreciate through analysis itself' — the analysand is the primary bearer of truth, the analyst a receptive Other. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t p. 30 (L-schema/Analytic Action section)
Lacan (late period, Seminar XV): 'if it is true that in the field of the psychoanalytic act what produces the psychoanalysand is the psychoanalyst' — the analysand is a production of the analyst's structural position as objet a, likened to 'assembly-line production.' — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-15-1 p. 107
This tension marks a genuine shift across Lacan's teaching: from a phenomenology of where knowledge 'resides' to a structural account of what the analytic act produces, with significant implications for the ethics of the analytic relation.
Whether the goal of analysis is the analysand's change in relationship to their satisfaction/jouissance (without any pretense of eliminating the symptom) or the analysand's separation from the analyst and accession to their own singular name/identity.
McGowan (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan): 'the intervention has nothing to do with alleviating dissatisfaction but with changing the way in which the analysand relates to her or his satisfaction.' Analysis is purely economic/quantitative, not curative in the symptom-elimination sense. — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan p. 73
Valabrega (in Lacan's seminar): 'This appeal of the analysand to the analyst, takes on from the beginning and at the end the form of two proper names' — analysis is a trajectory between two symbolic nominations culminating in 'the conquest of the name,' a qualitative transformation of symbolic identity. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12-1 p. 185
The tension reflects a broader disagreement between drive-economic and symbolic-identificatory accounts of what analysis achieves for the analysand.
Whether the analysand's resistance is a structural feature of discourse itself (resistance as the analysand's proper position) or a deficiency/bad faith of the analysand that the analyst must overcome.
Lacan (Seminar XV): 'This 'I do not think' is what allows us to give its sense, to this word truly manipulated in a way that up to the present was rather abject, in this sense that it reduced the position of the psychoanalysand, the patient, to an attitude that I would qualify as disparaged, if the psychoanalysand... resisted.' Lacan explicitly rehabilitates resistance as structural and criticizes the inquisitorial framing. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-15-1 p. 87
Lacan (Seminar I): 'aren't we aware these days that an analyst doesn't make a single move in the treatment without teaching his students to be always asking themselves, in relation to the patient, the question — What defence has he come up with now?' — here Lacan is reporting and critically diagnosing the style of analysis he will later explicitly invert, but the passage shows the extent to which the analysand's resistance is treated as an obstacle to be managed. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-1 p. 38
This is a diachronic tension within Lacan's own corpus: the early seminars describe the inquisitorial analytic style even while beginning to critique it, while the later seminars explicitly reframe resistance as structural necessity rather than individual defect.
Across frameworks
vs Ego Psychology
Lacanian: The analysand is the locus of unconscious knowledge whose free-associational discourse the analyst must receive without imposing meaning. The goal is not ego strengthening but the dissolution of ego-level imaginary identifications so that the symbolic Subject can emerge. Identification with the analyst's ego is a trap that redoubles alienation. As Lacan insists, the analysand's ego 'self-objectifies' on the couch in addressing imaginary others via transference—not in authentic self-disclosure to a knowing other.
Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Lowenstein) positions the analysand as a patient whose weak or conflict-ridden ego must be strengthened through a 'therapeutic alliance' with the analyst's healthy ego. The analyst serves as a model of mature adaptation, and the goal is the analysand's identification with the analyst's reality-oriented, conflict-free ego. The endpoint of analysis is the analysand's increased capacity for ego autonomy and adaptive functioning.
Fault line: The deepest disagreement concerns what knowledge-position the analysand occupies: ego psychology places knowledge with the analyst (who knows what healthy functioning looks like) and ignorance with the analysand (who cannot see past their defenses), while Lacanian analysis inverts this entirely.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: For Lacan, the analysand is a split subject ($) constitutively lacking any pre-given authentic self to actualize. What they bring to analysis is not a repressed true self but an unconscious structured like a language—an otherness within. The aim is not to 'find oneself' but to encounter the irreducible lack in the Other and to assume one's own desire without the guarantee of the big Other. Genuine analytic work produces not self-actualization but subjective destitution.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) understands the analysand (or 'client') as possessing an innate tendency toward growth, self-actualization, and authentic self-expression that has been blocked by conditional regard, social conformity, or trauma. The therapeutic relationship provides the conditions (unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence) under which the client's natural growth tendency can reassert itself. The goal is the client's discovery and expression of their true self.
Fault line: The fundamental disagreement is ontological: humanistic approaches presuppose a plenitudinous self whose growth has been blocked, while Lacanian theory holds that there is no such pre-given self—the subject is constituted by lack, and what appears as 'authenticity' is typically the effect of imaginary misrecognition.
vs Cbt
Lacanian: The analysand's discourse is not a report on internal cognitive-emotional states to be corrected by more adaptive beliefs; it is the surface where signifiers insist, producing effects that exceed the speaker's intention. What matters is not the conscious meaning the analysand intends but the signifying residue—the slips, lacunae, rhetorical tropes—that the analysand deploys unknowingly. Symptoms are not maladaptive cognitions but the subject's mode of jouissance, the disruption that grounds their very existence as desiring subject.
Cbt: Cognitive-behavioral therapy positions the person in therapy as holding identifiable cognitive distortions (negative automatic thoughts, dysfunctional schemas) that cause emotional and behavioral difficulties. The therapist works collaboratively with the client to identify, challenge, and replace these distortions with more adaptive beliefs and coping strategies. The client is an active collaborator whose conscious insight into the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors drives change.
Fault line: CBT assumes that conscious identification and rational re-evaluation of beliefs is the engine of change, placing the client's cognitive mastery at the center; Lacanian theory holds that the analysand's conscious understanding is precisely the obstacle, and that genuine change occurs at the border of the symbolic and the real, independent of insight.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (247)
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#01
The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud
**BURNING FREUD: THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS AS A CLASSIC OF SCIENCE AND LITERATURE**
Theoretical move: The passage defends psychoanalysis against epistemological, ideological, and empirical critiques by redefining its object as "symptomatic communication" and its field as interpretive practice (free association), while arguing that *The Interpretation of Dreams* itself exemplifies the split subject—being a radically composite, multi-voiced text that enacts the very disjunctive structure of the dream it theorizes.
This object and field are primarily constituted in practice by the discourse between analyst and analysand in the therapeutic relationship.
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#02
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
<span id="ch10.xhtml_page_1"></span>[Introduction to ‘Reading the <span class="italic">Écrits</span>’: <span class="italic">La trahison de l’écriture</span>](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-002)
Theoretical move: The Écrits is theorized not as a conventional book but as a labyrinthine, desire-engendering psychoanalytic tool whose deliberate obscurity, resistance to writing, and symptomatic relation to the seminars position it as a transference-inducing object rather than a vehicle of rational comprehension.
the perplexity and the suspension of knowledge that the analysand experiences in respect of the analyst and the analytic process itself
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#03
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.9
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Situation in time and place of this exercise
Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized as a repetition-with-difference (après-coup) that counters the ego-psychological Americanization of psychoanalysis, which is diagnosed as a symptomatic repression of the unconscious behind an adaptive, autonomous ego and a medicalized analyst-as-knower structure that inverts the true knowledge-relation of the clinic.
the analyst–analysand rapport is one in which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand and ignorance on the side of the analyst.
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#04
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.13
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The adversary
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.
Actual analysands on analysts' couches are speaking subjects who have become what they are through an ontogenetic life history always-already mediated by the socio-historical matrices of big Others as symbolic orders.
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#05
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing speaks of itself
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious, personified as a speaking Thing (la Chose freudienne), is not a hidden depth but a surface-inscribed, linguistically constituted truth that invariably manifests itself — and that the analyst's proper technique is to attend literally to the signifying text of the analysand's speech, treating all analytic material as language-immanent variables.
the analyst's evenly hovering attunement to the devilish details of the literal text of the analysand's symbolico-linguistic productions is the surest manner by which to maintain close contact with the speaking unconscious
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#06
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.19
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Parade
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.
psychoanalytic experience and the theories to which it gives rise originate in Freud's clinical practice as itself grounded upon his analysands' free associations, namely, their speech.
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#07
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.29
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing’s order
Theoretical move: By retranslating Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological rendering, Lacan argues that the telos of analysis is not ego-over-id domination but the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject ($), grounding his ethics of psychoanalysis and his critique of misreadings of Freud that degrade the primacy of speech and signifiers in clinical practice.
Lacan warns of the high practical-therapeutic costs of not adequately appreciating the linguistic constitution and mediation of the analytically symptomatic.
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#08
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.32
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Resistance to the resisters
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.
The analysand, for Lacan, spontaneously self-objectifies in talking about him/her-self on the couch.
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#09
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.43
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Imaginary passion
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's mirror stage grounds the ego in a constitutive double alienation—imaginary and symbolic—such that the ego is structurally paranoid, narcissistic, and rivalrous, making ego-to-ego analysis (as in ego psychology) a therapeutic dead end that merely amplifies imaginary passions rather than dissolving the transference.
the not-so-therapeutic outcome resulting from the analyst's ego becoming the superegoistic ego-ideal to the analysand's ego inevitably must entail tapping into and stirring up the 'imaginary passion'
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#10
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.50
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The locus of speech
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian analytic practice turns on distinguishing the Imaginary (ego-centred empty speech) from the Symbolic (unconscious full speech), and that the compulsive repetition of neurotic symptoms is explained through a Hegelian–Kojèvian logic of unrecognised desire, whereby the analyst's appropriate recognition of transferential demands can finally dissolve symptomatic repetition.
The ear of the Lacanian analyst attunes itself to signifiers insofar as, while listening to the analysand's speech, this ear quietly loosens what the analysand takes to be tight, firm ties between his/her signifiers and the consciously envisioned signifieds he/she intends.
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#11
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.61
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Symbolic debt
Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.
The attainment of this 'singular correspondence' (361, 5) is the sine qua non of therapeutic termination, the true telos of the analytic experience
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#12
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.64
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The training of analysts to come
Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is argued to be a return to the structures of language operative in the unconscious, which grounds a critique of medicalized, dogmatic analytic training and calls for a perpetually self-renewing pedagogy open to the structuralized human sciences and mathematics — with the Real (as the impossible-yet-condition-of-possibility) underwriting both the necessity and the limits of analytic practice.
The futility of 'saying it all,' while in one sense a condition of impossibility for associating analysand and interpreting analyst alike
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#13
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract
Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.
Not just the resistance of an analysand to analytic treatment, but of the analyst to psychoanalysis itself
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#14
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychological unconscious
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that pre-Freudian (and ego-psychological) hierarchical dualisms between conscious and unconscious encode a political bias that is itself legible as the 'unconscious of scientific discourse'; true psychoanalytic insight locates conflict not in biological or archetypal sources but in the linguistic structure of the symptom as articulated in speech.
In psychoanalysis, 'conflict is read and interpreted' in the analysand's 'chatting,' and that chatting is enriched by free association
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#15
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The intersubjective game by which truth enters reality
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symptom is constituted by the diachronic and synchronic operations of the signifier rather than by object-relations or emotional causality, and that the signifier's arbitrary yet overdetermined nature means it cannot serve as a guide to adaptive reality but instead generates a complex web of meanings that impacts reality — a view that Lacan uses to critique the ego-psychological and object-relations reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptive "corrective emotional experience."
promote one's own ego as the measure of health, which will be used to bring the analysand back to 'reality.'
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#16
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.92
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.
Far from situating the unconscious as the site of a question, psychoanalysis, practiced and theorized in a certain way, constitutes it as a lure, allowing the analysand to simply better 'skirt the question.'
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#17
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.110
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The foundation of our research: free association
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "golden age" of psychoanalysis was undone by the cultural absorption of its interpretive vocabulary, and that analysts' recourse to non-mediated access (the "third ear," affect, lived experience) represents a regression into the Imaginary; the remedy lies in privileging the Symbolic/signifier, whose irreducible triangularity (the Other as third) keeps psychoanalysis from collapsing into a dyadic imaginary relation.
Patients became just as versed in psychoanalytic jargon as their psychoanalysts donning interpretations like ready-to-wear (387, 3).
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#18
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.115
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Portrait of the unconscious as a young dog
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primacy of the signifier — demonstrated through Pavlov's conditioning experiment, Saussurean linguistics, and Augustinian semiotics — is the foundational principle of psychoanalytic practice, such that the unconscious, structured like a language, enslaves the subject through signifying chains, and clinical cure proceeds by uncovering the subject's relation to key signifiers rather than eliminating symptoms.
an analysand, a musician, who when performing could not put her 'heart in it' developed severe anxiety accompanied by benign heart arrhythmia as a symptom
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#19
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.118
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Defrosting the signifer
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Rabelais' frozen words allegory to establish the symbolic order's primacy and exteriority to the subject as the very definition of the unconscious, then develops this into a critique of Jungian archetypes, Jonesian symbolism, and existential listening practices—ultimately arguing that proper analytic technique consists in attentiveness to the literal, phonemic, polysemous signifier rather than to signification or meaning.
