Desire of the Analyst

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (105)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.7

   TO HÉLOÏSE

   Theoretical move: The analyst's correct positioning depends not on understanding the patient but on maintaining an ignorance of what the particular subject desires, so that the analyst can function as the container of the object of desire—a structural, not hermeneutic, relation.

   he must always call into question what he understands and remind himself that what he is trying to attain is precisely what in theory he does not understand.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.12

   **The Satisfaction Understanding Brings**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that understanding in psychoanalysis primarily satisfies the ego rather than the unconscious, and that the unconscious is better gratified by nonsense, puns, and condensations than by logically well-formed statements — making ego-satisfying understanding a clinical danger that short-circuits treatment.

   if it satisfies the analyst, is it because it gives the analyst a gratifying sense of accomplishment, intelligence, or even mastery? If so, its importance must be impugned

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.13

   **Making Do without the Satisfactions of Understanding**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is irreducibly partial and provisional—never commanding absolute truth-value—and that this epistemic limitation is not a defect to be overcome but a structural condition of the work, one whose acceptance actively guards against the illusion of mastery.

   perhaps we are better off without it, since it fosters the illusion of mastery!

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.32

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's primary ethical and technical task is to listen in the symbolic register—attending to what is actually said rather than projecting imaginary meaning onto the analysand's speech—and that resistance in analysis belongs fundamentally to the analyst, not the analysand, when the analyst fails to prompt free association toward what is left unsaid.

   only when they are sure the analyst really and truly wants to hear it. We have to let them know that we really and truly do want to hear it, even and especially when it may not be terribly pleasing or flattering to ourselves!

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.34

   **Whose Understanding?**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's use of their own vocabulary — even seemingly neutral everyday terms — constitutes an act of understanding that short-circuits the analysand's own articulation; clinical practice therefore requires radical restraint in language, confining itself as far as possible to the analysand's own words so as not to foreclose subjective exploration.

   to keep us from falling into the trap of understanding, of jumping to conclusions about what things mean based on our own experience and conceptions

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.39

   **Beyond Understanding**

   Theoretical move: Fink demonstrates that the analyst's avoidance of imaginary projection—through open-ended rather than leading questions—allows the analysand's symptom to speak in its own signifying logic; the clinical vignette shows how tracking the analysand's own words (rather than imposing diagnostic categories) can unlock the unconscious chain underlying a somatic symptom.

   Introducing the term intercourse seems to suggest that all we are interested in is intercourse … so why should the analysand bother to tell us about all the other things

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.67

   **Foucault's Critique of Analytic Power Dynamics**

   Theoretical move: Fink uses Foucault's critique of analytic power (analyst as "master of truth") as a foil to articulate Lacan's contrasting position: the analyst occupies a position of semblance rather than mastery, thereby redirecting the production of truth and interpretation back to the analysand, progressively dismantling the power dynamic the analysand projects onto the analyst.

   Maybe if she just keeps her mouth shut long enough, I'll say what it is I need to say for my symptoms to go away…

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **Section II**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological training norms exposes how appeals to the analyst's innate "gifts" and inarticulate transmission undermine psychoanalysis' scientific status and reduce a theory of technique to a standardization of analyst personality, thereby making the discipline incommunicable.

   heal not by what they say and do but by who they are (p. 587). A training institute's goal is thus to standardize who they are, to standardize their so-called personalities.

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **Section III**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of empathy, the "communication of unconsciouses," and Ferenczi's subjectivism converge on a single theoretical move: the analyst's function requires preserving the place of the Other and non-knowledge rather than identification or resemblance with the analysand.

   Ferenczi at least also emphasizes nonknowledge: the fact that the analyst does not know everything in advance and must thus learn from each new analysis he conducts

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.99

    **Whose Truth?**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's constituted knowledge (savoir) is itself a symptom—a compromise formation driven by the passion not to know—and that genuine analytic practice requires the analyst to maintain a stance of nonknowledge oriented toward the analysand's singular truth, rather than applying predigested, imaginary generalities.

    An analyst has to maintain a stance of nonknowledge; she will not be able to foster constituting speech or true speech if she thinks she already knows what he means

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.103

    " VA R I AT I O N S O N T H E S TA N D A R D T R E AT M E N T "

    Theoretical move: Fink's commentary on Lacan argues that introducing death as the Other of the imaginary (rather than via the symbolic) can dialectize the ego-to-ego analytic situation, and that a successfully completed analysis requires the subjectification of one's being-toward-death—a condition that anticipates both the traversal of fantasy and the L schema's placement of the Other.

    the analyst strips his own ego of all forms of desire and presents only the face of death to his analysand

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    <span id="page-119-0"></span>A PSYCHOANALYTIC [ETHICS OF TRANSLATION](#page-7-0)

    Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp opposition between analytic interpretation and the imaginary act of "understanding," arguing that it is precisely a refusal of understanding—a resistance to filling in meaning—that opens the space for genuine analytic intervention.

    one of the things we must guard against most is understanding too much, understanding more than what is there in the subject's discourse

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.163

    **Course of Treatment and Assessment of Progress**

    Theoretical move: Through clinical case narration, Fink argues that analytic work effects structural change by allowing the analysand to reclaim his body from the Other's desire—not through brilliant interpretation but through the gradual elaboration of fantasy and dream-work—and frames the analyst's proper aim as furthering the analysand's Eros rather than imposing a concept of the Good.

