Training Analysis

Training analysis designates a specific and structurally distinct stage of psychoanalytic praxis: the analysis undergone by a candidate in the course of becoming an analyst. In Seminar XI, Lacan identifies it not merely as a pedagogical or institutional requirement but as a domain that has been systematically suppressed in the published literature — a lacuna that is itself theoretically symptomatic. To ignore training analysis is to ignore the moment in which the subject who will exercise praxis must confront, within the analytic situation, the very structures — desire, fantasy, jouissance, transference — that praxis is meant to treat. The silence around it is not accidental; it mirrors the way the Discourse of the Master structurally conceals its divided subject (the $) in the position of hidden truth: the master (the trained analyst, the institution) presents a unified front while the real conditions of his formation remain unspoken.

Lacan's theoretical move in Seminar XI is to frame this suppression as continuous with his own excommunication — an institutional act that reveals how the "truth of the subject" is displaced onto external, official structures. Training analysis is thus not simply a clinical matter but a political-theoretical flashpoint: it is the site where the aims, limits, and effects of psychoanalytic praxis are most acutely at stake, and where the question of what psychoanalysis is (science or religion? symbolic treatment of the real?) is most personally and most structurally posed for the would-be analyst. To theorise it is to expose the very machinery that the institution prefers to leave unexamined.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-11, training analysis appears on the opening page of Lacan's most programmatic seminar, at the precise moment when he is forced to justify his own institutional position after his excommunication from the IPA. This placement is not incidental: the concept lives at the intersection of Lacan's account of Praxis and his critique of how psychoanalytic institutions reproduce the Discourse of the Master. As Praxis, training analysis is the point where the general theory of "treatment of the real by the symbolic" becomes reflexive — the analyst-in-formation is simultaneously subject and object of the symbolic operation. Its suppression in the literature enacts, in institutional form, the logic of Foreclosure: the founding signifier of analytic formation (what it means to become an analyst, what "analysis terminable and interminable" means for the practitioner) is not repressed but structurally absent from official discourse, returning only in the Real of institutional crises and excommunications.

The concept also touches the axes of Hysteria and Objet petit a. Training analysis is the site where the candidate must traverse the hysterical question — "Why am I what the institution tells me I am?" — and, if successful, arrive at some relation to objet a as cause rather than as goal. The Imaginary dimension is equally implicated: the idealisation of the training analyst, the mirror-relation with the institution, must be worked through rather than consolidated. That all of this has been "completely ignored in all published work" is Lacan's indictment of an imaginary capture at the heart of psychoanalytic self-reproduction — a capture that his own excommunication simultaneously illustrates and theoretically unmasks.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.20)

the training analysis—that praxis, or that stage of praxis, which has been completely ignored in all published work on psychoanalysis—and throw some light on its aims, its limits and its effects.

The phrase "that praxis, or that stage of praxis" is theoretically loaded because it simultaneously subordinates training analysis to the broader category of Praxis (anchoring it within the symbolic treatment of the real) and distinguishes it as a discrete, bounded stage — one with its own "aims, limits and effects" — whose very existence as a separate stage the published literature has structurally refused to acknowledge. The word "completely" in "completely ignored" performs a rhetorical foreclosure: it signals not mere oversight but a systematic, constitutive absence, inviting the reader to ask what institutional interests are served by this silence.