It is not the dream itself, but what the analysand says about the dream that matters.
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#20
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.
the one plus one of the analyst-analysand does not equal two, rather it constitutes an odd number
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#21
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Appendix
Theoretical move: Lacan uses this appendix to mount a sustained critique of ego psychology and identification-based training analysis, arguing that genuine psychoanalytic cure produces separation from rather than identification with the analyst, and that a return to Freud's texts is the corrective to the conformist institutionalization of psychoanalysis.
The illusion of creating an autonomous ego shipwrecks the analysand's discourse on the shore of the analyst's meaning.
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#22
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.132
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Context
Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.
the spoken discourse of an analysand should be understood rhetorically, with all of its missteps, neologisms, jokes, silences, and slips
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#23
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.137
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Introduction
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Instance of the Letter" is positioned between speech and language (*parole* and *langue*), such that the unconscious is revealed not through the linguistic system as a whole but through the failures and anomalies of specific acts of speech—making rhetoric (the study of language effects) as important as grammar/structure for analytic practice.
It is through an analysand's speech, specifically, the failures, lacunae, and anomalies of the subject's spoken discourse, that the unconscious is revealed.
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#24
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.144
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious
Theoretical move: Lacan's alignment of metaphor/metonymy with condensation/displacement establishes the signifier's logic as constitutive of both the unconscious and the subject itself: the subject is not the ego-cogito but the effect of signifying operations, and symptoms/desire are the two modes in which the letter insists through these operations.
Analysands may have powerful reactions to specific objects or places, for example, that are connected only tangentially to a past experience of trauma.
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#25
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.146
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious
Theoretical move: Lacan's deployment of rhetorical trope (via Quintilian) over mere figure reframes metaphor and metonymy as active, structural operations of the unconscious that work independently of conscious intention—thereby establishing the primacy of the signifier and positioning psychoanalysis as necessarily interdisciplinary, in explicit opposition to ego psychology's "autonomous ego."
analysands may employ trope without knowing that they do so, and thus reveal the operations of the unconscious that interest their analysts.
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#26
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.159
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Conclusion
Theoretical move: The passage argues that in Lacan's thought, metaphor and metonymy operate on two registers simultaneously—as a grammar of the unconscious (structural/linguistic) and as genuinely rhetorical figures in the concrete discourse of analysands—and that attentiveness to rhetoric as an art is therefore indispensable for clinical psychoanalytic practice.
the enunciated discourse of analysands requires attunement to the art of rhetoric
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#27
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.211
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > I. Who analyzes today?
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of post-Freudian (especially ego-psychological) psychoanalysis is mobilized to argue that authentic analytic practice requires orienting from the symbolic axis (Other, lack, desire) rather than from imaginary ego-to-ego relations, with the L-schema formalizing why the analytic situation must be understood as four-positional rather than dyadic.
The analyst freely chooses the concrete actions or techniques he uses in the analytic situation… by the material the analysand brings forth.
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#28
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > IV. How to act with one’s being?
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's proper mode of being cannot be derived from technical rules, happiness, or comprehension, but must be grounded in the ethics of desire — specifically the desire of the analyst — and that the analyst's stance toward the analysand's demand (intransitive, without object) is the pivot around which the direction of treatment turns.
the analyst should not respond to the analysand. This frustrates the analysand because he is asking ('demande') the analyst for an answer
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#29
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.232
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > IV. How to act with one’s being?
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function is not to fulfil the analysand's demand but to allow the signifiers bound up with frustration to reappear, thereby distinguishing need, demand, and desire, while also warning against identification-based or "good-for-the-subject" treatments that merely compel repetition or install the superego in place of the analytic relation.
the analysand might as well wait to be given 'it.' 'And even this nothing the analyst does not give'
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#30
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire operates by refusing to answer at the level of demand, thereby opening a space for the subject to encounter their own truth as construction — grounded in the irremediable lack in the Other — which Lacan identifies as the aim of analysis at this stage of his teaching.
It is the subject, analysand or analyst, that has to deal with this emptiness
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#31
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.
the analysand is able to situate himself in the space "'behind the mirror'" – that is, behind the flat mirror – in a manner that is entirely different from what typically happens in neurosis
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#32
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Analytic action
Theoretical move: The L-schema is deployed to argue that the fundamental axis of analytic action is the Symbolic (between unconscious subjects), not the Imaginary (between egos), and that the analyst's strategic self-effacement/silence opens space for the unconscious to speak by dissolving the transference and instantiating the symbolic order as condition of possibility for the analysand's speech.
unconscious knowledge, knowledge of the unconscious, resides on the side of the analysand rather than the analyst. This is something the analysand should be brought to appreciate through analysis itself
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#33
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.141
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The meaning of the letter
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of the 'letter' — the insistence of a structural element of language within concrete speech — reformulates the Saussurean sign by elevating the signifier over the signified and exposing the bar as a resistance to signification, such that the operations of metonymy and metaphor reveal how the unconscious is structured like a language, producing truth-effects that exceed the speaking subject's intent.
the speech of an analysand should be understood rhetorically, because the deployment of the letter can 'signify something altogether different from what it says'
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#34
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.71
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.
When the analyst plays 'the dummy' by stubbornly remaining silent, she submits the speech of the analysand to a measured pressure of depersonalization.
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#35
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.154
Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross
Theoretical move: The passage argues that crucifixion, read through the intersection of Lacanian and Hegelian frameworks, figures not as sacrificial atonement but as the subject's embrace of the Other's foreignness as an opening to what is unknown in itself — a "dying away" of the ego that parallels Lacan's rereading of Freud's *Wo Es war, soll Ich werden* and Hegel's dialectical conception of love as constitutive self-division, which in turn grounds a psychoanalytic ethics of non-judgement toward the analysand.
Open the space for the internal complexity of the analysand, allow for the self-contradiction of the symptom. Facilitate analysands' own entry into that space, enabling their ownership of contradiction
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#36
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.68
I > 2 > I Can Get Satisfaction
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche in which the drive always-already produces satisfaction, meaning the analytic intervention is not a cure from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but a quantitative shortening of the circuitous path the subject takes to its inevitable enjoyment — a political critique of capitalism's logic of accumulation follows directly from this.
The aim of the psychoanalyst — the analyst's desire — must be to remove the detours that the analysand has placed along the path of the drive in order to allow the analysand to take up completely her or his position in the drive.
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#37
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.73
I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom
Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.
the intervention has nothing to do with alleviating dissatisfaction but with changing the way in which the analysand relates to her or his satisfaction.
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#38
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.95
I > 3 > Freedom and Injustice
Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a distinct critique of capitalism grounded not in justice (as in Marxism) but in freedom: class society deprives subjects of freedom and enjoyment at the level of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis emerges precisely to address the persistence of unfreedom after the Enlightenment's failure to achieve its own ideal.
It is in this sense that we should revisit the status of the analysands that psychoanalysis treats.
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#39
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.167
I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > An Absence of Final Causes
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that teleological thinking (the "final cause") structurally occludes enjoyment/jouissance, which operates as an "immanent cause" inhering in action itself rather than as a pursued end; psychoanalysis—through free association—is theorized as the method that brackets the final cause to expose this immanent causality, identifying the death drive as Freud's formal theorization of enjoyment-as-immanent-cause.
When the analysand speaks, the analyst focuses on the signifiers themselves and what they say rather than on the meaning that the analysand intends to impart with these signifiers.
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#40
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.307
I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity
Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the theoretical argument that loss is constitutive of value, subjectivity, and drive, reinterpreting Freud's death drive as the theoretical elaboration of repetition compulsion and positioning Hegel—rather than Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—as Freud's closest philosophical predecessor through the shared recognition of a structural limit (nonknowledge/unconscious desire) within the project of knowledge.
Freud's insistence that psychoanalysis would simply not work if it was given away for free or at a discount price stems from his understanding of the constitutive dimension of loss. The analysand's sacrifice of money gives the psychoanalytic session value.
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#41
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.311
I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive
Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.
No one would come into analysis if she or he were not, on some level, dissatisfied, but this dissatisfaction occurs on a second level: aspiring analysands are dissatisfied with the way that they obtain their satisfaction.
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#42
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.343
I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life
Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.
the key moment in this analysand's talking is what cannot be said rather than the seemingly endless stream of words that are said.
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#43
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_106"></span>**language**
Theoretical move: The passage traces four developmental phases of Lacan's theory of language, arguing that language (langage) functions as the single paradigm of all structure, that the unconscious is structured like a language of signifiers, and that language has both symbolic and imaginary dimensions—against any reduction of it to the symbolic order alone or to a mere code.
tend to play down the importance of language and emphasise the 'non-verbal communication' of the analysand (his 'body language', etc.) at the expense of the analysand's speech.
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#44
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_196"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0223"></span>**subject suppposed to know**
Theoretical move: The passage elaborates the Subject Supposed to Know as a transferential function—not a person but a position the analyst comes to embody—whose establishment and dissolution structure the entire arc of analytic treatment, while also showing that the function is reversible: the analyst equally institutes the analysand as a subject supposed to know via the fundamental rule of free association.
It is only when the analyst is perceived by the analysand to embody this function that the transference can be said to be established.
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#45
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_11"></span>**act**
Theoretical move: The passage establishes 'the act' as a distinctively Lacanian ethical concept: only that which is fully assumed—consciously and unconsciously—qualifies as a true act, thereby linking responsibility, unconscious desire, and the death drive into a single ethical framework that distinguishes the act from acting out, passage to the act, and mere behaviour.
when it helps the analysand to move towards the end of analysis.
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#46
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_48"></span>**demand**
Theoretical move: Demand is theorised as structurally double: it articulates a biological need while simultaneously becoming a demand for love from the Other, and this gap between the two functions is precisely what generates desire as an insatiable leftover — a move that situates demand as the mediating term in the Need-Demand-Desire triad.
By forcing the analysand to express himself entirely in speech, the psychoanalytic situation puts him back in the position of the helpless infant
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#47
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_95"></span>**interpretation**
Theoretical move: Lacan's renewed theory of interpretation displaces the classical model (which unmasks hidden meaning via symbolism/decoding) in favour of a technique that disrupts meaning altogether, reducing signifiers to non-sense so that irreducible, determinant signifiers emerge — thereby inverting the signifier/signified relation and returning the analysand's message to him in its true, inverted form.
Far from offering the analysand a new message, the interpretation should serve merely to enable the analysand to hear the message he is unconsciously addressing to himself.
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#48
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_161"></span>**punctuation**
Theoretical move: Punctuation is theorized as the fundamental operation by which the receiver retroactively fixes meaning in the signifying chain; in clinical practice, the analyst's punctuation of the analysand's discourse—through repetition, silence, or session termination—exploits this retroactive structure to reveal unconscious meaning beyond the analysand's intended speech.
by punctuating the analysand's discourse in an unexpected way, the analyst can retroactively alter the intended meaning of the analysand's speech
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#49
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_18"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0034"></span>**analysand/psychoanalysand**
Theoretical move: By introducing the term 'analysant' (gerund form) in 1967 to replace the passive 'analysé', Lacan theoretically repositions the analysand as the active agent of the analytic process, reversing the conventional assumption that the analyst performs the analysis on a passive patient.
Lacan prefers this term because, being derived from the gerund, it indicates that the one who lies on the couch is the one who does most of the work.
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#50
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_50"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0064"></span>**desire of the analyst**
Theoretical move: The passage articulates a constitutive ambiguity in Lacan's concept of the desire of the analyst: on one side, it functions as an enigmatic attributed desire that engines the analytic process by sustaining the Che vuoi? question; on the other, it names a properly analytic desire oriented not toward identification or cure but toward 'absolute difference', situating it at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis and requiring a training analysis to constitute it.
the task of the analyst throughout the treatment is to make it impossible for the analysand to be sure that he knows what the analyst wants from him
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#51
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_61"></span>**end of analysis**
Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's evolving formulations of the 'end of analysis' across his teaching, arguing that the end-point is a logical terminus defined by subjective destitution, traversal of fantasy, and identification with the sinthome—not therapeutic cure, ego-strengthening, or identification with the analyst—and that it always involves the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and the reduction of the analyst to objet petit a.
the end of analysis involves a change in the subjective position of the analysand (the analysand's 'subjective destitution'), and a corresponding change in the position of the analyst
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#52
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_210"></span>**treatment**
Theoretical move: The passage defines psychoanalytic treatment as a directed structural process distinct from medical cure, whose aim is not the restoration of a healthy psyche but the analysand's articulation of desire and truth, structured by transference, resistance, and the desire of the analyst across distinct phases.
the aim of analytic treatment is simply to lead the analysand to articulate his truth.