    Even though W at times explicitly stated that he wanted me to prohibit his homosexual activity and make him into a heterosexual, I did not take such requests at face value and instead left the question of his sexual orientation up to him.

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.165

    *Relationship with the Mother*

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical vignette, Fink demonstrates how the mother's jouissance becomes installed in the analysand's bodily experience and desire, and how analytic work—via variable-length sessions and the analysand's own self-analyzing—enables a gradual exorcism of that maternal inscription, illustrating core Lacanian principles about the analyst's non-masterful position and the analysand's active role.

    In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analyst does not present him- or herself as the master of knowledge, but rather sets the analysand to work, to the work of analyzing all the dreams, fantasies, daydreams, and intrusive and "stray" thoughts

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.168

    *Analytic Stance*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's primary clinical tool is the expression of the Desire of the Analyst — not interpretation or resistance-accusation — and that this desire is what sustains the analysand's capacity to symbolize an inherently resistant Real; the analyst occupies the place of the unconscious for the analysand, making the unacceptable speakable through transference.

    it is nevertheless the analyst's expression of his or her desire that the analysand continue the work that allows the process of symbolization to continue.

16. #16

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    **Complicating Factors**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes a clinical-technical argument that the analyst's affective stance (equanimity vs. anxiety) functions differently depending on the structure of the patient's pathology—specifically distinguishing masochistic from fetishistic configurations—and that the analyst's non-interventionist position with respect to medications illustrates the analytic stance of non-suggestion.

    I never made any specific suggestions or interpretations about them

17. #17

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.206

    **Establishing a Limit**

    Theoretical move: Through the case of José, Fink/Alemán demonstrates how a psychotic subject can construct a substitute for the foreclosed paternal metaphor through a self-invented fictional "parenthesis" — a narrative device that installs a limit to jouissance where the Name-of-the-Father failed to intervene, functioning as a sinthome-like stabilization rather than a delusional resolution.

    This is clearly why Alemàn encouraged José to dream up such films in great detail.

18. #18

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.222

    **The Demand for Absolute Love**

    Theoretical move: By reading Marilyn Monroe's case through a structural lens, Fink argues that hysteria is defined by an insatiable demand for the Other's unconditional love, and that Greenson's collapse of analytic boundaries—driven by an ego-psychological service-industry model—exemplifies the theoretical failure that results when the analyst abandons the Desire of the Analyst in favour of attempting to satisfy the hysteric's demand.

    He tried to give Marilyn what she asked for, but—not surprisingly—it was never enough for her even as it was too much for him.

19. #19

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.224

    **The Blossoming of Desire**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's task is to create a space where desire can differentiate itself from demand, and that by gratifying Marilyn Monroe's demands directly, Greenson collapsed desire back into demand—thereby foreclosing the analytic process through which a neurotic subject might separate from the Other's desire and articulate a desire of their own.

    Paradoxically enough, a psychoanalyst is, in a sense, a person—perhaps the only person—you pay *not* to grant your requests, his or her job being to elicit your desire instead.

20. #20

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.235

    *Bruce Fink interviewed by Izabela Michalska*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that psychoanalytic concepts are clinically grounded and cannot be straightforwardly universalized as cultural hermeneutics; simultaneously, he explains the Lacanian analytic position as one of strategic unknowing that mobilizes the Subject Supposed to Know structure to return unconscious knowledge to the patient.

    the analyst is not in the position of the master who knows, but rather in a position of unknowing and this requires the patient to produce knowledge.

21. #21

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.236

    **So does he speak at all?**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian interpretation is not a delivery of analyst-held knowledge to the patient, but a minimal, nearly authorless transformation of the patient's own words — thereby displacing the analyst from the position of Subject Supposed to Know and grounding interpretation in the patient's own speech.

    An interpretation is not supposed to be something that the analyst develops and then delivers as a gift to the patient, but rather something almost without an author

22. #22

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    **The image that comes to me, when I think about the Lacanian analyst, is the Delphic Oracle, speaking enigmatically about fate . . .**

    Theoretical move: The analyst's speech should be oracular — deliberately ambiguous and polyvalent — so that interpretive work is displaced onto the analysand rather than delivered as a fixed, authoritative statement.

    the analyst's speech should be oracular, in the sense that it should be quite ambiguous, polyvalent, open to several different interpretations

23. #23

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    **There are no straightforward rules of interpretation; you as an analyst say something enigmatic to the patient . . . Can't you just then say anything at all?**

    Theoretical move: Lacanian interpretation is a disciplined yet creative clinical practice that works strictly through the patient's own language and idiom, refusing to impose external frameworks, and must be individually tailored to each case—including adjusting for the patient's clinical structure (neurosis vs. psychosis).

    interpretation requires a great deal of discipline... we have to enter into her world and we have to do something very different in each case

24. #24

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.252

    A SUMMARY COMPARISON [OF PSYCHOANALYTIC PARADIGMS](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: Fink contrasts three paradigms for the role of the analyst — Freudian observer, contemporary co-participant, and Lacanian — arguing that the Lacanian approach distinguishes itself by positioning the analyst as objet petit a (cause of desire) operating at the level of the Real, rather than as an imaginary ego or relational participant, while channelling a desire for the analytic work itself over any particular outcome.

    Analysts cannot be neutral, but are imbued with a desire that takes precedence over all other desires they may have regarding the analysand: a desire for the analytic work to go on.

