The Pass

A treatment is not interminable. It can come to an end, a pass that is a logical conclusion. Lacan designates The Pass as the procedure that authenticates the end of an analysis. Since its invention, the pass has always demonstrated its pertinence and its cutting edge. Here you can read, see and hear, the essence of what is covered by this demonstration.

An analytic treatment is equivalent to a demonstration

Jacques-Alain Miller, Comment finissent les analyses. Paradoxes de la passe.

The event of the Pass is the act of saying on the part of one sole person, the Analyst of the School, when he puts his experience into order, when he interprets it to the benefit of anybody who happens to come along.

Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, Hurly Burly 12.

The AS or Analyst of the School, who is characterised as being among those who are able to testify to crucial problems, at the vital point they have come to, for analysis.

Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, Analysis 6.

The pass [. . .] cannot be reduced to the narrative content of a set of statements. It is a function of the relationship in act that the subject sustains with what he is saying; it is a function of the tone, the pace, the way of saying, in short, of enunciation.

Jacques-Alain Miller, Comment finissent les analyses. Paradoxes de la passe.

“An analytic treatment is equivalent to a demonstration^[1]“. How does an analysis end? Posed by Freud in his time and defined as fundamental by Lacan, the question is still the subject of debate among psychoanalysts. In his famous “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, Freud identifies two possible ends, the first of which is akin to a tautology: analysis ends when the analysand and the analyst cease to meet each other. The proposal is more subtle: a halt on a sufficient satisfaction for both parties, agreeing to end. The second poses the end in the form of a paradox: an end without an end. Indeed, for Freud, every analysis is doomed to stumble upon an impossible: to go beyond the rock of castration, going so far as to propose (which was never implemented) that the analyst return every five years to say where he stands in his relation to castration and this famous rock.

Lacan will take up the path traced by Freud, which makes the analyst the product of an analysis carried to its conclusion. But there where Freud stumbled upon the rock of castration, Lacan, in 1967, will find a pass, a path that leads beyond the rock of castration and allows the end of a treatment to be logified, which he names traversal of the fantasy. This is what those who have experienced this traversal can best testify to.

“The event of the Pass is the act of saying on the part of one sole person, the Analyst of the School, when he puts his experience into order, when he interprets it to the benefit of anybody who happens to come along”.^[2] In order to gather the testimony of the end, Lacan devised a precise, double-triggered procedure, which he detailed in his Proposition of 9 October 1967. There is thus a structural knot between the School, which offers this procedure, and the choice of the one who wants to provide the demonstration of the end. There is no obligation to do the pass, but there is the possibility for an analysand to want this guarantee from the School. The School must therefore create the conditions so that anyone who wishes to engage in this process can do so in his or her name, but not without transference to the School. Transference lies at the heart of the procedure and it is important to analyse what happens to it at the end of analysis.

“The AS or Analyst of the School, who is characterised as being among those who are able to testify to crucial problems, at the vital point they have come to, for analysis…”^[3] Those who are nominated AS at the end of the procedure, are expected not only to demonstrate the logical conclusion of their psychoanalytic treatment, but also to testify to the crucial problems of psychoanalysis, with the aim of being responsible for the progress of the School. Lacan therefore intended to give the AS a central place in the School, with consequences for the orientation, interpretation and, beyond that, for the reading of the world. Here you can read the testimonies of all those who have been nominated Analysts of the School since 1985.

“The pass [. . .] cannot be reduced to the narrative content of a set of statements. It is a function of the relationship in act that the subject sustains with what he is saying; it is a function of the tone, the pace, the way of saying, in short, of enunciation”.^[4] The demonstration of the end does not simply pass through the construction of one’s own case, but it is a matter of a “performance” which passes into the saying itself, the enunciation. This is why the testimonies are public. It is necessary to involve the speaking body to fully testify to what a psychoanalysis is: an experience which has effects on the body, itself affected by language. The ultimate point of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

^[1] Miller, J.-A., Comment finissent les analyses. Paradoxes de la passe, Navarin éditeur, 2022, p. 285.

^[2] Miller, J.-A., “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”, Hurly Burly 12, 2015, p. 128.

^[3] Lacan, J., “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, Analysis 6, 1995, 1-13.

^[4] Miller J.-A., Comment finissent les analyses, op. cit., p. 16.