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#53
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_172"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0193"></span>**resistance**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes resistance as a structural feature of the analytic process rooted in the imaginary register of the ego, not the ill will of the analysand, and distinguishes it from defence by locating resistance on the side of the object (transitory, imaginary) and defence on the side of the subject (stable, symbolic), while also implicating the analyst's own resistance as the true source of any obstruction to treatment.
He can do this by recognising his own part in the analysand's resistance, for 'there is no other resistance to analysis than that of the analyst himself'
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#54
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_38"></span>**Communication**
Theoretical move: Lacan redefines communication against standard linguistic models by showing that in psychoanalytic speech the sender is always simultaneously a receiver, and that the analyst's interpretive work returns the analysand's own message in its inverted, unconscious form — making intentionality exceed consciousness.
When speaking to the analyst, the analysand is also addressing a message to himself, but is not aware of this.
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#55
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_195"></span>**Subject**
Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical genealogy of Lacan's concept of the 'subject', arguing that it is irreducibly distinct from the ego, constituted through language and the symbolic order, essentially split, and identified with the Cartesian cogito reread as the subject of the unconscious rather than self-conscious agency.
the term is also used to refer to the analysand (Ec, 83).
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#56
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_22"></span>**autonomous ego**
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of the ego-psychology concept of the "autonomous ego" reframes the locus of autonomy: rather than the ego achieving freedom through adaptation and identification with the analyst, it is the symbolic order that is genuinely autonomous, exposing the ego's supposed mastery as a narcissistic illusion.
helping the analysand's ego to become autonomous
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#57
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_108"></span>**letter**
Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's concept of the Letter as the material, indivisible, and localised substrate of the Symbolic order that is itself Real (hence meaningless), persists through repetition, and positions the analyst as a reader of formal properties rather than meanings — against Saussure's privileging of the acoustic signifier.
the analyst must focus not on the meaning or the signification of the analysand's discourse, but purely on its formal properties
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#58
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_74"></span>**fragmented body**
Theoretical move: The fragmented body (corps morcelé) is theorised as a constitutive counterpart to the Mirror Stage: the perception of bodily disunity drives identification with the specular image that forms the ego, while the memory of fragmentation continues to threaten that ego's synthetic unity, surfacing in aggressivity, negative transference, and hysterical symptoms governed by an 'imaginary anatomy'.
the moment when the analysand's aggressivity emerges in the negative transference
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#59
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_167"></span>**recollection**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes recollection (remémoration) as a symbolic process of reconstructing one's history from reminiscence as an imaginary reliving of experience, positioning the analytic process on the side of symbolic reconstruction rather than affective re-experiencing or acting out.
what matters is what the analysand reconstructs of his past (S1, 13), the key word being 'reconstruct'.
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#60
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_145"></span>**pass**
Theoretical move: The passage defines and contextualises Lacan's institutional procedure of 'the pass' (la passe), arguing that it operationalises the principle that the end of analysis must be articulable in language and extractable as knowledge (savoir), thereby serving a teaching rather than clinical function.
the passage from being an analysand to being an analyst, which may be testified to by 'the pass' in the first sense of the term
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#61
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_42"></span>**countertransference**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes countertransference not as the analyst's affective reactions per se, but as the analyst's failure to make adequate use of those affects; ultimately, he dissolves the countertransference/transference binary by insisting on the non-symmetrical, unified structure of transference in which both analyst and analysand are implicated.
the more likely he is to be frankly in love with, or be quite repulsed by, the analysand
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#62
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_205"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0234"></span> **topology**
Theoretical move: Topology is argued to be not merely a metaphor for structure but structure itself in Lacan's framework, privileging the function of the cut as a non-intuitive, purely intellectual means of expressing the symbolic order and distinguishing continuous from discontinuous transformations in psychoanalytic treatment.
so an effective interpretation preferred by the analyst modifies the structure of the analysand's discourse in a radical way.
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#63
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_15"></span>**aggressivity**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of aggressivity is theorized as a fundamental imaginary relation rooted in the mirror stage and narcissism, distinct from mere aggression and from Freud's death drive, and is given clinical significance as negative transference that must be mobilized early in treatment.
Lacan argues that it is important to bring the analysand's aggressivity into play early in the treatment
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#64
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_200"></span>**Symbolic**
Theoretical move: The passage defines the Symbolic as the central order in Lacan's tripartite schema, arguing that it constitutes the essentially linguistic, law-governed, and totalising dimension of human subjectivity—irreducible to biology, structuring the Imaginary, and encompassing the Unconscious, the Other, the Death Drive, and Lack—while distinguishing it sharply from Freud's 'symbolism' as fixed bi-univocal meaning.
it is only by working in the symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand
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#65
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_211"></span>**truth**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of truth is irreducibly plural in its functions: it is always particular (not universal), tied to desire and speech rather than exactitude or science, and structurally intertwined with deception, fiction, and the Real—making it impossible to reduce to a single definition while remaining central to psychoanalytic ethics and treatment.
the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to lead the analysand to articulate this truth... the analyst must take them into account
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#66
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_207"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0236"></span>**training**
Theoretical move: Lacan abolishes the IPA distinction between therapeutic and training analysis, arguing that all analyses are potentially training analyses, and that the formation of the analyst is an ongoing, subject-transforming process irreducible to institutional certification.
the term 'training analysis' refers exclusively to a course of analytic treatment entered into by the analysand for the purpose of training as an analyst.
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#67
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_21"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0037"></span>**art**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's engagement with art is not literary criticism or psychobiography but a methodological demonstration: works of art serve as models for how the analyst should read the analysand's discourse as a text, foregrounding the signifier over the signified, and as illustrative metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts — making psychoanalysis irreducibly a clinical practice rather than a general hermeneutic metadiscourse.
The analyst must, in other words, treat the analysand's discourse as a text
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#68
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans · p.67
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_52"></span>**dialectic**
Theoretical move: Lacan appropriates the Hegelian dialectic—particularly through Kojève's reading—to frame psychoanalytic treatment as a dialectical experience, while decisively breaking with Hegel by denying any final synthesis (Absolute Knowing), replacing the telos of progress with 'the avatars of a lack' anchored in the irreducibility of the unconscious.
the analyst forces the analysand to confront the contradictions and gaps in his narrative
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#69
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_192"></span>**Speech**
Theoretical move: The passage elaborates Lacan's concept of *parole* (speech) as a theoretically overdetermined term drawing on anthropology, theology, and metaphysics, and pivots on the distinction between 'full speech' and 'empty speech' as the axis along which the subject's relation to desire and truth is articulated in psychoanalytic treatment.
One of the analyst's tasks when listening to the analysand is to discern the moments when full speech emerges.
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#70
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_187"></span>**Signifier**
Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's transformation of the Saussurean signifier: by asserting the primacy and autonomy of the signifier over the signified, grounding it in differential structure, and defining it as "that which represents a subject for another signifier," Lacan reconstitutes language as the field of the Other and the unconscious as an effect of the signifier's operation on the subject.
Lacan's insistence that the analyst attend to the signifiers in the analysand's speech is not really an innovation in technique but an attempt to theorise Freud's own method in more rigorous terms.
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#71
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.211
**XVII**
Theoretical move: Lacan critically exposes the theoretical dead end of Balint's object-relation theory, which defines the object purely as satisfier of need and models all libidinal life on a closed, harmonious mother-infant complementarity—arguing this framework cannot account for the subject's encounter with the Other as a genuine subject, and thus deviates from the fundamental analytic conception of the libido.
Balint thus belongs to this Hungarian tradition which blossomed around the questions raised by the relation of the analysand and analyst, conceived of as an interhuman situation involving persons
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#72
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.290
xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\*
Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's *Verneinung* argues that negation (*Verneinung/dénégation*) is not simply the negation internal to judgement but the very genesis of thought: by presenting one's being in the mode of not being it, the subject achieves a *Aufhebung* of repression that separates the intellectual from the affective, and the analysand's intellectual acceptance of what was denied constitutes a "negation of the negation" that still leaves the repressive process intact.
the patient, let us call him the person being psychoanalysed [psychanalyse], says to his analyst: 'Now you'll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I've no such intention.'
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#73
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.17
**I**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the contemporary confusion in analytic technique stems from a reduction of psychoanalysis to a two-body (intersubjective) psychology, and proposes that the analytic experience must instead be formulated as a three-term relation in which speech is the central organizing element.
the elaboration of the notion of the relation between analyst and analysand is the path taken by contemporary analytic doctrines in trying to rediscover a firm basis for the realities of that experience.
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#74
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.38
**m**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical case from Margaret Little to argue that ego-to-ego interpretation — premised on hic et nunc intentionality and projective reciprocity — is structurally indistinguishable from projection and therefore generates errors prior to truth and falsity; genuine interpretation of defences requires at minimum a third term beyond the dyadic ego-relation, and resistance must be understood in Freud's broader sense as anything that interrupts analytic work, not merely as psychical obstacle to interpretation.
The subject was perfectly justified in accepting Margaret Little's interpretation, for the simple reason that, in a relationship as intimate as that which exists between analysand and analyst, he was sufficiently aware of the analyst's feelings.
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#75
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.296
xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\*
Theoretical move: Hyppolite argues that Freud's *Verneinung* cannot be reduced to positive psychology but must be read as a grand myth founding a fundamental asymmetry: affirmation (Bejahung) is the *Ersatz* of Eros/unification, while negation (Verneinung) is the *Nachfolge* of the destruction drive and expulsion (Ausstossung), and it is precisely the *symbol* of negation — not affirmation — that creates a margin of thought independent of the pleasure principle and makes possible the ego's méconnaissance-structured recognition of the unconscious.
'There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the analysand reacts with the phrase: "I didn't think that"'
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#76
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.112
**IX**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of analytic experience rests on full speech as a performative, symbolic act of recognition—not on imaginary transference or indoctrination—and critiques object-relations and superego-based accounts (Strachey, Klein) for remaining trapped on the imaginary plane, proposing instead to relocate the question to the narcissistic/ego economy of the subject.
the analytic method, if it aims at attaining full speech, starts off on a path leading in the diametrically opposed direction, in so far as it instructs the subject to delineate a speech as devoid as possible of any assumption of responsibility
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#77
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.32
**II** > **Sorry? What's that?**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes counter-transference and resistance not as signs of the analyst's authoritarian character but as the very conditions that allow resistance to be rendered objective and therapeutically manageable; recognising resistance is what distinguishes Freud's method from the dominatory logic of hypnotic suggestion.
The only thing that allows the analyst to be intelligent, is when this resistance makes the analysand look like an idiot. It promotes heightened self-esteem.
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#78
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.85
THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primal scene is constitutively traumatic—not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation but in a 'factitious fact' structured by the tuche (the encounter with the Real)—and that the split in the subject persists as the deeper division between the dream-image and the invocatory/scopic solicitation of the gaze and voice.
it is not sexual empathy that sustains the modulations of the analysable, but a factitious fact.
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#79
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), articulates the lying structure of truth, anchors the analyst's position in the hystorization of desire rather than institutional validation, and grounds the pass-procedure in the object as cause of desire and the real as the 'lack of lack.'
Like satisfaction, it is acquired only with use, with the use of an individual—who, in psycho-analysis (psych = fiction of), is called an analysand.
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#80
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transference is constituted precisely by the subject's positioning of another as the "subject supposed to know," and that the analysand's withholding of information from the analyst reveals that what most limits the analytic process is not fear of deception by the analyst but fear of being understood too quickly—i.e., fear that the analyst will reduce the symptom to an organic or biographical cause, foreclosing the analytic work itself.
Because, the analysand may reply, I had told you earlier, you might have regarded it as responsible, in part at least, perhaps even wholly, for my disorders and I am not here for you to find an organic cause for them.
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#81
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.147
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Szasz's ego-psychological conception of transference — wherein transference analysis reduces to reality-testing by a "healthy part of the ego" — as a theoretical blind alley that, by placing the analyst beyond critique, paradoxically endangers psychoanalysis itself; the implicit counter-move is that transference cannot be resolved by appeal to ego integrity or consensual reality-testing.
it is a question of agreement between the analysand and the analyst, except that here the analyst is a judge against whom there is neither appeal nor recourse
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#82
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Subject Supposed to Know cannot be fully dismantled even when the analyst is put in question, because the analysand still credits the analyst with a residual infallibility; and that recognition of the good (Socratic/Platonic tradition) is never sufficient to produce action toward it, since jouissance itself imposes a recoil that splits knowing from wanting.
the patient may think that the analyst may be misled if he gives him certain facts. He holds back certain facts so that the analyst may not go too quickly.