25. #25

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.254

    **Transference as distortion.** > **Analyst's actual behavior strongly affects analysand.** *Critique:* The analyst acts differently with analysands than their parents did, supposedly allowing them to break out of old patterns of behavior toward signi ¿ cant others. However, this often leads simply to conscious knowledge of old patterns by the "observing ego," not to new patterns.

    Theoretical move: Fink's comparative table argues that the Lacanian approach to transference, countertransference, interpretation, and truth is theoretically superior to both a Freudian caricature and contemporary eclectic approaches, specifically because it subordinates imaginary empathy to the analyst's desire, treats interpretation as constitutive (not revelatory) of truth, minimises transference interpretation to preserve the subject supposed to know, and maintains a strict structural distinction between neurosis and psychosis.

    Neutrality as useless; analyst's desire must be foremost; imaginary relations must be kept to a minimum, however.

26. #26

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.12

    AGAINST UNDERSTANDING, VOLUME 2 > **What Is a Case Study?**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that case studies are structurally motivated by the clinician's drive to demonstrate mastery—of theory, technique, and diagnosis—and that genuine clinical honesty is only possible outside institutional power relations, a critique that operates as a meta-theoretical reflection on the epistemological conditions of psychoanalytic knowledge production.

    Rare is the clinician who admits in print to having been in a serious muddle about what was going on for his patient, to having made obvious mistakes in the course of the treatment

27. #27

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.15

    AGAINST UNDERSTANDING, VOLUME 2 > **My Approach to Case Studies Here**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that publishable case studies inevitably involve mastery-effects, selective framing, and suppression of contradictory material, and that the ideal of therapist-patient agreement rests on an impossible fantasy of total intersubjectivity—one Lacan's theory of structural misunderstanding forecloses.

    In order for the analyst to have what the analysand lacks, he must possess nescience qua nescience. [. . .] He must be but one short step away from being as ignorant as his analysand.

28. #28

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.30

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > COMMENTARY

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical vignette to argue that neurotic jouissance is structured as a refusal to relinquish symptomatic enjoyment, even at financial cost; the goal of analysis is not the elimination of all enjoyment but the dissipation of the enjoyment tied to symptoms, a "pound of flesh" that money alone cannot substitute for.

    most analysts want more than just money—they want blood too, in a sense, since they exact the pound of flesh (or 'bad jouissance,' as one analysand put it).

29. #29

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.36

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **The Analyst as Capitalist?**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the peculiar political economy of psychoanalysis—where the analysand pays to work rather than to receive a service—is what distinguishes it from all other therapies and from capitalist exchange logic, and that the analyst's acceptance of transference projections (occupying the place of the cause of desire) is precisely what is purchased, not advice or knowledge.

    Payment means analysts are not doing it out of charity, because they love us, or because they think we are good-looking or charming or might turn out to be useful to them in some way. Payment means they are doing it because it is their job.

30. #30

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.54

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Time as Technique**

    Theoretical move: Fink defends Lacan's technique of variable-length sessions (scansion) as a directed interpretive intervention that concentrates analytic work on the most significant formulations, reversals of perspective, and unconscious material, distinguishing it from a misread "virtue of nonaction" and framing the analytic process as dialectical rather than linear.

    it is the analyst's responsibility to direct the treatment by ensuring, as Freud certainly did, that the analysand speaks at length about the things that are hindering him most in life

31. #31

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.78

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Reality and "The Good"**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's proper ethical orientation is not toward the analysand's "good" (which the analyst cannot know better than anyone else) but toward the analysand's greater Eros, and that the distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, correctly read via Lacan and Freud, concerns psychical reality—specifically the reality of unconscious desire—rather than any unmediated contact with external reality; this grounds an ethics of psychoanalysis in grappling with desire, not in normative reality-adjustment.

    the analyst must not aim at what he or she considers to be the analysand's own good, but rather at the analysand's greater Eros

32. #32

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.174

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-169-0"></span>[Talk given upon receipt of a prize for translating](#page-8-0) *Écrits* > COMMENTARY

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that mistranslation of Lacan's key theoretical distinction—that the analyst strives to get the analysand to divine their own unconscious knowledge, rather than exposing it to them—obliterated a foundational clinical difference between Lacanian technique and ego-psychological mastery, thereby distorting Lacan's reception in the English-speaking world.

    It is not the analyst's role to guess it himself and simply pass it on: patients are far more convinced and far more involved when they figure it out themselves, with the analyst's help of course.

33. #33

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.195

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Words, Words, Words**

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed clinical case of Wesley, Fink demonstrates how the inability to name "the lack in the Other"—particularly the lack constitutive of sexual difference—structures both an obsessional neurosis and a broader symptomatic relation to language, writing, and women, showing how analytic work on sexual significations can open a gap in the Other that enables desire and speech.

    He even managed to get an erection just by thinking about a woman recently. (He commented at that point, 'You're enabling my dick.' This perhaps illustrates what Lacan means when he suggests that the analyst should try to further the analysand's Eros.)

