Working-Through

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (45)

1. #01

   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.

   were we never to go beyond the exploration of its mazelike pathways and harebrained lucubrations, we would seem (unlike Maimonides) to leave analysands in a state of continual perplexity without any guide

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.25

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues, via clinical illustration, that therapeutic change does not require conscious understanding or the analysand's ability to articulate causal connections between past and present; the subject can get better without knowing why, which places the burden of proof on cognitivist accounts of cure.

   There is no need for the analysand to know in order to get better, in order to stop sabotaging his life and his career.

3. #03

   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.

   Not because we are masochistic... but to foster working through.

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.33

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the clinical aim is not understanding but exhaustive articulation: affects must be spoken in all their variations, incomplete utterances (aposiopesis) must be completed, and verbal compromise formations must be heard and unpacked — all of which reveals meaning as overdetermined, multilayered, and never fully masterable.

   Working through requires that his hostility be spoken in all its different variations and keys, that it be articulated in relation to all the different figures in his life toward whom he has felt it

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.36

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that analytic technique must resist popular-psychological labels (like "abuse") that exonerate the analysand and foreclose the discovery of unconscious guilt displacement, submissive agency, and deeper Oedipal crime; conscious understanding through the observing ego is insufficient and may even obstruct the treatment's real work.

   she would have learned to observe her own behavior and tried to stop repeatedly submitting to punishment … This would have done little or nothing to remove the temptation

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.37

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that intellectual "understanding" is always partial, provisional, and imaginary, and that genuine analytic transformation operates at the level of jouissance (the Real, libidinal economy) rather than conscious comprehension — making jouissance, not meaning, the proper lodestar of analytic work.

   nothing to work through the resentment directed at her mother that seemed to be the motor force of the repetition.

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.73

   A RESPONSE TO FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE

   Theoretical move: Fink defends psychoanalytic symbolization against Foucault's critique by arguing that working-through trauma is not merely recoding it in dominant discourse, and that Foucault's implicit appeal to a pre-discursive primary experience is incoherent — tantamount to a secularized myth of the Fall or Rousseau's State of Nature.

   it leads to a genuine working-through of the trauma. It is true, however, that our cultural discourses are often an obstacle to this form of symbolization.

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.125

   **The Jouissance of the Text**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that translating Lacan requires conveying the jouissance of the text itself, and situates Lacan's deliberately inaccessible style as a calculated pedagogical and institutional strategy to resist ego psychology and object relations traditions while reinventing the psychoanalyst as intellectual.

   his writings were not meant to be read but rather worked over and worked through pen, dictionaries, and Freud's texts in hand

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.127

   **For Whom Doth the Translator Toil?**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the quality and intended audience of a translation are inseparable theoretical-clinical problems: early English translations of Lacan failed to reach clinicians not merely through stylistic inadequacy but through ignorance of the Freudian and broader intellectual context Lacan presupposes, and his own translation practice is explicitly oriented toward producing a clinically usable Lacan rather than a literary-academic one.

   My theory—perhaps some will say it was nothing more than a wish—was that not all English-speaking clinicians are totally anti-intellectual and totally averse to working through challenging texts.

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.214

    CASES

    Theoretical move: This clinical case material illustrates the features of untriggered (pre)psychosis, noting the limited therapeutic effect of insight and the role of parental figures, religious imagery, and the analyst's presence in the transference, without these elements producing working-through.

    it was never in any way taken up or brought to bear on her life or therapy

11. #11

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

    **Can they really understand them? As Lacan said, one understands nothing . . . Is there any ¿ nal knowledge or it is always a process?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of total Hegelian knowledge is mobilized to argue that psychoanalytic change operates through a non-cognitive, non-conscious process irreducible to self-knowledge: the unconscious persists structurally even after analysis, and therapeutic transformation cannot be explained by consciously acquired knowledge.

    Analysis brings a kind of change that doesn't necessarily involve consciously realized knowledge you can explain to other people.

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.32

    <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** > *Tucking Some Away*

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical vignette of "George," Fink demonstrates how the obsessional's characteristic posture—self-blame and conspicuous hard work in analysis—functions as a resistance to the non-goal-directed associative work psychoanalysis requires, while the inherited money operates simultaneously as the enabling condition for treatment and as a symptomatic object that condenses the analysand's entire conflicted relation to his family and his intellectual project.

    Consciously working hard at something in analysis does not mean you necessarily achieve results. Obsessives work hard so they can feel they are putting in their time and getting their money's worth, but this often impedes the kind of non-goal-directed associative work psychoanalysis requires.