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#83
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.8
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), repositions the analyst as one who 'hystorizes only from himself', introduces the 'pass' as a test of analytic truth, and locates the object as cause of desire as the only conceivable idea of the object—with the lack of the lack constituting the Real.
Like satisfaction, it is acquired only with use, with the use of an individual—who, in psycho-analysis (psych = fiction of), is called an analysand.
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#84
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85
THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental relation to sexuality in analytic experience is not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation, but in a traumatic, factitious fact (the primal scene), and that the subject's split—exemplified by the dream-awakening structure—points toward a more profound split between the representative image and the invocatory/scopic causality (voice and gaze) that underlies it.
it is not sexual empathy that sustains the modulations of the analysable, but a factitious fact
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#85
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.147
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Szasz's ego-psychological account of transference — which reduces it to a defence mechanism analysable only through the "healthy part of the ego" — exposing the theoretical blind alley this creates: if transference is merely illusion to be corrected by reality-testing, the analyst becomes an unappealable judge and analysis collapses into "pure, uncontrolled hazard."
it is a question of agreement between the analysand and the analyst, except that here the analyst is a judge against whom there is neither appeal nor recourse
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#86
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.152
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic relation is structurally asymmetric and irreducibly oriented toward truth: the analyst is posited as the one who knows (Subject Supposed to Know), while the analysand is constitutively situated in the dimension of self-deception (se tromper), making truth — not reciprocity or integrity — the proper frame for understanding the transference.
From the latter, the thought immediately arises that not only must he not make a mistake (se tromper), but also that he can be misled (on peut le tromper).
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#87
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248
OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference is constituted by the subject's attribution of the place of the Subject Supposed to Know to some individual, and that the initial analytic situation is complicated not by the patient's fear of being deceived by the analyst, but rather by the patient's fear that the analyst will be deceived *by them* — a structural reversal that limits the analysand's openness to the analytic rule.
Because, the analysand may reply, I had told you earlier, you might have regarded it as responsible, in part at least, perhaps even wholly, for my disorders and I am not here for you to find an organic cause for them.
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#88
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (grounded in the Ego Ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject sees itself) and the objet petit a as the paradoxical object that disrupts the deceptive mirroring of love in the transference, introducing mutilation and the gift-of-shit as the truth of analytic alienation.
I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this of my person—as they say—Oh, mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of skit
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#89
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the successful termination of analysis consists in the analysand's "conquest of the name" — the separation from identificatory names (father's name, analyst's name) and the founding of a singular subjective identity — with transference liquidation as the structural hinge between alienated and autonomous subjectivity.
This appeal of the analysand to the analyst, takes on from the beginning and at the end the form of two proper names.
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#90
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire is theorized not as a counterforce to the patient's defensiveness but as a ruse that inhabits the patient's own defensive structure—occupying the pole of sexual reality's impossibility—so that what constitutes the analysand's original fantasy can be separated out and the objet petit a revealed as the substitute for the missing sexual relationship; this operation is articulated through the Möbius strip topology of the unexpected.
the subject who knows, who is not the analyst but the analysand, has been for a long time established within his own game
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#91
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26
**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transmission of psychoanalytic experience cannot be grounded in ego-ideal identification or immanent developmental schemas (à la Piaget), but must be seized at the level of structure—specifically the structure of language as a topology that is irreducible to any instrumental or biunivocal logic, implicating the subject as such.
Is the analysand someone who transmits a certain mode of the experiences of the one who analysed him, as he himself has received it, how can these experiences be oriented with respect to one another
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#92
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.296
**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**
Theoretical move: Lacan organizes his year's work around the triad Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit, arguing that the Freudian discovery of compulsion (Zwang as Entzweiung/Spaltung of the subject) and Plato's identification of the Good with Number together illuminate the distinctive status of Truth in psychoanalytic experience—a truth that is irreducibly personal and constituted through means that exceed ordinary medical reference.
if this book were opened by someone who might want to find in it the paths of the perfect psychoanalysand, you can rest assured: he would find himself much less solicited by it than by other works
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#93
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.331
**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that American psychoanalysis has undergone a pathological inversion by becoming an 'o-object' (objet petit a) of conspicuous display and ideological suture — masking the class struggle under the 'pursuit of happiness' and the promise of adaptation — while true psychoanalysis is defined by assuming the irreparable, i.e. the lack of being, and the properly oriented desire of the analyst.
Only if the analysand by going to have himself analysed wants to show ostentatiously that he has the money for it
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#94
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: The child's "all-powerfulness" is not magical omnipotence but derives from the child's structural position as the objet petit a for the desiring adult; the analyst's failure to recognise this makes her into an object herself, turning counter-transference into a transference neurosis that renders analysis interminable.
there is highlighted what is more or less legitimately called counter-transference and which is, as is always the case in a transference neurosis, what is said to be at the source of interminable analyses.
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#95
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.
the collusion of the proper names of the analyst and of the analysand
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#96
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26
**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**
Theoretical move: Lacan dismantles psychological and Piagetian models of intelligence by showing that language is not the instrument of intelligence but its constitutive difficulty, and pivots to the claim that the subject is only a subject by being implicated in structure—thereby grounding analytic transmission not in ego-ideal identification but in the topology of the signifier.
Is the analysand someone who transmits a certain mode of the experiences of the one who analysed him, as he himself has received it, how can these experiences be oriented with respect to one another
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#97
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.331
**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan (via a presenter's reading of Zinberg) diagnoses the "ethical illness" of American psychoanalysis as its transformation into an objet petit a — an object of ostentatious display and adaptation ideology — whose inversion of the analytic aim (assumption of irreparable lack) replaces the desire of the analyst with the pursuit of happiness as social suture; Lacan then defends his own teaching as what preserves a "breathable" theoretical atmosphere against these impasses.
Only if the analysand by going to have himself analysed wants to show ostentatiously that he has the money for it
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#98
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.
the subject who knows, who is not the analyst but the analysand, has been for a long time established within his own game
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#99
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.296
**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**
Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his year-long triadic schema (Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit) to argue that the Freudian discovery of Spaltung/Entzweiung gives a new philosophical status to truth, and that psychoanalysis is constitutively the practice of truth-as-means, distinguishing it from all other sciences and grounding its therapeutic effects in a reduplicated sense of truth proper to the subject.
if this book were opened by someone who might want to find in it the paths of the perfect psychoanalysand
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#100
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272
**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the problem of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (fantasma), Lacan argues that the gap (écart) constitutive of the simulacrum is also constitutive of the subject, and that the Sophist—precisely as the one who lacks a sure reference and operates through this gap—figures the analyst himself, who likewise occupies a place of non-knowledge in relation to the analysand.
He speaks to us and about us every day on our couches. That he speaks in us when we hear speaking those who are speaking.
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#101
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.47
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages with Conrad Stein's theory of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to sharpen the distinction between imaginary dual relations and the properly Lacanian categories of the big Other, the small other, and objet petit a — arguing that the analytic situation cannot be reduced to fusional narcissism but involves an articulated structure of desire and the object.
Presenting himself as a fool, he makes of the psychoanalyst his king. He is going to suffer for pleasure namely try to deny the reality of existence
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#102
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.54
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word cannot be situated at a place of narcissistic fusion or primitive Bejahung (affirmation), but must instead be aligned with Verneinung (negation/denial) — since truth serves itself and cannot be "served," the analyst's position is defined by a structural cut rather than by fulfillment or lure.
through these free associations the analysand 'in the perfect accomplishment of his gift' tries to realise his word towards that same place which is that aimed at by the analyst
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#103
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage, presented by André Green as a commentary on Lacan's o-object, argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted through the effacing of the trace—a logic linking the Death Drive, the Name of the Father, castration, and metonymy—and that this logic of effacement (cutting/suturing) is what structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) fails to capture, reducing symbolic difference to mere homology rather than recognizing the barred lack as the cause of desire.
If the death drive infiltrates the word of the analysand, in the silence towards which it always pushes him, the analyst has to deal with a living word; living in its refusal to be reduced to silence.
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#104
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.100
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 26 January 1966**
Theoretical move: Dr Stein, presenting within Lacan's closed seminar, develops a formal theory of predication to elucidate the psychoanalytic proposition "it speaks" (ça parle), distinguishing the "subject of the predicate" from the "predicating subject" in order to articulate the imaginary limit-structure of the analytic session as one in which the speaking subject cannot be assigned to either patient or analyst individually.
In the analytic situation, it is a matter of someone that one habitually calls the patient and if one wished to examine with this method the content of any dialogue whatsoever… the patient must always remain the same whether he is being spoken about, whether he is being spoken to, or whether he speaks himself.
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#105
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.54
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes to reframe Melman's reading of Stein's article: the analyst's word is not a 'preaching' that serves truth but must be situated at the place of the objet petit a, and the analyst's position is better defined through Verneinung (negation/denial) than through Bejahung (affirmation), because truth serves itself — it cannot be served.
through these free associations the analysand 'in the perfect accomplishment of his gift' tries to realise his word towards that same place which is that aimed at by the analyst
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#106
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive operates through the effacement of the trace—a logic linking the signifier's self-cancellation to castration, paternity, and the cause of desire—and that this logic (not structuralist homology) is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, while also grounding a structural technique built on the non-identity of the signifier to itself.
if the death drive infiltrates the word of the analysand, in the silence towards which it always pushes him, the analyst has to deal with a living word
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#107
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.111
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage stages a seminar discussion in which participants (Conté, Melman, Lacan) critically interrogate Stein's theoretical framework, converging on the argument that his account of the analyst's word, narcissism, desire, and predication remains incomplete precisely because it lacks a structural reference to the big Other as the third locus from which the subject receives his own word — a lacuna that collapses the treatment into a dual imaginary game between analyst and patient.
the lack, for example, of the analysand trying to posit himself as the object lacking to the analyst
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#108
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.46
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages Stein's account of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to distinguish the imaginary dual relation from the big Other and to locate the o-object (objet petit a) within the structure of desire rather than as a supplement to fusional narcissism—thereby insisting that the analytic situation has an articulated symbolic structure, not merely a fusional lack of distinction.
Fearing regression the patient tries to reduce the analyst to silence, to escape from fluctuation by becoming the one who organises it, and to preserve a mastery over it
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#109
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication is not a logical act but an act of desire's forcing, and that the analytic relation cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronouns (I/you equivalence); the remainder that escapes specularisation is what opens the dialectic between the barred Other and truth, and the transference's misunderstanding consists in the analysand supposing the analyst knows everything except the truth.
in this grammatical universe in which Stein seemed to me to situate the relationships of the analyst to the analysand
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#110
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.
it is only around this point that there can take their correct place, especially everything that happens in the field of the analytic act, whether it is a matter of the relation of the analysand-analyst or the effects of regression.
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#111
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.161
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 15 March 1967.**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses an introductory address to Dr. André Green to rehearse the logic of the alienation operation—specifically the forced/inaugural choice between "I am not thinking" and "I am not"—and to argue that psychoanalytic candidates must maintain critical vigilance rather than subordinating thought to the completion of their training analysis.
the proper position of a candidate is criticism … They wait until their analysis is finished to think about it.
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#112
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.217
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.
if the analysed subject, if the analysable subject, adopts what is called a regressive, or again, pre- … position … in order to evade the operation, the impact of castration
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#113
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.185
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.
it is only around this point that there can take their correct place, especially everything that happens in the field of the analytic act, whether it is a matter of the relation of the analysand-analyst or the effects of regression.
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#114
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the paradox that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" as a strictly logical consequence of psychoanalytic doctrine—not a naturalist scandal—while simultaneously arguing that the psychoanalytic act culminates in the analysand rejecting the analyst as objet petit a (the "o-object"), a formulation he notes has gone entirely uncontested.
it is as a piece of shit that the analyst is rejected. That depends uniquely on the psychoanalysand.
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#115
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.
the elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst... If the psychoanalysand makes the psychoanalyst, there is still nothing added except the bill.
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#116
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: At the culmination of a training analysis ("the pass"), the analysand discovers that the subject supposed to know has been reduced to the objet petit a (the analyst as residue/rubbish), and that the subject of every act is constitutively absent from the act itself — a subject without essence, mirroring the o-object's lack of essence, which is the structural truth that the unconscious shares with the end of analysis.
he knows that here is the désêtre that through him, the psychoanalysand, has struck the being of the analyst.
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#117
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.87
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the tetrahedron of alienation (the "either/or," "I am not/I do not think," etc.) to articulate the structure of the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the analyst's unique advantage is knowing from experience what is involved in the Subject Supposed to Know, and that the telos of the analytic act is to reduce that subject to the function of the objet petit a.