34. #34

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-236-0"></span>[CONTOURS OF TRAUMA](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: This passage introduces a clinical case study to explore the contextual conditions under which events acquire traumatic status, while also illustrating, via a counter-example, the clinical principle that the analyst must keep their own personality and background out of the treatment.

    how contemporary psychotherapists sabotage their work with patients because they cannot or refuse to keep their own backgrounds and personalities out of the therapy

35. #35

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.245

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Inability to Express Anger Directly*

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink argues that the analyst's proper role is not to "lay down the law" in response to an analysand's appeal for punishment and prohibition, but rather to interpret that appeal as a symptom of the subject's conflicted relation to a superego already in place — thereby reframing the transference dynamics and the evolution of fantasy as the real site of analytic work.

    it is not the analyst's immediate role in such cases to 'lay down the law' or represent the law somehow for analysands, but rather to underscore and interpret the appeal made by an analysand to the analyst to do so.

36. #36

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.256

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of clinical and theoretical endnotes to a case study chapter, touching on Lacanian concepts such as the sexual non-relation underlying trauma, masochism's relation to the superego and Oedipus complex, and the analyst's desire as an alternative to legalistic conditions in treatment — but is primarily footnote material with limited standalone theoretical development.

    The analyst needs, instead, to express his or her desire that analysis be conducted in such and such a way.

37. #37

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.86

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Neurotic is Building a Case**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural differential between neurosis and psychosis via the criterion of recognition-seeking: the neurotic constitutively addresses the analyst as a confirming Other and seeks validation of his subjective position, while the psychotic operates in "a language devoid of dialectic" that has abandoned the demand for recognition—the analyst's proper response to the neurotic being to redirect recognition from the stated victim-position toward the unacknowledged desire lurking in the discourse.

    The analyst has to avoid being convinced, even though she may sympathize with many of the neurotic's complaints... The analyst for the most part does not buy the story or agree with the subject's sense that he is merely a victim

38. #38

    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.

    an ethics must be formulated that integrates Freud's conquests concerning desire: one that would place at the forefront the question of the analyst's desire

39. #39

    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.

    The analyst must realise that he only occupies the position of one who is presumed (by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does possess the knowledge attributed to him.

40. #40

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_136"></span>***objet (petit) a***

    Theoretical move: This passage traces the full conceptual evolution of objet petit a across Lacan's work, showing how it migrates from a purely imaginary little other (schema L, 1955) through the object of desire/fantasy (1957) to the real cause of desire, surplus-jouissance, and finally semblance of being at the centre of the Borromean knot—demonstrating that the concept accumulates rather than replaces its earlier determinations.

    the analyst must situate himself as the semblance of objet petit a, the cause of the analysand's desire.

41. #41

    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.

    The analyst must be guided in these interventions by an appropriate desire, which Lacan calls the desire of the analyst. An intervention can only be called a true psychoanalytic act when it succeeds in expressing the desire of the analyst.

42. #42

    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_76"></span>**frustration**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceptualises 'frustration' against its post-Freudian misuse: by relocating it from the register of biological need to that of the demand for love within a symbolic-legal order, he reframes analytic abstinence not as an end in itself but as the means through which the signifiers of demand are made to reappear, ultimately causing desire to emerge.

    Lacan differs from Freud in the way he theorises the rule of abstinence... he stresses that there is a much more common demand that the analyst can also frustrate—the analysand's demand for a reply.

43. #43

    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.

    The question of how the analyst engages with these demands is crucial. Certainly the analyst does not attempt to gratify the analysand's demands, but nor is it simply a question of frustrating them

44. #44

    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.

    the analyst must 'forget what he knows' when listening (Ec, 349) and when offering interpretations must do so 'exactly as if we were completely ignorant of theory'

45. #45

    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.

    Such punctuation is a way of 'showing the subject that he is saying more than he thinks he is' (S1, 54)

46. #46

    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.

    the task of the analyst is to help him to analyse well.

47. #47

    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 desire of the analyst is ultimately that which operates in psychoanalysis' (Ec, 854). By presenting the analysand with an enigmatic desire, the analyst occupies the position of the Other

48. #48

    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.

    a conflict between a force which drives the treatment on (see TRANSFERENCE, DESIRE OF THE ANALYST)

49. #49

    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.

    The task of the analyst is to enable the analysand to hear the message he is unconsciously addressing to himself; by interpreting the analysand's words, the analyst permits the analysand's message to return to him in its true, unconscious dimension.

50. #50

    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_63"></span>**ethics**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's analytic ethic is defined against both traditional (Aristotelian/Kantian) ethics and the normative ethics of ego-psychology, positioning it as an ethic of desire — and later of 'speaking well' — that refuses the Sovereign Good, the pleasure principle, and the 'service of goods' in favour of the subject's fidelity to their desire.

    The desire of the analyst cannot therefore be the desire to 'do good' or 'to cure' (S7, 218).

51. #51

    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 authorisation of an analyst can only come from himself

52. #52

    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_54"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0069"></span>**discourse**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically presents Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses as four possible social bonds founded in language, each defined by rotating four algebraic symbols (S1, S2, $, a) through four structural positions, with the discourse of the master as the generative base from which the others derive—and with the discourse of the analyst positioned as the structural inverse of mastery, making psychoanalysis inherently subversive.

    the analyst must, in the course of the treatment, become the cause of the analysand's desire (S17, 41).