13. #13

    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.

    They agree to stand in for the mother provisionally so that something about our relationships with our mothers can be worked through.

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.192

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

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed clinical unfolding of Wesley's case, Fink demonstrates how an obsessional neurotic structure pre-exists and shapes the impact of a traumatic event, and how repressed aggression toward the father—displaced onto the mother, the self, and eventually the transference—is progressively worked through in analysis, with somatic, oneiric, and parapraxic material serving as privileged evidence.

    its main outlines have become ever clearer as the trauma at age ten has been progressively worked through in the analysis

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.264

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **What do you believe is behind the growing emphasis on and demand for such outcome studies?**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is structurally incompatible with insurance-driven outcome-focused therapy, and defends Lacan's late concept of "identification with the symptom" as a non-reductive, transformative endpoint of analysis that exceeds mere symptom elimination.

    When symptoms get cleared up in a very short [time]... exposing the patient to the risk that the symptom will return quite quickly.

16. #16

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.265

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **What do you believe is behind the growing emphasis on and demand for such outcome studies?** > LACAN IN AMERICA

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that affect is an effect rather than a cause, and that the Lacanian concept of jouissance — the patient's hidden enjoyment in their own symptoms — is the clinically decisive category that symptom-reduction approaches and affect-centred therapies systematically miss; anxiety is then theorised as the universal convertible currency of affect in which jouissance manifests.

    it is often necessary to go further so that a year later he or she won't have any new panic attacks, for example, because something has been worked through once and for all.

17. #17

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.274

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-271-0"></span>[VIOLENCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: Violence is endemic to analytic work at multiple levels: it inheres in the Other's desire and jouissance as they are mobilized in transference, in analytic techniques such as scansion and interpretation, and in the post-Freudian betrayal of Freud's praxis through the reversion from transference-work to suggestion.

    interpretations that are likely to be disruptive should only be proffered once trust between analyst and analysand has been established, so that the impact of the interpretation can be worked through

18. #18

    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_204"></span>**time**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of time constitutes a double break with linear temporality: logical time replaces chronometric time with a dialectical intersubjective structure (tripartite: instant of seeing / time for understanding / moment of concluding), while retroaction and anticipation replace linear developmental sequences with a non-linear psychic temporality in which present, past and future mutually condition one another.

    Lacan's concept of 'the time for understanding' can throw light on the Freudian concept of working-through

19. #19

    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 analysand works through the signifiers that have determined him in his history

20. #20

    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_151"></span>**phobia**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

    the treatment should aim at helping the subject to work through all the various permutations involving the phobic signifier

21. #21

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.231

    <span id="Chapter23.htm_page214"></span>Postmodern Antiques: *Patience (After Sebald)*

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that *Inception* symptomatically stages the supersession of the Freudian unconscious by a "subconscious" colonised by late-capitalist cognitive labour: where the classical unconscious was an alien otherness, the film's dreamscapes recirculate familiar commodified images, converting psychoanalytic depth into therapeutic self-help ideology and thereby dramatising how capitalist "inception" (interpellation) works by making subjects believe its implanted ideas are their own.

    Dreams have ceased to be the spaces where private psychopathologies are worked through and have become the scenes where competing corporate interests play out their banal struggles.

22. #22

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter13.htm_page140"></span>Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

    Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

    These musics were vast collective works of mourning and melancholia.

23. #23

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

    Theoretical move: Fisher distinguishes clinical depression from hauntological melancholia as a cultural condition, and frames the act of writing/blogging as a working-through that externalises negativity from the individual onto culture — making the personal therapeutic move simultaneously a critical-theoretical gesture about cultural desolation.

    Some of these writings were part of the working through of the condition, and it's no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity

24. #24

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.193

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted through the Symbolic order (big Other as "locus of speech"), and that the Freudian unconscious must be accounted for in strictly Symbolic—not phenomenological-Imaginary—terms, with the unconscious's peculiar atemporality, repetition, and desire explained through the structural mediation of signifiers and the Hegelian-Kojèvian desire-for-recognition.

    Lacan draws a clear, sharp line between Imaginary and Symbolic accounts of those facets of the unconscious Freud associates with (as the title of a 1914 essay of his has it) 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.'

25. #25

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.224

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded entirely in the structure of the patient's speech—distinguishing empty from full speech, showing that the ego is constituted by alienation rather than frustrated desire, and that the analyst's proper medium is the symbolic relation expressed in discourse, not any imaginary "contact" with the patient's reality.