This 'I do not think' is what allows us to give its sense, to this word truly manipulated in a way that up to the present was rather abject, in this sense that it reduced the position of the psychoanalysand, the patient, to an attitude that I would qualify as disparaged
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#118
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.
We can identify this psychoanalysand, to the divided and related couple of the spectator and the chorus.
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#119
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.48
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the triad "I read / I write / I lose" to differentiate three levels of knowing and to position the psychoanalytic act as structured around failure and parapraxis, arguing that the analyst's act is irreducible to teaching (thesis) or doing (faire), and that the passage from analysand to analyst marks the critical, untheorised limit at which the act encounters its own obstacle.
The psychoanalysand as I recently introduced the word, a pinpointing that spread rapidly, which proves that it is not inopportune and that moreover it is obvious.
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#120
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalyst operates *as* the objet petit a rather than *being* it, and the psychoanalytic act constitutes a paradoxical act of faith precisely insofar as it puts in question the very support (the subject supposed to know) that makes the analytic work possible—this structural paradox is then leveraged to re-read the Marxist critique of alienation, suggesting that capitalist production of the worker-as-subject mirrors the analyst's production of the psychoanalysand.
if it is true that in the field of the psychoanalytic act what produces the psychoanalysand is the psychoanalyst
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#121
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.79
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.
It is the subject who has accomplished the task at the end of which he has realised himself as subject in castration, qua something lacking in the enjoyment of sexual union.
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#122
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.97
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Aristotelian logical category of the subject—understood as that which slips away beneath predication, represented by the empty box in Peirce's schema—is precisely captured by his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier," thereby grounding the analytic situation in a logic of the subject as non-being, and linking the history of logical debate to the concealed question of desire.
how contest the fact that the psychoanalysand, in his place in the discourse is at the place of the subject? … He is essentially the one who speaks.
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#123
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic act is constituted by a structural feint: the analyst must pretend (while knowing otherwise from their own analysis) that the Subject Supposed to Know is tenable, in order to set the process in motion—but the act itself exceeds doing (faire) and produces a renewal of the subject's presence precisely by excluding the analyst-as-subject from its agency.
It is to this bench that one harnesses, that one puts the psychoanalysand, it is the bench of a doing. He does something. Call that what you will, poetry or breaking in, he does something.
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#124
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.102
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: By deploying Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—Lacan argues that the Objet petit a functions as the true middle term connecting the psychoanalysand-as-subject to the psychoanalyst-as-predicate, such that the psychoanalyst is defined not as a pre-given identity but as a production of the psychoanalysing task, sustained by the analyst's identification with the o-object in itself.
the psychoanalysand and the psychoanalyst placed by us in these distinct positions which are, respectively, what is going to be the status of a subject defined by this discourse
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#125
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the not-all logic of the unconscious prevents any totalisation of psychoanalytic knowledge, and that the psychoanalyst's proper position is defined not by mastery-knowledge but by occupying the place of the objet petit a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position exemplified through the Gaze as the most occluded partial drive in clinical practice.
Is the psychoanalyst that the psychoanalysand is, at the end of his task, what it is? ... There is no one psychoanalysed, there is someone 'who has been a psychoanalysand'
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#126
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's proper function is not mastery of knowledge about sexuality but rather occupancy of the place of the objet petit a—the structural void that conditions desire—and that the analyst's inability to sustain this position drives the institutional fiction of "private life," which insulates analytic hierarchy from the truth of the analyst's own structural impotence.
From the moment one does an analysis, there is no longer a private life… There is an intermediary lock: it is a psychoanalysed, or psychoanalysing life.
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#127
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.66
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of an analysis (which belongs to the analysand as task) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and its replacement by the objet petit a as cause of the subject's division constitutes the act that makes one a psychoanalyst — thereby grounding the logic of the phantasy in the structure of alienation, desire, castration, and the lost object.
Beginning to be a psychoanalyst, as everyone knows, begins at the end of a psychoanalysis ... The analysand who has come to the end of the analysis in the act, if there is one, which carries him to become a psychoanalyst.
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#128
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.3
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates the concept of the "psychoanalytic act" by distinguishing it from both motor activity/discharge (the physiologising, reflex-arc model favoured by ego-psychological theorists) and from mere action, arguing that an act is constitutively tied to a signifying inscription — and thereby implicates the Subject and the unconscious in a way that demands a wholly different theoretical framework.
It is sure that we encounter the act on entering analysis... to decide to do what is called a psychoanalysis. This decision involves a certain commitment.
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#129
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Ego Psychology's normative ideal (Fenichel's "genital character") and Winnicott's object-relations framework to establish that the psychoanalytic act — constitutively tied to the manipulation of transference — is precisely what analysts have most systematically evaded theorising, and that there is no analytic act outside this transference dimension.
I absolutely never meant the discourse of the analysed person - as he is improperly called it would be better to say the analysand
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#130
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.107
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively paradoxical: the analyst operates *as* the objet petit a (not *being* it fully) while simultaneously being the only one capable of putting in question the Subject Supposed to Know on which transference—and the very possibility of the analytic act—depends; this produces the analysand as a kind of manufactured product, linking psychoanalytic alienation to the Marxist problematic of alienated labour.
if it is true that in the field of the psychoanalytic act what produces the psychoanalysand is the psychoanalyst
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#131
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.78
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.
It is the subject who has accomplished the task at the end of which he has realised himself as subject in castration, *qua* something lacking in the enjoyment of sexual union.
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#132
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.158
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "not-all" logic of quantification—applied to the proposition "not all knowledge is conscious"—does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; instead, the analyst's proper position is determined by their identification with the objet petit a (as cause of desire and object of demand), and each register of this object (gaze, voice, breast, anal) carries an immunity to negation that grounds the psychoanalytic act.
Is the psychoanalyst that the psychoanalysand is, at the end of his task, what it is?
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#133
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.65
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of analysis (on the side of the analysand) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know gives way to the Objet petit a as cause of the subject's division — and it is this terminal act that grounds the analyst's capacity to begin each new analysis.
A psychoanalysis is a task, and some people even say that it is a trade... They are going to say it now because the word has become popular. Nevertheless, that is what it means.
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#134
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.87
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is structurally defined through the tetrahedron of alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not"), and the analyst's function is to reduce the Subject Supposed to Know to the objet petit a — a move that distinguishes genuine analytic structure from mere discourse and rehabilitates resistance as a structural necessity rather than a defect of the analysand.
This 'I do not think' is what allows us to give its sense, to this word truly manipulated in a way that up to the present was rather abject, in this sense that it reduced the position of the psychoanalysand, the patient, to an attitude that I would qualify as disparaged, if the psychoanalysand... resisted.
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#135
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.69
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that at the conclusion of a training analysis, the analyst is reduced to the objet petit a (a residue without essence), and the subject supposed to know is simultaneously subverted — a moment Lacan calls "the pass" — such that the analysand-becoming-analyst installs the o-object at the place of the subject supposed to know, discovering that the subject of every act is a subject not-present-in-the-act, and that all o-objects are without essence.
he knows that here is the désêtre that through him, the psychoanalysand, has struck the being of the analyst
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#136
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.33
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fenichel/Winnicott discussion to distinguish a normative, ego-psychological discourse about psychoanalysis from the analytical act proper, arguing that transference cannot be legitimised by an appeal to the analyst's objectivity but is itself constitutive of analytic practice—and that the analytic act has been systematically eluded, even by Freud's own treatment of parapraxis.
the discourse of the analysed person - as he is improperly called it would be better to say the analysand
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#137
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.48
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes three levels of "mathesis" (I read / I write / I lose) to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure and loss, and that teaching (thesis/antithesis) is not itself an act — but the act's topology, in which failure is primary, is what analysis uniquely inaugurates and what analysts themselves resist recognising.
The psychoanalysand as I recently introduced the word, a pinpointing that spread rapidly, which proves that it is not inopportune and that moreover it is obvious.
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#138
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.41
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the Subject Supposed to Know is constitutive of the analytic situation from its very inception, and that the psychoanalytic act is defined precisely by the analyst's feigned (and potentially forgotten) displacement of that function—a displacement that is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.
The subject, let us say the analysand is not something flat, as suggested by the image of the drawing. Inside, he is himself the subject as such already determined and inscribed in the world as caused by a certain effect of the signifier.
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#139
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.3
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates his seminar on the psychoanalytic act by arguing that 'act' cannot be reduced to motor activity or energetic discharge (as in ego-psychology and physiologising theories); rather, the act is constituted by its correlative inscription in the Symbolic order, thereby implicating the subject—and specifically the unconscious—in a way that distinguishes it categorically from mere action or behaviour.
It is all the same something that merits the name of act to decide, with everything that this involves, to decide to do what is called a psychoanalysis.
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#140
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.199
**Annex 3**
Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.
the elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst... Does the psychoanalysand, at the end of the task assigned to him, know 'better than anyone' the subjective dismissal
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#141
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.102
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—to argue that the Objet petit a functions as the logical middle term connecting the psychoanalysand (as vanishing subject) to the psychoanalyst (as product/predicate), while also theorizing that the analyst's position is constituted by an 'in itself' identification with the o-object, distinguished from narcissistic human relations by the exclusion of the 'I like you' (tu me plais).
such a subject whose exercise is in a way to put himself to the test of his own resignation, when can we say to what is a predicate applied?
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#142
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.175
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of the statement "I am not" to anchor the split subject of the unconscious, then extends this logical paradox to the claim that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" — not as naturalist provocation but as a structural consequence of desire being constructed through the unconscious, with the psychoanalytic act defined as the analyst being rejected like the objet petit a at the end of analysis.
That depends uniquely on the psychoanalysand. It is necessary to know whether for him shit is really what was at stake.
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#143
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.35
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**
Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Meno* alongside the analytic act, Lacan argues that the theory of reminiscence — knowledge already in the soul, recoverable through questioning — is the archaic, mythical form of the function he calls the 'subject supposed to know,' which underpins every question about knowledge and is inseparable from the structure of transference and the unformulated end of the training analysis.
In the training analysis, the psychoanalytic act is not on the part of the subject who, as it is put, submits to it.
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#144
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.89
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constituted by the analyst's refusal to act, which structurally opens the space for transference and the Subject Supposed to Know; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the necessity of signifying sequence for any 'consequence' to be conceivable, and maps the objet petit a as the horizon-end of every act, not just the analytic one.
psychoanalysand with the function occupied in the dynamic by him, the psychoanalysand as subject, the little o-object.
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#145
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.97
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act forces a return to the foundational problem of logic — the status of the subject — and that his formula "the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier" re-opens what mathematical logic elides: the initiating positing of any signifier. Using Peirce's schema of the empty box, he demonstrates that the subject is constituted as nothing (no stroke), an effect of discourse rather than a bearer of being (ousia), and that psychoanalysis uniquely ties together the history of logic's ambiguities about the subject by revealing desire as the hidden stake behind logical debates.
how contest the fact that the psychoanalysand, in his place in the discourse is at the place of the subject? Whatever reference we arm ourselves with to better situate him, it is naturally in the first place with the linguistic reference. He is essentially the one who speaks.
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#146
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.383
Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969
Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.
the hysteric, as one might say, is already a psychoanalysand, namely, already on the path of a solution
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#147
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.239
Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.
They have put the work definitively into the hands of the psychoanalysand. They reserve the listening for themselves.
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#148
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363
Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.
the psychoanalysand makes (fait), in the strong sense of the term, the psychoanalyst.
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#149
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.50
*[A porter appears]*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.
the one who accepts in advance to be the product of the cogitations of the psychoanalysand, namely the psychoanalyst, becomes the pledge and the hostage of
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#150
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.21
**ANALYTICON**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the four discourses (Master, Hysteric, University, Analyst) and argues that psychoanalytic knowledge cannot be transmitted like ordinary university knowledge, because the being of the psychoanalyst—what is produced when a psychoanalysand commits to becoming an analyst—is the real question, a point left open in his seminar on the psychoanalytic act.
These are called psychoanalysands... What is generated by the fact that one fine day a psychoanalysand commits himself to be a psychoanalyst?
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#151
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.275
Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970
Theoretical move: The passage argues that "dying of shame" is the only affect that registers the Real as such — shame is the genealogically certain sign of a failed signifier, and this logic is used to diagnose University discourse as a perverted Master's discourse that evades the Real. The passage then deploys the Subject Supposed to Know as the mechanism by which the psychoanalysand constructs transference, explicitly warning that identifying the analyst with knowledge of truth would be fatal to that transference.