53. #53

    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.

    it has given him a desire which is even stronger than those passions, a desire which Lacan calls the DESIRE OF THE ANALYST

54. #54

    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_19"></span>**anxiety**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

    the analyst must not allow his own anxiety to interfere with the treatment, a requirement which he is only able to meet because he maintains a desire of his own, the desire of the analyst

55. #55

    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_12"></span>**acting Out**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of acting out is distinguished from the Freudian baseline by introducing the intersubjective dimension of the Other: acting out is not merely repetition substituting for memory, but a ciphered message addressed to a 'deaf' Other, locating the cause partly in the analyst's own interpretive failure (resistance of the analyst).

    since every resistance to analysis is a resistance of the analyst himself (E, 235), when acting out occurs during the treatment it is often due to a mistake made by the analyst.

56. #56

    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_44"></span>**death**

    Theoretical move: Death is a multi-dimensional concept in Lacan, functioning simultaneously as constitutive of the Symbolic order (the symbol murders the thing), as a topological limit (between-two-deaths), as a philosophical inheritance from Hegel and Heidegger, as an analytic stance (the analyst as 'dummy'/dead), and as the structuring question of obsessional neurosis.

    The analyst intervenes concretely in the dialectic of analysis by pretending that he is dead…he makes death present

57. #57

    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 authorisation of an analyst can only come from himself' (Lacan, 1967: 14).

58. #58

    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_176"></span>**Schema L**

    Theoretical move: Schema L is Lacan's first and most sustained diagrammatic formalization of psychoanalytic structure, demonstrating that the symbolic relation between the Other and the subject is always partially blocked by the imaginary axis, while also representing the decentered subject stretched across four structural loci; it is positioned as the originary quaternary from which all subsequent schemata derive, and as the precursor to Lacan's mature topological work.

    If he enters into the coupling of the resistance, which is just what he is taught not to do, then he speaks from a' and he will see himself in the subject.

59. #59

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.32

    **1** > <span id="page-28-0"></span>**4 A. Johnston**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's polemic in "The Freudian Thing" diagnoses ego psychology's Americanization of psychoanalysis as a structural inversion of the proper analyst-analysand knowledge-relation, in which the analyst's surrender to the transference demand to occupy the position of "subject supposed to know" constitutes the fundamental betrayal of Freud's discovery of the unconscious.

    The properly practicing analyst…is limited to being the handmaiden of the analysand's unconscious knowledge, merely allowing it to speak for itself.

60. #60

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.152

    **8**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego's structural duality—as both a vehicle for unconscious speech and a weapon of resistance against it—makes it a negative index for the analyst: the weak/fragmented ego betrays unconscious truth (full speech), while the strong/whole ego fortifies méconnaissance, which is why Lacanian clinical practice targets ego-weakness rather than ego-strength, in direct opposition to ego psychology.

    to arouse a desire for (unconscious) knowledge in the analysand running contrary to his/her ego's Imaginary 'passion for ignorance.'

61. #61

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.174

    **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action**

    Theoretical move: The L Schema is deployed to argue that genuine analytic action operates along the Symbolic axis (between speaking subjectivities) rather than the Imaginary axis (between egos), and that the analyst's ethical responsibility is to keep this distinction operative — thereby reframing non-Lacanian notions like "timing, tact, and dosage" within a register-theoretic framework where the unconscious speaks between analyst and analysand as a "pact" grounded in the big Other.

    It is the well-analyzed analyst's (ethical) responsibility to position him/her-self appropriately, as a true Freudian analyst, with respect to both his/her own ego as well as that of his/her analysand.

62. #62

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.182

    **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action** > Or, as I put the same ideas elsewhere:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's "playing dead" (silence and self-cadaverization) instantiates both Symbolic and Real dimensions of the big Other, with death functioning as an incarnation of the Real that precedes its explicit theorization in Seminar VII, and that dialectical thinking—contra bivalent formal logic—is requisite for grasping mortality's paradoxical convergence of the representable and unrepresentable.

    the analyst concretely intervenes in the dialectic of analysis by playing dead (faisant le mort)—by 'cadaverizing' (cadavérisant) his position… either by his silence where he is the Other with a capital O, or by canceling out his own resistance where he is the other with a lowercase o

63. #63

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston

    **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action** > Or, as I put the same ideas elsewhere:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's structural position condenses multiple figures of death and unknowability — through silence, self-effacement, and the embodiment of finitude — such that the analytic Other functions as a "neighbor-Thing" whose inscrutable jouissance threatens the subject with annihilation, making the analyst literally a presenter of death.

    Keeping mum (i.e., as silent as death); figuratively committing suicide or allowing him/herself to be killed off; playing the dummy (le mort) and/or playing dead

64. #64

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.247

    **13** > <span id="page-236-0"></span>**The Training of Analysts to Come**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Lacanian Real functions as an Anstoss — simultaneously a condition of impossibility and of possibility for psychoanalysis — because the subject perpetually slips away from the Symbolic's concatenations of signifiers, making the "impossible profession" of analysis both structurally necessary and interminably generative.

    So long as analysts continue to be moved by the desire to, in Beckettian terms, 'try again, fail again, fail better' vis-à-vis this Real, analysis will persist as a living endeavor.

65. #65

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious operates through the ordered chains of formal language rather than through any biological property of living memory, and that repetition-automatism arises not from the real but from "what was not"—thereby grounding the symbolic order as sufficient to explain the indestructibility of the unconscious and orienting psychoanalytic training toward the question of how formal language determines the subject.

    How can one remain seated when one has placed oneself in the situation of no longer having to answer a subject's question in any way than by lying him down first?