    The aptness of the German word Durcharbeiten—equivalent to the English 'working through'—has been recognized in passing.

26. #26

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.276

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's interventions—including abstention, session length, and temporal punctuation—constitute the junction between the Symbolic and the Real, and that the variable-length session ("short sessions") has a precise dialectical function: by shattering discourse it brings forth genuine speech, countering the obsessive's strategy of working-through as seduction of the master.

    the subject's 'working through' is in fact employed to seduce the analyst.

27. #27

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.516

    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?* > *II. What Is the Place of Interpretation?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has inverted Freud's proper order of treatment—rectification of reality, transference development, then interpretation—by subordinating interpretation to transference management and ego-strengthening, a regression only overcome by grounding interpretation in the radical structure of the unconscious as language and the function of the signifier.

    interpretation is absorbed into a kind of 'working through' that one can quite simply translate by 'work of transference'—which serves as an alibi for a sort of revenge the analyst takes for his initial timidity

28. #28

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.539

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > *V. Desire Must Be Taken Literally*

    Theoretical move: By close reading of the butcher's wife dream from the *Traumdeutung*, Lacan demonstrates that desire is irreducibly structured by language—specifically that desire operates as metonymy of want-to-be, while the dream-work enacts metaphorical substitution; hysterical identification is thereby revealed as the subject's constitutive identification with the Other's desire rather than with a person.

    One does not get better because one remembers. One remembers because one gets better.

29. #29

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.544

    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: Lacan argues that desire is structurally the Other's desire—constituted in the gap opened by the signifying chain between need and demand—and that the phallus functions as the signifier of this desire, a thesis illustrated through a clinical vignette where a mistress's dream restores the obsessive patient's desire precisely by displaying what she lacks.

    our exhausting in the transference work [travail de transfert] (Durcharbeitung) all the artifices of a verbalization

30. #30

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.614

    In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical reading of Jones' theory of symbolism to argue that the signifier—not affect—is what is repressed, and that the phallus exemplifies the signifier's function as marker of the subject's constitutive loss, thereby subordinating Jones' developmental biologism to a properly structural account of desire, condensation, displacement, metaphor, and metonymy.

    if I allow myself to use this word with the same metaphorical effect as that found in the terms 'working through' and Durcharbeiten in use in psychoanalysis

31. #31

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.832

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S TO "TH E SITUATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAININ G OF PSYCHOANALYSTS IN 1956" > NOTE S T O TH E DIRECTIO N O F TH E TREATMEN T

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's "Direction of the Treatment," clarifying terminological choices, identifying intertextual references, and glossing key concepts such as repetition, transference, metaphor, metonymy, desire, and the drive—thereby serving as a secondary apparatus rather than advancing a primary theoretical argument.

    Lacan provides here his own translation, travail du transfert (work of transference), of Freud's Durcharbeitung, which is usually translated into French as perlaboration.

32. #32

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.842

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO "REMARKS ON DANIEL LAGACHE S PRESENTATION: 'PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PERSONALITY STRUCTURE' " > NOTE S T O "TH E SIGNIFICATIO N O F TH E PHALLUS "

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial/translator's notes glossing technical terms, bibliographic references, and translation variants in Lacan's "The Signification of the Phallus," with no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

    See SE XXI, 105-7, and Freud's article, 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' (1937), SE XXIII, 209-54. In 'Variations on the Standard Treatment,' Lacan translates the title of this article as 'L'analyse finie et l'analyse sans fin,' 'Finite (or Finished) Analysis and Endless Analysis.'

33. #33

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.886

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

    Durcharbeiten, 249, 712 Durcharbeitung, 630

34. #34

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **II**

    Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's intermediate technique between hypnosis and dialogue (hand-pressure, the lifting of the barrier), Lacan identifies the embryonic form of the analytic relationship to discourse and resistance, using the Lucy R. and Anna O. cases to contrast elegant, compressed symptom-resolution with the extended labour of working-through.

    with Anna O. we find the hard labour of working-through possessing all the animation and density of the most modern analytic cases

35. #35

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalytic discourse from philosophical discourse by insisting that the subject is primordially constituted as an effect of language (as 'o', the bet/zero), and uses a critical reading of Bergler's account of the superego to argue that Durcharbeitung (working-through) and the superego must be rethought together—not as a theatrical agency hitting the ego but as structurally related to identification, the ego ideal, and the limit-encounter in treatment.

    Durcharbeitung, l'élaboration as it is translated in French...Analytic elaboration is not at all like that. People on the couch see that it consists in coming back the whole time to the same thing.