The supposed knowledge from which the psychoanalysand constructs the transference
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#152
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.105
*[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970
Theoretical move: The Discourse of the Master is identified as the structural inverse of the Analytic Discourse (symmetry with respect to a point, not a line or plane), and the Master Signifier is shown to determine castration by transmitting itself toward the means of enjoyment (knowledge); this move simultaneously distinguishes the unconscious as a disjointed, mythical knowledge irreducible to scientific discourse.
the one who is in the position of analysand whom we allow, in a way, to make his way into his own quarry
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#153
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.5
**Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVIII by arguing that discourse is a structure irreducible to any speaking subject, that the subject is necessarily alienated and split within it, and that the question of "a discourse that might not be a semblance" can only be posed from within the artefact of discourse itself — there being no metalanguage, no Other of the Other, and no true of the true from which to judge it.
someone, starting from the analytic discourse, places himself with respect to you in the position of an analysand. This is not new, I already said it but no one paid any attention to it.
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#154
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.129
Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan uses mathematical logic (Boole, Frege, Cantor) to argue that Truth can only "half-say" itself — that 0 is not the negation of 1 but the mark of a constitutive lack, such that the impossibility of reaching 2 from 0 and 1 formally mirrors the impossibility of the sexual relationship and the inaccessibility of the Real; the analyst's position as semblance of Objet petit a grounds a non-initiatory knowledge of truth that is structural, not esoteric.
the analyst can understand nothing except in the name of what the analysand says, namely, to see himself, not as cause but as effect of this discourse
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#155
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.76
Seminar 5: Wednesday 9 February 1972
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a emerges not from any single term (demand, refusal, offer) but from their triadic knotting—a Borromean-style structure where each term only holds meaning through the others, and the "it's not that" at the heart of every demand is precisely the irreducible gap that generates the object of desire in analytic discourse.
what grounds the discourse of the analysand, is precisely that, I am asking you to refuse me what I am offering you, because it is not that!
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#156
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.81
Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment is always "from the Other" but never sexual (there is no sexual relation), and that the Other must be barred — emptied out — to become the locus where the sexuation formulae and knowledge are inscribed; this move connects the barred Other S(Ø) to lalangue, fantasy, repetition (Nachträglichkeit), and the necessity of writing for psychoanalysis to be possible at all.
I am at the place, the same one, and this is what is educative about it, I am at the place of the analysand.
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#157
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.126
Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.
under the title of analysand, they are standing surety for in his enunciation as subject
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#158
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.94
Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972 > Seminar 7: Wednesday IS March 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism "Yad'lun" (there is One / il y a de l'Un) as a foundational ontological proposition, distinguishing the One as a structural feature of analytic discourse from both the Platonic dyadic Eros and the Freudian death-drive pairing, while showing that analytic experience turns on the analysand's encounter with division within the One rather than a fusion of two.
the analysand who is what is at stake, the first mode of the manifestation of this One, is obviously to reproach you with only being One among others.
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#159
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.181
J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972
Theoretical move: Lacan substitutes Peirce's schema with his own articulation of analytic discourse, identifying the *objet petit a* as the sole representamen in analysis — the analyst embodies this object as semblance/waste-product so that the analysand can be born to interpreting speech; the passage closes by reframing the analytic relation as fraternal brotherhood rooted in shared subjection to discourse, while warning that bodily fraternity without symbolic mediation gives rise to racism.
The interpreter, is the analysand... it is the couple representation-object which has always to be reinterpreted, this is what is at stake in analysis.
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#160
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.17
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "incomprehension of Lacan" is not a symptom, using this occasion to distinguish the symptom-as-truth-value (a one-directional equivalence introduced by Marxist thinking and refined by psychoanalysis) from mere misunderstanding or resistance, while also clarifying the structure of the Subject Supposed to Know as the ground of transference independently of any certainty about the analyst's actual knowledge.
since it is I who speak, it is I who am here in the position of the analysand.
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#161
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.120
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > Pascal's Triangle
Theoretical move: By working through Pascal's triangle and set theory (the empty set as element, pure difference as sameness), Lacan argues that the One operative in analytic theory is not the One of similitude/Platonic universality but the One of pure difference that grounds repetition — the S1 produced at the level of surplus-jouissance in the analytic discourse.
this major incidence in the talk of the analysand that it exposes with a certain repetition, with regard to what? A signifying structure.
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#162
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.57
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the tetrahedron to ground the Four Discourses as a structural necessity derived from the properties of four points in space, then pivots to the question of the function of speech as the unique form of action that posits itself as truth—establishing the epistemological basis for the knowledge of the psychoanalyst.
this is what this discourse reveals to each and every one, who simply commit themselves to it in an oriented fashion as an analysand.
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#163
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.70
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's knowledge is constituted by a "scrap of knowledge" drawn from the subject's own jouissance—unconscious knowledge that is not "supposed" but emerges from slips, dreams, and the analysand's work—and locates this within the Four Discourses structure where S2 occupies the place of truth and $ occupies the place of enjoyment, distinguishing scientific (mathematical/topological) writing from the zone of discourse where meaning is always partial and borrowed from another discourse.
It is in this stumbling, in this failed action, in the dream, in the work of the analysand that there results this knowledge
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#164
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26
II
Theoretical move: By reading the Meno episode of the slave's geometry lesson, Lacan establishes a structural distinction between the Imaginary (intuitive, reminiscent, formal) and the Symbolic (irreducible, forcing, non-homogeneous with intuition), arguing that the Symbolic cannot be derived from the Imaginary and that this cleavage is the founding move for understanding the ego in Freudian — rather than general psychological — terms.
Meno isn't the analysand, he's the analyst - the bulk of analysts.
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#165
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.110
**VII** > 92 Complement
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the distinction between the infinite and the finite to recast the logic of the not-all (pas-toute): in the finite, not-all implies a particular exception, but in the infinite the not-all produces only an indeterminate existence that cannot be constructed—grounding his claim that Woman cannot be written (barred) and that feminine jouissance exceeds the phallic function.
We can deal with the unconscious only on the basis of what is said, of what is said by the analysand. That is a saying (dire).
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#166
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.7
On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > **PREFACE**
Theoretical move: This is a translator's preface by Bruce Fink to Seminar XX, making no substantive theoretical argument; it addresses translation methodology, the problem of misrepresentation of Lacan by secondary commentators, and the challenges of rendering Lacan's polyvalent French into English.
As is true in the case of an analyst listening to the discourse proffered by an analysand, there is no escaping a theoretical frame of sorts
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#167
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.11
On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.
while it is true that with respect to you I can only be here in the position of an analysand due to my 'I don't want to know anything about it'
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#168
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.93
**VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)*
Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.
the very watchword of the analysand's discourse - is what leads to the Lustprinzip
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#169
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**
Theoretical move: The passage introduces a structural crisis within linguistics itself — the shift from Saussurean structuralism to transformational grammar, and then the internal antinomies (realist/nominalist, intensional/extensional) within transformational linguistics — in order to ground Lacan's own concept of *linguisterie* as a distinct field that takes the unconscious as accessible only through the said, not through scientific linguistics.
we can only deal with the unconscious starting from the said, the said of the analysand
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#170
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.163
Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**
Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural connection between the barred Woman (not-all), the barred Other S(Ø), and Other jouissance, arguing that what ancient metaphysics designated as the Supreme Good (Aristotle's unmoved mover) is in fact a mythical placeholder for the enjoyment of the Other—and that psychoanalysis must dissociate the imaginary small o from the symbolic barred O to accomplish what psychology has failed to do: the splitting that reveals the sexual non-relationship at the foundation of all knowledge.
to say anything at all, which is the very watchword of the discourse of the analysand, is what leads to the Lustprinzip
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#171
Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.73
**Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the model for a "Real meaning effect" in analytic interpretation: by homogenising the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) as equally consistent and showing their non-chain knotting, he repositions the analytic saying (*dire*) as what makes a knot—not mere word-use—while introducing "ek-sistence" as the Real correlate of the knotted Imaginary.
The word is an object of elaboration for the analysand, but what the analyst says – for he says – what the analyst says has effects
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#172
Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.67
**Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976** > W w e W.
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's riddle (the fox burying his grandmother) as an exemplar of the analytic response — necessarily "stupid" relative to the poem-like symptom — and argues that meaning is produced by suturing/splicing the Imaginary to the Symbolic, while simultaneously splicing the sinthome to the parasitic Real of enjoyment; the Borromean knot is the structural model for this therapeutic operation.
the object of the analyst's response to the presentation by the analysand all along of his symptom.
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#173
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.63
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topological figures (flattening of the Borromean knot) to generate the Real/Imaginary distinction, then cedes the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who constructs a multi-stage circuit using the Graph of Desire and the Purloined Letter schema to theorise the *Passe* as a process by which successive inversions of knowledge between subject (Bozef) and Other (the King) propel the subject through positions of innocence, duplicity, and finally radical exposure before the Other.
the analyser quite often as we know chooses his analyst while saying unconsciously to himself... 'I am choosing him, this particular one, because I know I am going to be able to best him'
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#174
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.110
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lalangue—the mother tongue as obscene, pre-structural substrate—is what the analytic session truly circulates around (via the analysand's kinship discourse), and that the symptom (sinthome), not truth, is what the analyst actually reads; "varité" (a portmanteau of truth and variety) names the only accessible approximation of truth, rendering psychoanalysis structurally an "autism à deux" redeemed only by lalangue's communal character.
depends on the reading that he makes of his analyser, of what his analyser says to him in so many words…What his analyser believes he is saying to the analyst in question, has nothing to do…with the truth.
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#175
Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.16
**Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.
The analyser speaks. He produces poetry. He produces poetry when he manages to do so – it is not frequent – but it is art.
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#176
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan
**II** > **Ill** > **The Other and psychosis**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a polemical aside about analytic literature to set up a methodological contrast: the analyst's clinical practice demands the abolition of personal judgment toward patient utterances, whereas the accumulated body of psychoanalytic literature is marked by flagrant, unacknowledged contradictions around basic concepts — implicitly motivating Lacan's own rigorous conceptual return.
as I was reminded by my analysands [analyses] several times on the one day
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#177
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.432
**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.
the analyst does everything at this moment to suggest to the subject that there is in her a desire to possess the phallus. In itself, this is perhaps not, my goodness, the worst thing he could say, if it were not for the fact that for him that means that the subject has the desire to be a man. Which she doesn't stop contradicting
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#178
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.424
**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.
It's perfectly clear that the orientation of the treatment opens the door to an entire imaginary collaboration in the two-person relation between the analysand and the analyst
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#179
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.489
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **1 The signifying chain**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifying chain is the irreducible structural condition of human subjectivity, the unconscious, and intersubjectivity alike — and that failing to grasp this leads to technical deviations (e.g. Bouvet's imaginary-centric technique), which Schema L is designed to correct by showing how the vector from the Other to the subject must traverse, not reduce to, the imaginary relation.
the homosexual relationship between the analyst and the analysand, and to imaginary fellatio
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#180
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.52
**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*
Theoretical move: Lacan establishes love as a Metaphor (signifier substitution) by articulating the structural non-coincidence between what the lover (erastès) lacks and what the beloved (erômenos) unknowingly has, grounding transference in this same gap and positioning the trajectory of analysis as the revelation of the unconscious Other through an analogous structure.
He who seeks us out does so on the basis of the assumption that he doesn't know what he has, and the whole unconscious, the fundamental 'he doesn't know,' is already implied therein.
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#181
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.194
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is first encountered as the Other's unconscious, which reframes the countertransference debate: analytic apathy is not grounded in the analyst's thorough self-analysis (reduction of unconscious blind spots) but in the analyst being possessed by a desire stronger than other desires—a transformed economy of desire specific to the analytic position.
the question ... is fundamental to the position of the analysand in relation to the analyst, even if he does not formulate it to himself - 'What does he [the analyst] want?'
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#182
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.193
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, and uses this to reread Socrates' role in the Symposium as an unwitting analyst who redirects Alcibiades' transference love toward his true desire — thereby grounding the analytic situation in the structural relation between two desires rather than in object-relations theory.
how the final articulation of the Symposium... allows us to structure the situation of the analysand in the presence of the analyst around the position of two desires
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#183
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.343
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function cannot be theorized neutrally from outside the analytic group, because post-Freudian technique underwent a symptomatic "slippage" in which the ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) was quietly replaced by the ideal ego (ideales Ich) — a displacement that reflects the analyst's own subjective involvement and traces back to the 1920 turning point, where analytic discourse ceased to recognize itself as a discourse bearing on the discourse of the unconscious.
there is no overlap between what the analyst is for the analysand at the beginning of the analysis and what the analysis of transference will allow us to reveal
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#184
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.200
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Kleinian theory of countertransference by showing that what analysts call "countertransference" — the analyst's feelings determined by the analysand — is not an incidental imperfection but a structural feature that must be theorized through the Graph of Desire (especially the relation between demand, the Other, and the superego), not simply attributed to projection of the "bad object."
the analysand has a partner. You should not be surprised to discover that the analysand's own ego is attached to the same place.