66. #66

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > IOI Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aggressiveness is constitutively subjective and operates through imagos of the fragmented body, and that analytic technique must systematically elicit the analysand's aggressiveness (negative transference) rather than suppress it, because these aggressive intentions are the inaugural knot of the analytic drama — a position that simultaneously critiques behaviourist reductions and grounds the analyst's deliberate self-effacement in the structure of the transference.

    What, then, lies behind the analyst's attitude, sitting there as he does across from him? The concern to provide the dialogue with a participant who is as devoid as possible of individual characteristics. We efface ourselves... we depersonalize ourselves and strive to represent to the other an ideal of impassability.

67. #67

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.265

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is not a sign-system for transmitting information but a fundamentally intersubjective structure in which speech constitutes the subject—the sender receives the message back in inverted form—and thus the analyst's interpretive speech has a structuring (not merely informational) function that recognizes or abolishes the subject, a claim illustrated against bee-dance semiology and against ego-psychology's conflation of 'need' and 'demand'.

    The decisive function of my own response thus appears, and this function is not, as people maintain, simply to be received by the subject as approval or rejection of what he is saying, but truly to recognize or abolish him as a subject. Such is the nature of the analyst's responsibility every time he intervenes by means of speech.

68. #68

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.287

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *A Bat Question: Examining It in the Light of Day*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the crisis of therapeutic criteria in psychoanalysis reveals a constitutive méconnaissance: the field's "extraterritoriality" from external scientific validation is mirrored by an internal misrecognition, and the only available criterion for what constitutes psychoanalysis is tautological—defined solely by who practices it—thereby making ethical rigor and theoretical formalization, not therapeutic outcome, the true standard of analytic practice.

    he does not, in the end, wish to appear to be motivated by it. While he thus views cure as an added benefit [la guerison comme benefice de surcroit] of psychoanalytic treatment, he is wary of any misuse of the desire to cure.

69. #69

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.452

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > *II. The Letter in the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's fetishism case to demonstrate that the unconscious operates through linguistic (signifying) displacement across languages, then turns this into a polemical defense of the "intellectual" dimension of Freudian sexuality against Ego Psychology's moralization of psychoanalysis.

    I would like to say, to those who are listening to me, how they can recognize bad psychoanalysts

70. #70

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.510

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's power in treatment derives not from "being" (ego strength, emotional reeducation, autonomous ego) but from a structural position within the transference—a quadripartite division that alienates the analyst's freedom and whose misrecognition by ego-psychology and object-relations approaches collapses the analytic situation into crude suggestion or the imposition of the analyst's reality.

    his politics, where he would do better to take his bearings from his want-to-be than from his being

71. #71

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.531

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's being and desire—not ego-identification, happiness, or understanding—must ground analytic action; it advances this by articulating how demand (as intransitive, signifier-structured) generates transference, identification, and the analyst's ethical position, against both English object-relations practice and superficial humanist notions of the analyst as a "happy man."

    An ethics must be formulated that integrates Freud's conquests concerning desire: one that would place at the forefront the question of the analyst's desire.

72. #72

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.553

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > 9. Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire.

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes that psychoanalytic direction operates through speech, brackets demand, and channels the subject toward the avowal of desire, while simultaneously locating desire's ultimate incompatibility with speech in the subject's constitutive Spaltung—a split that is sealed by the phallus as the unparalleled signifier, making the analyst's own desire (modelled on Freud's) the condition of possibility for interpretation.

    Let us go further. Let us question how things should stand with the analyst (with the analyst's 'being'), as far as his own desire is concerned.

73. #73

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.724

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious ⁸²⁹

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious is a concept founded on the trace left by what constitutes the subject—irreducible to any psychological, instinctual, or consciousness-based notion of the unconscious—and that this concept is inseparable from language, enunciation, and the locus of the Other, making psychoanalysts themselves constitutive parts of the concept they employ.

    psychoanalysts are part and parcel of the concept of the unconscious, as they constitute that to which the unconscious is addressed.

74. #74

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.733

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious ⁸²⁹

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of the subject's constitution through two dialectical operations—alienation (vel of meaning) and separation (intersection/splitting)—culminating in the myth of the lamella as a symbolic articulation of libido as an organ tied to the loss produced by sexuation and death, while also grounding the unconscious in the Other's field rather than in subjective consciousness.

    The true and final mainspring of what constitutes transference is the expectation of this being's advent in relation to what I call 'the analyst's desire,' insofar as something about the analyst's own position has remained unnoticed therein.

75. #75

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.742

    On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive, properly understood, institutes desire through the structure of prohibition (castration, the Name-of-the-Father, the Oedipus complex) rather than through instinct or gratification, and that it is ultimately the analyst's desire—not therapeutic technique—that operates as the motor force of psychoanalytic treatment.

    it is ultimately the analyst's desire that operates in psychoanalysis.

76. #76

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.802

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTE S T O "A THEORETICA L INTRODUCTIO N T O TH E FUNCTION S O F PSYCHOANALYSI S I N CRIMINOLOGY " > NOTE S T O "LOGICA L TIM E AN D TH E ASSERTIO N O F ANTICIPATE D CERTAINTY " > NOTES TO 'O N THE SUBJECT WHO IS FINALLY IN QUESTION"

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial footnotes to Lacan's Écrits, clarifying translation choices, glossing technical terms (aphanisis, condensation), and situating Lacan's references to Reich, Jones, Ferenczi, Marx, and early translators; the only substantive theoretical move is the gloss on "du psychanalyste" as gesturing toward the desire of the analyst as a partial, aspirational condition rather than a fully achievable identity.