36. #36

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

    Theoretical move: By reading Little Hans's case through Lévi-Strauss's structural method for myth analysis, Lacan argues that the signifying elements of Hans's fantasies cannot be fixed to univocal meanings but function as transforming bundles whose traversal moves from the eruption of the real penis to its symbolic accommodation, with the imaginary father (occupied by Freud himself) remaining distinct from both the real and symbolic father—and this structural incompleteness explains both the cure and its limits.

    the Durcharbeitung is not, contrary to what is commonly accepted, animated merely by some endless iteration at the end of which what had not been intellectually assimilated will at last work its way under the subject's skin

37. #37

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.171

    Silence

    Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

    'it' can be tackled, if only by the long road of 'working through' the voice and the loop of the Other.

38. #38

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of the unconscious reveals an irreducible cycle of repetition, submission, and authority-seeking that underlies all politics, love, and therapy, and that the analyst — like Shakespeare's Falstaff — must strategically occupy the position of the primal father/authority in order to work through, rather than merely repeat, these foundational fantasies.

    to recall and diagnose love for the authoritarian rather than simply repeating it in displaced forms… the remembering process to resolve an issue that the patient would rather get rid of in the form of an action

39. #39

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the transition from hypnotic/cathartic technique to modern free-association analysis reveals that patients do not remember the repressed but instead repeat it as action under conditions of resistance — establishing repetition-compulsion as the central dynamic of transference and the structuring force of analytic work.

    Piece by piece the entire illness is brought within the scope and ambit of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something intensely real and immediate, it is our job to do the therapeutic work

40. #40

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the analyst's central technical task is to contain the patient's compulsion to repeat within the transference as a controlled "playground," transforming acting-out into memory and ultimately into a workable transference neurosis; the decisive therapeutic change comes not from identifying resistance but from working through it—a phase that distinguishes analysis from suggestion-based therapy.

    One has to give the patient time to familiarize himself with the resistance now that he is aware of it, to *work his way through it*, to overcome it by defying it and carrying on with the therapy in accordance with the basic rule of analysis.

41. #41

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.12

    Self > Preface

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a programmatic argument that a genuinely materialist psychoanalysis must engage with the life sciences, and proposes a four-category taxonomy (theorizable/treatable) to map the limits and possibilities of Freudian-Lacanian analysis when confronted with neuroscientific findings, particularly neuropathologies—defending the position that such cases belong to a 'theorizable but not treatable' category rather than being wholly outside analytic reach.

    The time is long overdue for psychoanalysis and the ensemble of established Continental philosophical orientations to begin appreciating and seriously working-through a number of developments in the life sciences.

42. #42

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

    Theoretical move: Freud pivots from the earlier therapeutic goal of conscious remembering (via catharsis/hypnosis) to the recognition that patients under resistance *repeat* rather than remember — acting out repressed material as present reality — and that this compulsion to repeat is structurally tied to transference and resistance, reframing repetition as the primary clinical phenomenon to be worked through.

    Piece by piece the entire illness is brought within the scope and ambit of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something intensely real and immediate, it is our job to do the therapeutic work, which consists to a very great extent in leading the patient back to the past.

43. #43

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat, rather than being simply suppressed, must be harnessed via the transference as a controlled "playground" that converts acting-out into remembering; the working-through of resistances — not mere identification of them — is the decisive therapeutic operation that distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion.

    One has to give the patient time to familiarize himself with the resistance now that he is aware of it, to *work his way through it*, to overcome it by defying it and carrying on with the therapy

44. #44

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of group psychology and repetition compulsion reveals all political life—liberal and authoritarian alike—as structured by transference onto leader-figures descended from the primal father, and that the therapeutic response (working-through rather than repeating) mirrors the dynamics staged in Shakespeare's Falstaff/Hal scenes, making literary play a potential rival to psychoanalytic cure.

    to recall and diagnose love for the authoritarian rather than simply repeating it in displaced forms… 'prepares himself for a constant battle with the patient, in order to keep within the psychic domain all those impulses that the patient would prefer to divert into the motor domain'

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.130

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: Žižek reads Henry James's late style as a literary enactment of the Hegelian passage from Substance to Subject, in which the nominalization of predicates desubstantializes the subject and the loss of ethical substance becomes the very condition for a higher, mediated ethics of intersubjective dependence—a move Žižek then generalizes into a "parallax gap" at the level of political antinomy.

    The key difference between Hyacinth and James was that James was able to 'work through' his inability to act, his withdrawal from participation in life, to transpose it into the art of writing.