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#185
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.221
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst must preserve the gap between demand and desire by resisting premature interpretation: the "margin of incomprehension" is precisely the margin of desire, and collapsing it—whether by satisfying the obsessive's demand, offering phallic communion, or nourishing the subject with metaphor—forecloses desire in favour of symptom, while the object of desire is shown to pre-exist the subject who seeks it.
what it is most important to understand in the analysand's demand is what is beyond that demand.
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#186
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.210
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between demand and desire is irreducible: every demand structurally evokes a counter-demand from the Other, and it is precisely the meeting of these two demands—not a meeting of tendencies—that produces the discordance in which desire exceeds and survives (or is extinguished by) satisfaction, illustrated paradigmatically through oral demand and the nursing relationship.
the analyst's necessary involvement in the transferential situation, which is precisely why we must distrust this unsuitable term. For, in fact, countertransference simply concerns the necessary consequences of the phenomenon of transference itself
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#187
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.246
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.
He must be but one short step away from being as ignorant as his analysand... he is only effective when he gives himself over to true surprise, which is untransmittable, and of which he can give only a sign.
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#188
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.330
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the question of transference from countertransference to the analyst's ontological participation ('our being'), then uses this reframing to adjudicate the Kleinian (analyst as object) versus Anna Freudian/ego-psychological (analyst as subject, therapeutic alliance) poles, before pivoting to myth as the structural category that underlies psychoanalytic fate—the analysand's quest for what he calls his 'destiny'—and links it to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◇ a).
What does the analysand come looking for in analysis? He comes looking for what there is to be found, or, more precisely, if he comes looking, it is because there is something to be found.
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#189
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.443
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVII - Mourning the Loss of the Analyst**
Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes to Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVII, providing philological, intertextual, and editorial clarifications; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own, though several notes gesture toward Lacanian concepts (barred signifier, fantasy, desire, the analyst as object) in passing cross-references.
it being unclear whether it is the analyst who mourns or the analysand who mourns the loss of the analyst.
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#190
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.425
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter ΧΠ - Transference in the Present**
Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic and conceptual glosses on Seminar VIII's discussion of transference, desire, and the Graph of Desire; it is largely non-substantive but contains two theoretically pointed glosses: one clarifying the aim of *Aidos* as the fall of the Other (A) into *objet a*, and one identifying the analysand's desire as the question "What does the analyst want?"
The 'analysand's constitutive desire' is the question, 'What does the analyst want?'
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#191
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.6
*Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*
Theoretical move: By interrogating the Cartesian cogito through the logical paradox of the liar ("I am lying"), Lacan argues that "I think" cannot ground "I am" because it confuses the planes of enunciation and statement (énoncé/énonciation), thereby opening the question of the split subject and the impossibility of self-grounding identity in psychoanalysis.
I remember one of them - one can quote a dream -: 'Why?' dreamt one of my analysands, 'does he not tell the truth about the truth?'
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#192
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.193
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*
Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.
can cause the subject from time to time to pose the question of the analyst's desire, a desire always presumed never known and for this reason always potentially the place from which anxiety can arise for the analysand.
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#193
The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.70
III. The Triumph of Religion
Theoretical move: Lacan sharply distinguishes psychoanalytic speech from religious confession, arguing that the analytic setting is not confessional but oriented toward free speech about anything; religion's potential triumph over psychoanalysis is explained not by any structural resemblance between the two but by religion's constitutive invincibility.
We begin by explaining to people that they are not there in order to confess. It is the first step of the art. They are there to talk - to talk about anything.
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#194
The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.82
V. The Word BringsJouissance
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Gospel of John's "In the beginning was the Word" by insisting that the Word precedes the beginning and is the fundamental condition of human suffering ('ravaged by the Word'), while simultaneously grounding the clinical practice of analysis in the Word as a source of jouissance — the reason analysands return.
why would they come back so regularly for years on end? Can you imagine that!
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#195
Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.19
<span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell
Theoretical move: Reshe argues that the death drive constitutes an irreparable "negative insight" that undermines psychoanalysis from within, revealing it as a self-defeating practice: the therapeutic frame structurally contradicts—and thereby cancels—any genuine acknowledgement of suffering as constitutive and incurable, making the psychoanalyst a fraud and psychoanalysis itself a living-dead institution.
This is when the analysand sabotages a favourable outcome of the analysis, which contradicts the initial demand of the analysand, that is, alleviating their suffering.
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#196
Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.138
<span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that psychoanalysis uniquely enables access to the structural causes of suffering by attending to the signifier rather than pre-established therapeutic schemas; suppression of the unconscious through positive-thinking regimes or pharmaceuticals does not eliminate its content but forecloses it, producing a return of the Real — a logic she homologizes to the climate crisis as a structural surplus-waste problem.
a handle that can help the analysand move something in this structure she inhabits, and which inhabits her
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#197
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.167
Silence
Theoretical move: Dolar argues that silence must be theorized across Lacan's three registers—symbolic (silence as structural differential element), imaginary (silence as supposed plenitude), and real (silence as the mute insistence of the drives)—and that the analyst's silence is not merely an absence of speech but an act that homologizes the silence of the drives, making it the operative lever of analytic practice.
Psychoanalysis, in its elementary form, places side by side an analysand who speaks—the only rule being that he or she should freely say anything that comes to mind—and an analyst who keeps silent.
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#198
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
III
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat—manifest in transference neurosis, fate patterns, and traumatic dreams—operates beyond and more primally than the pleasure principle, forcing a theoretical revision that displaces pleasure as the sole regulator of psychical excitation and anticipates the hypothesis of the death drive.
The patient is unable to remember all that is repressed within him… Instead he is driven to repeat the repressed matter as an experience in the present, instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past
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#199
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > *Einfall*: Associate Freely Now!
Theoretical move: Free association, far from enacting psychical freedom, operates as a coercive rule that exposes unconscious determination: by repeating the illusion of freedom it simultaneously dismantles it, thereby revealing a concept of freedom internal to—rather than opposed to—determinism.
The analysand is required to be an attentive and detached observer of the associative movement of his own thought, such that his speech mimetically repeats this associative movement.
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#200
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > How to Remain a Rationalist?
Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freudian psychoanalysis establishes a "materialist rationalism" whose founding gesture—taking parapraxes and other seemingly trivial phenomena seriously—entails a non-exclusive universalism about rational explanation, a new concept of existence that encompasses what "inexists" (the unsaid, the unconscious), and an immaterial materiality ('un-matter') that constitutes the Real underlying psychoanalytic inquiry.
Freud therefore came up with the idea that the analyst's 'evenly suspended attention' (*gleichschwebender Aufmerksamkeit*) corresponds to the analysand's 'free association,' to which I will return.
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#201
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.235
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *2. The Rewriting of Destiny*
Theoretical move: This passage, constituted by scholarly endnotes, theorizes the constitutive incoherence of the big Other (barred, lacking any Other of the Other), the pre-symbolic law of the mother as foundational subjection, the distinction between classical and modern tragedy as forms of destined versus destituted subjectivity, and the analytic end-point as confrontation with helplessness and the absence of a Sovereign Good — all articulating how drive, fantasy, and the real internally limit symbolic consistency.
the analysand's interpretation or construction of the Other's desire can be thrown into question only insofar as the analyst does not react as the analysand expects
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#202
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.67
2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Analyst as Daimon*
Theoretical move: Analysis functions as an "interpellation beyond ideological interpellation" by repositioning the analyst as the enigmatic cause of desire, replacing fantasmatic fixations with a transferential relation that reorganizes the analysand's existential orientation and opens new possibilities of singularity.
Instead of staying forever stuck in repetitive fantasies, the analysand's desire becomes amenable to working through and reconfiguration.
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#203
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.69
2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*
Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.
The analysand emerges with new relations to life's possibilities, and that increases the capacity for joy—as well as for genuine sorrow
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#204
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *8. The Sublimity of Love*
Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.
the clinical practice of psychoanalysis can take advantage of the enigmatic desire of the analyst to induce a reorganization of the analysand's psychic life
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#205
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.63
2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*
Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.
for the analyst to make himself 'the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness . . . is a form of fraud'
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#206
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.42
1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that transcendent experiences function as a counter-interpellation that breaks the hypnotic hold of sociosymbolic investments, thereby releasing congealed drive energies and opening access to subjective singularity — situating this claim at the intersection of Lacanian Real, Santner's theology-inflected post-Lacanian theory, and Althusserian interpellation.
Lacan's own statement about miracles is much less sanguine, for he makes it in the context of complaining about the fact that analysands are invariably looking for 'a place where miracles happen'
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#207
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec
<span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 2**
Theoretical move: This endnotes section for Chapter 2 develops the theoretical argument that the gaze arises from linguistic rather than voyeuristic/fetishistic assumptions, that the cinema is better understood through the concept of the "nonspecularizable" than through the mirror/screen analogy, and that a properly Lacanian account of the subject requires distinguishing the unreturned gaze from imaginary identification and aggressivity.
It was only with the second, the privileging of the analyst/analysand relationship, that psychoanalysis (properly speaking) was begun.
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#208
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.117
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c09_r1.xhtml_page_117" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="117"></span>*9*
Theoretical move: Through the analytic session, the passage traces how a lifelong pattern of self-imposed exile and isolation—from family, from intimacy, from presence—constitutes a compulsive repetition that the analysand only recognizes as such mid-session, connecting childhood withdrawal to adult philosophical "theoria" and forcing a revision of his idealized self-narrative.
I am chronically uncomfortable on the couch. Working myself up to speak feels like sticking a finger down my throat.
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#209
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.81
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_76" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="76"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_77" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="77"></span>*7*
Theoretical move: The passage enacts the analytic session as a site where dream-work, traumatic association, and unconscious guilt converge: the dreaming subject's images (black lake, renovated cottage, self-shooting) are mobilized in the transference with the analyst (Barbara), ultimately forcing the analysand to articulate the guilt-laden fantasy that his son's death was his own fault — a move from free association to confession that the analytic frame makes both possible and unbearable.
The need to know, to make some sense of what happened, that's what drove me into analysis. Yet the labor of the sessions seems impossible. I have to force myself to speak.
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#210
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.39
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c05_r1.xhtml_page_39" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="39"></span>*5*
Theoretical move: The passage performs a live demonstration of free association on the analytic couch, illustrating how the analyst's minimal interventions (repetition, silence, well-timed questions) function as quilting points that retroactively reorganize the analysand's speech, and how the unconscious says more than is consciously intended—the most basic tenet Lacan's teaching according to the author.
I lie back awkwardly and try to relax, painfully aware of the woman sitting unseen behind me.
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#211
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.53
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c05_r1.xhtml_page_39" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="39"></span>*5*
Theoretical move: This passage enacts, in a clinical session, the psychoanalytic dynamic of digression-as-avoidance: the analysand's free-associative detour through childhood memories is retrospectively revealed as a defence against the unbearable grief of the son's death, illustrating how the pleasure of reminiscence functions as a resistance to the traumatic Real.
Why am I recounting this stream of memories? I don't know. I'm savoring them now, but it seems ridiculous to be paying such an exorbitant amount for the hearing of them.
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#212
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.207
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c15_r1.xhtml_page_207" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="207"></span>*15*
Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical-psychoanalytic move in which dream-work becomes the site for recognizing disavowed aggression and tracing an intergenerational transmission of denied ambition; the analyst's intervention forces the analysand to own the dream's transformative energy as his own, turning the dream from passive observation into an act of unconscious desire.
As I lie down again on the couch, I feel like a prizefighter flopping onto the corner stool and leaning back against the ropes.
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#213
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.12
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c02_r1.xhtml_page_8" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="8"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c02_r1.xhtml_page_9" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="9"></span>*2*
Theoretical move: The passage performs an autobiographical-theoretical pivot: the author's grief-driven compulsion to *know* what led to his son's suicide, and his subsequent entry into analysis, set up the book's central argument that analytic work ultimately displaces the demand for knowledge with an acceptance of unknowing — a move that challenges the author's own philosophical commitments to theoretical clarity.
It was that desperate need for understanding that drove me into the terrible silence of an analyst's consulting room.
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#214
Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.203
<span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_198" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="198"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_199" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="199"></span>*14*
Theoretical move: The passage stages a classic analytic move: the analysand's resistance to self-knowledge (contempt for "pat Freudian formulas") is itself interpreted as a defence against a painful discovery — that projected opacity onto the other (ex-wife, son) screens disavowed rage within the self, illustrating how projection and denial function in the transference relationship.
For a moment, I'm pulled up short by a wave of contempt for the whole apparatus of psychoanalysis.
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#215
Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.143
*Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.
For does this mean that the prisoners are in the position of the analysand? And if so, should one not here also recall the basic fact that (in psychoanalysis) an analysand is constitutively a volunteer?