    Lacan seems to want to indicate with this syntagm that while it is perhaps too much to hope for to be able to point to some people who are fully psychoanalysts, we can hope that there will be people who are psychoanalysts in at least some respect, that is, who are imbued with the analyst's desire at least at some level.

77. #77

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > B. ANALYTIC EXPERIENCE

    Theoretical move: This is a classified index entry (table of concepts) organizing references to analytic experience across the Écrits — it is a navigational/bibliographic apparatus, not a substantive theoretical argument.

    3. a. Neutrality and the analyst's response: *106-9, 251, 303-4, 307, 310, 346-47, 358-59, 429-31, 439,* 589.

78. #78

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *On the Ego in Analysis and Its End in the Analyst*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego is constituted through an imaginary identification with the image of the other (the mirror relation), and that the terminus of analysis must be the "subjectification of death"—the analyst's ego must be stripped of narcissistic illusion down to its only sustaining face, mortality, so that the dyadic (ego-to-ego) conception of transference is broken open by the mediation of a third term: the death drive.

    in order for the transference relationship to escape these effects, the analyst would have to strip the narcissistic image of his own ego of all the forms of desire by which that image has been constituted, reducing it to the only face that sustains it behind their masks: the face of the absolute master, death.

79. #79

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.383

    The Freudian Thing > *How to Teach It*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structure of analysis can be formalized through three symbolic dimensions (history, language, intersubjectivity), while critiquing ego psychology's reduction of analysis to an imaginary dyadic relation; it then articulates the distinction between the small other and the big Other as the locus of the unconscious, grounding the subject's discourse in truth rather than suggestion.

    if he remains silent, it is in order to let this Other speak

80. #80

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

    the problem of the analyst's desire is what creates the obstacle... If the question of this desire stands not only unresolved, but hasn't even begun to be resolved, it's simply for the following reason, that until now in analytic theory there has never been, apart from this Seminar, any exact positioning of what desire is.

81. #81

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's case of female homosexuality to demonstrate that acting-out is structurally addressed to the Other, that the unconscious desire can operate through lying/fiction, and that Freud's own passage à l'acte (abandoning the case) reveals his inability to think femininity as evasive structure—while also critiquing ego-identification as the goal of analysis by pointing to the unassimilable remainder (objet a) it leaves untouched.

    These questions are perhaps designed to clarify for you what I mean when I speak about the analyst's desire and when I pose the question of this desire.

82. #82

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.246

    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: Lacan situates psychoanalysis in relation to modern Science (La science) by articulating the unconscious upon a revised Cartesian subject, and introduces transference as the nodal phenomenological site where this articulation becomes operative — irreducible to the transference/counter-transference split and essentially bound up with desire.

    it is what I designate under the term the desire of the psycho-analyst.

83. #83

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of early analysts' transferential desires (Abraham, Ferenczi, Nunberg) to argue that the analytic relation is structured around the subject's accommodation of images around the objet petit a, using the optical schema of the inverted bunch of flowers to show how the subject's imaginary integration is always conditioned by the analyst's own desire.

    the commitment of the desire of each analyst, we manage to add some small detail, some corroborating observation, some incidental addition or refinement, which enables us to define the presence, at the level of desire, of each of the analysts.

84. #84

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.250

    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: Lacan argues that desire and "not wanting to desire" are structurally identical (like a Möbius strip), and that this paradox is precisely the site where the analyst's desire functions as the essential pivot through which the subject's desire—constituted as desire of the Other—is both approached and indefinitely deferred in its recognition, rendering aphanisis an irreducible obstacle rather than a resolvable impasse.

    the desire of the analyst, which I designate here as an essential function. And let no one tell me that I do not name this desire, for it is precisely this point that can be articulated only in the relation of desire to desire.

85. #85

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.24

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis cannot be defined as a science through hermeneutics, praxis-field, or formula-making alone; instead, its scientific status depends on clarifying the status of its four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and, crucially, on interrogating the analyst's desire as constitutive of the analytic field itself.

    the training analysis has no other purpose than to bring the analyst to the point I designate in my algebra as the analyst's desire

86. #86

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.24

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from both hermeneutics and alchemy by arguing that its scientific status hinges on the structural role of the analyst's desire and on the foundational conceptual status of Freud's four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive), which have been systematically distorted in the analytic literature; the passage thereby frames the central theoretical question of Seminar XI.

    what is the analyst's desire?…the training analysis has no other purpose than to bring the analyst to the point I designate in my algebra as the analyst's desire

87. #87

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246

    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: Lacan situates psychoanalysis in relation to modern Science (La science) by grounding it in a revision of the Cartesian subject articulated through the unconscious, and reframes transference not as a technical split between transference/counter-transference but as an essential, indivisible phenomenon bound up with desire — tracing its rigorous articulation back to Plato's Symposium.

    it is what I designate under the term the desire of the psycho-analyst.

88. #88

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250

    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 desire's defensive structure ("not wanting to desire" = "wanting not to desire") is structurally identical to desire itself, forming a Möbius-like loop; and that the analyst's desire functions as the pivotal axis that transforms the patient's demand into transference, while "man's desire is the desire of the Other" entails an irreducible alienation that constitutively prevents the subject's desire from ever being fully recognized.

    The axis, the common point of this two-edged axe, is the desire of the analyst, which I designate here as an essential function.

89. #89

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.198

    **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.

    if the analyst achieves apathy ... it is to the extent that he is possessed by a desire that is stronger than the other desires ... a change has occurred in the economy of his desire.

90. #90

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.117

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' desire as an atopia — an unclassifiable, unsituable place of pure desire for discourse — which he locates topologically in the space between-two-deaths, and uses this to frame the question of the analyst's desire as something that must be articulated beyond the vague notion of training catharsis.

    we must try to articulate and situate what the analyst's desire should be... the analyst's desire is not such that it can be explained by reference to a dyad.

91. #91

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

    Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.

    I formulate this by asking what the analyst's desire must be.

92. #92

    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?'

93. #93

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.133

    The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

    Theoretical move: The voice occupies the structural position of sovereignty (inside/outside the law simultaneously), functioning as a permanent threat of a "state of emergency" within the symbolic order; this topology extends to psychoanalysis, where the analyst's silence incarnates the object voice as a pure enunciation compelling the subject's response—making the voice the pivot of transference and of political, ethical, and linguistic subjectification alike.

    it is the analyst, with his or her silence, who becomes the embodiment of the voice as the object. She or he is the personification, the embodiment, of the voice, the voice incarnate, the aphonic silent voice.

94. #94

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.94

    The voice and the drive > The voice of the daemon

    Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of conscience" from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's Savoy vicar, Dolar argues that the supposedly pure inner voice — positioned as the ground of morality beyond logos — is structurally tied to the big Other: the apotreptic, negative function of the divine inner voice always requires an external authority (Teacher, daemon, God) to authenticate it, so the ideal of autonomous self-authorization secretly reproduces heteronomy.

    He does not proffer advice or positive theories, he only dissuades them from bad ways of thinking... He turns into the champion of the voice which was given him beyond his will or intention; his role is to become its agent.

95. #95

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.215

    Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

    One of Lacan's key papers on this problem most appropriately bears the title 'On Freud's Trieb and the Psychoanalyst's Desire', linking the drive to the position of the analyst.

96. #96

    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.

    the analyst's stance, in a different register, consists in turning himself into the agent of a voice which coincides with the silence of the drives, by assuming this silence as the lever of his position

97. #97

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.36

    POWERS OF HORROR > CATHARSIS AND ANALYSIS

    Theoretical move: Kristeva uses the Lacanian linkage of abjection to the saintliness of the analyst as a pivot to genealogize 'catharsis' through Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Aristotelian poetic catharsis—unlike Platonic purification—works by immersion in and repetition of the abject rather than its elimination, and that this rhythm-based discourse of the body is the only viable analogue to analytic practice.

    Lacan says so when he links that word to the saintliness of the analyst, a linkage in which the only aspect of humor that remains is blackness.

98. #98

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.305

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

    The desire that no longer needs to be sustained by the superego injunction is what Lacan calls the 'desire of the analyst'; this appeared before psychoanalysis proper—Lacan discerns it in different historical figures, from Socrates to Hegel.

99. #99

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

    This is why Lacan talked about the 'presence of the analyst': like Christ, the analyst is an object.

100. #100

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.72

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Bobby Peru scene from Lynch's *Wild at Heart* as a pivot to theorize the structure of the empty gesture, desire vs. want, and the "wild analyst" figure, then extends the analysis through Heidegger's reading of Trakl to argue that sexual difference is not between two sexes but between the asexual and the sexual — with the discordant *Geschlecht* being irreducibly feminine, not neutral — making the presexual "undead boy" a figure of Evil and the Real of antagonism.

     What if Peru, by enacting the sudden cut, shift, in the mode of discourse, from brutal intrusion to friendly thanking, acts more as a kind of 'wild analyst,' compelling Dern to confront the truth of her fantasmatic core that regulates her desire? What if his non-act is trading position with the analyst?

101. #101

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.100

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

     a true analyst is not an example to follow—when he is caught doing the opposite of what he advising the patient to do, his answer is: 'Listen to my words, do not look at what I do!'

102. #102

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.93

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

     what Lacan defines as the subjective position of the Analyst is the only 'autonomous' form of subjectivity, and it paradoxically overlaps with what he called 'subjective destitution.'

103. #103

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

     Lacan's late identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism

104. #104

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.39

     **GENDER IN THE BLENDER**

     Theoretical move: By positioning the analysand as the only "specialist" through the rule of free association, the passage argues that psychoanalytic listening — rather than diagnostic expertise — is the proper clinical stance toward transgender and gender non-conforming patients, reframing the analyst's role as one of non-judgmental openness to unconscious knowledge.

     the analyst is ready to listen without being judgmental or pushing a hidden agenda

105. #105

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.181

     **CODA**

     Theoretical move: The figure of Tiresias—as mythic sex-changer, seer, and patron saint of psychoanalysis—is deployed to argue that the trans experience is structurally instructive for psychoanalysis: it teaches that jouissance rather than biology grounds sexuation, and that the analyst must embody the semblance of objet petit a as the object of transference.

     the psychoanalyst is a being moved by a desire for pure difference, ready to embody the semblance of the eternally missing object.