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#216
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)
Theoretical move: By reinterpreting Plato's cave through topology (Möbius strip, Klein bottle) and the Lacanian Real, Žižek argues that the Self is a fragile surface between two outsides, that authentic emancipation requires a dialectics of master and volunteer structurally homologous to the analytic relation, and that capitalist "freedom" and emancipatory "servitude" are two inversions of the same Möbius-strip reversal of freedom/servitude.
does this mean that those who need a master are—always already—in the position of the analysand?
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#217
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.
the final moment of the psychoanalytic process is, for the analysand, precisely when he gets rid of this question - that is, when he accepts his being as non-justified by the big Other
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#218
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.86
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation, Separation, and the Traversing of Fantasy in the Analytic Setting**
Theoretical move: The analytic setting operationalizes alienation and separation as clinical techniques: the analyst's enigmatic desire disrupts the analysand's fantasy ($ ◇ a), while the Freudian injunction "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" frames the Lacanian subject as ethically tasked with subjectifying the otherness of primal repression — making the subject appear where the drive/Other once dominated.
Imagine, for a moment, an analysand-ensconced upon the analyst's couch, talking about his or her dream from the night before, filling the room with his or her discourse, hoping that it will be interesting and satisfying to the analyst
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#219
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.46
<span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Trauma**
Theoretical move: Fink distinguishes two orders of the Real: a pre-symbolic R1 (residuum never fully symbolized, seat of trauma and fixation) and a second-order Real generated *by* the symbolic order itself through structural exclusion (the *caput mortuum*), arguing that what the symbolic chain necessarily cannot write causally determines what it does write — thereby introducing the Real as the structural cause of the chain rather than merely its outside.
By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic 'event,' we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers.
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#220
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.41
<span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **The Unconscious Assembles**
Theoretical move: The unconscious operates as a formal, non-semantic ciphering system: it is structured not by meaning but by letter-assemblages functioning like set-theoretical inscriptions, so that psychoanalytic interpretation aims not at unveiling meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning in order to locate the determinants of the subject's behavior.
What must be glimpsed by the analysand, beyond the meaning inherent in interpretation itself, is 'the signifier-which has no meaning, and is irreducible and traumatic-to which he, as subject, is subjected'
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#221
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.14
**THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise
Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.
a paradoxical move by the analysand, prepared by a specific approach on the analyst's part, to subjectify the cause of his or her existence
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#222
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.63
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Cartesian Subject and Its Inverse**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan inverts the Cartesian cogito by demonstrating that the subject cannot simultaneously possess thought and being; instead of the ego's "false being" (conscious rationalization mistaken for true subjectivity), the Lacanian subject is constituted by a forced choice that permanently separates it from being — a structural inversion of Descartes rather than a mere critique.
this false being manifests itself every time an analysand says, 'I'm the kind of person who's independent and free-thinking'
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#223
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.105
<span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Imaginary Objects, Imaginary Relations*
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's early theorisation of the ego as imaginary object (*a*), showing how imaginary relations (love/identification and hate/rivalry) operate through the logic of same/different, and contrasts this with the later emergence of the real object cause of desire (objet petit a), while situating countertransference as an inescapably imaginary phenomenon that the analyst must set aside.
the analyst is often taken by the analysand (especially at the outset) as a stand-in for the imaginary other
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#224
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.79
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-77-0"></span>*Object* a: *The Other's Desire*
Theoretical move: Through the operation of separation, the Other's inscrutable desire constitutes object a as the remainder of a hypothetical mother-child unity, and it is only by cleaving to this remainder in fantasy that the split subject sustains an illusion of wholeness and procures a sense of being beyond mere symbolic existence.
When analysands recount fantasies to their analyst, they are informing the analyst about the way in which they want to be related to object a.
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#225
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.163
<span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Three Registers and Differently "Polarized" Discourses**
Theoretical move: Lacan's late discourse theory in Seminar XXI reorganizes discourses not by agent/position (as in the four discourses) but by the sequential *order* in which the three registers (RSI/IRS/etc.) are traversed, and this allows Fink to argue that psychoanalysis—as an IRS discourse that "imagines the real of the symbolic"—is a praxis unifying theory and clinical practice, sharing this orientation with mathematics and potentially the best of science.
the analyst, in the analytic setting, listens for the real (impossibilities) in the analysand's symbolic and attempts to hit that real with interpretation
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#226
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.56
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Is Not the "Individual" or Conscious Subject of Anglo-American Philosophy**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the Lacanian subject from both the ego (as theorized in ego psychology) and the conscious subject of analytic philosophy, arguing that the ego is a narcissistic construct of crystallized ideal images whose very nature is distortion and error — making it precisely what the Lacanian subject is NOT.
The point of analysis is not to strive to give the analysand a 'true' or correct image of him or her self, for the ego is by its very nature a distortion. an error, a repository of misunderstanding.
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#227
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.108
<span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-105-0"></span>*The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations*
Theoretical move: By tracing the analyst's proper position through a critique of both imaginary and symbolic identifications, Fink argues that situating the analyst as the omniscient Other of demand traps the analysand at the level of demand rather than desire, and that only by relinquishing the position of subject supposed to know—redirecting knowledge-authority to the analysand's own unconscious—can analysis constitute the subject as desiring rather than demanding.
The analyst, rather than considering him or herself to be the representative of knowledge in the analytic situation, must take the analysand's unconscious as the representative of knowledge.
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#228
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.164
<span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Formalization and the Transmissibility of Psychoanalysis**
Theoretical move: Lacan's mathemes are theorized as a non-quantitative, qualitative mode of formalization whose value lies not in guaranteeing perfect communication but in the transmissibility of the written trace itself across time and interpreters; the "pass" is offered as an allied institutional mechanism for establishing a scientificity peculiar to psychoanalysis.
The pass is a process wherein someone who has gone through analysis talks about his or her analysis in detail with two other people (passeurs) who in turn report on what they have heard to a committee (Cartel de la passe).
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#229
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.166
<span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is constitutively a praxis of jouissance rather than a pragmatic social therapy, and that its proper teaching discourse is the hysteric's discourse—one that perpetually challenges authority and resists systematization—while also staging a methodological argument about the peculiar temporal logic required to read Lacan, against the American academic demand for immediate critical mastery.
analysts act instead so as to further their analysands' Eros. That aim is constitutive of the praxis that is psychoanalysis.
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#230
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.149
THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-147-0"></span>**The** Four Discourses
Theoretical move: The Four Discourses are introduced as structural matrices governing different social bonds, with the Master's Discourse functioning as the primary or originary discourse from which the other three are generated by quarter-turn rotations; each discourse's positions (agent, truth, other, product/loss) assign different roles to the same four mathemes (S1, S2, $, a), making discourse a structural — not psychological — category.
Psychoanalysis deploys the power of the cause of desire in order to bring about a reconfiguration of the analysand's desire.
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#231
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.97
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Breach*
Theoretical move: The subject is theorized not as a sedimentation of meanings but as the act of forging links between signifiers (Bahnung/frayage); the analytic aim is to "dialectize" isolated master signifiers, which simultaneously precipitates subjectivity, produces metaphorization, and initiates separation—a process Lacan presents as surpassing Freud's "rock of castration."
the analysand is no longer stuck at that particular point of his or her associations; after running up against the same term off and on for what may have been months on end, it begins to give.
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#232
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.23
<span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > A Slip of the Other's Tongue
Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation in language is constitutive of the subject: the Other (as the pre-given totality of language) is not merely an external resource but an intrusive force that molds need into desire, installs an unconscious Other-discourse alongside ego-discourse, and thereby fundamentally alienates every speaking being from themselves.
the analysand (i.e., the person engaged in analyzing him or herself)
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#233
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.31
<span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.
A former analysand of mine complained of a plethora of psychosomatic symptoms which changed all the time
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#234
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.34
<span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.
Virtually every analysand is astonished early on in the analytic process, in his or her initial attempts to understand dreams and fantasies
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#235
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.81
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **A Further Separation: The Traversing of Fantasy**
Theoretical move: The traversing of fantasy is theorized as a "further separation" in which the alienated subject paradoxically assumes its own traumatic cause—the Other's desire that produced it as split subject—thereby subjectifying jouissance and relocating from the position of effect to that of cause, in contrast to the Ego Psychology solution of identification with the analyst.
The analyst must steer clear of the role in which analysands often cast him or her, that of an all-knowing and all-seeing Other who is the ultimate judge of their value as human beings
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#236
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.91
<span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Signified**
Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of metaphor is leveraged to distinguish between ordinary "understanding" (assimilation of signifiers into a pre-existing chain, which is imaginary) and a "true" transformative process at the border of the symbolic and the real, where new meaning is created and the subject is implicated — making "insight" irrelevant to the analytic process.
Hence the irrelevance of the term 'insight' in the analytic process: the analysand's subjective frustration at not understanding what is going on... in no way hinders the efficacy of psychoanalysis.
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#237
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.48
<span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Interpretation Hits the Cause**
Theoretical move: Interpretation functions by hitting the traumatic cause that the analysand's discourse circles but cannot enunciate; through the analyst's intervention a signifier is introduced or pronounced that begins the subjectivization of the cause, with phonemes and garbled speech marking the bridge between the Symbolic and the Real.
an analysand speaking in the analytic setting is often unable to say, formulate, or come out with certain things; certain words, expressions, or thoughts are unavailable to him or her at a particular moment
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#238
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.197
<span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **Chapter 1 Language and Otherness**
Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of endnotes for Chapter 1, providing bibliographic references, clarifications of key Lacanian terms, and cross-references to other chapters and seminars. It is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.
Unable to 'read' such letters, the analysand brings them to analysis.
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#239
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.44
<span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real is not simply temporally prior to language but is constitutively defined as that which resists or has not yet been symbolized; the Symbolic's "cutting into" the Real produces Reality (existence), while the Real itself only "ex-sists" outside language — a distinction with direct ethical and clinical consequences for Lacanian versus other psychoanalytic practice.
part of the psychoanalytic process clearly involves allowing an analysand to put into words that which has remained unsymbolized for him or her.
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#240
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.27
**Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **Privileging the Unconscious**
Theoretical move: McGowan reverses the political logic of early Lacanian film theory by arguing that conscious critical distance from cinematic fascination is itself an ideological operation, and that the encounter with the Real Gaze requires full submission to the filmic experience—modelled on the analytic session—rather than Brechtian alienation effects or lighted-theatre vigilance.
While invested in the film, the subject (like the analysand free associating) is able to encounter the gaze as a disruption within spectatorship.
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#241
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.125
<span id="page-33-0"></span>part i
Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.
the analysand reports on his or her experiences in analysis... We could say that, in this process, the analysand 'lets go of her or his truth.'
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#242
Theory Keywords · Various · p.84
**Transference**
Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it extends Lacan's reformulation of transference via the 'subject supposed to know' from the clinical dyad to the reader-text relation, arguing that reading is structurally transferential; second, it argues—against a scarcity model of trauma—that psychoanalysis locates the real source of trauma in excess (especially excess jouissance/sexuality), not in physical suffering or deprivation.
The analysand places the analyst in the position of an all-knowing expert who has all the answers
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#243
Theory Keywords · Various · p.4
**Anxiety**
Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.
it is the person in therapy who does the work of analyzing, not the analyst.
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#244
Theory Keywords · Various · p.30
**Fantasy**
Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorised as the subject's orchestration of its relation to objet petit a and the Other's desire, with the purpose of producing jouissance — an excitement that exceeds the pleasure/pain binary and may manifest as disgust or horror, as Freud's Rat Man case illustrates.
When analysands recount fantasies to their analyst, they are informing the analyst about the way in which they want to be related to object a
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#245
Theory Keywords · Various · p.89
**Transference** > **Unconscious**
Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.
when a patient makes a Freudian slip–mentions her father but then when asked, denies it–that denial is the closing, and in uttering the denial, the analysand makes an opening into her unconscious
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#246
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.174
Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Latching On
Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique requires not only a "negative" moment of critical destabilization but also a "positive" moment of "latching on"—an opening toward something new—and that this dialectical structure parallels both the Hegelian movement of self-consciousness and the Lacanian end of analysis, making critique genuinely transformative rather than merely cynical.
The experience of such a liberation was described by an analysand at the end of the analysis, when he said that 'I feel that everything has changed—and yet I am still the same as when I came here the first time.'
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#247
What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.74
Contradictions that Matter > Hm…
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the apparent opposition between equivocity (Cassin) and formalization/univocity (Badiou) in Lacan is false: equivocity is not the opposite of formalization but its very condition, since the "right word" in analytic interpretation functions like a formula by targeting the singular impasse/contradiction that the symptom "solves," rather than by conveying a determinate meaning.
I learn everything from my analysands; it is from them that I learn what psychoanalysis is about. I borrow my interventions from them, and not from my teaching.