One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalysis, building on its success, has become so popularised that it now refers, for the general public, to very diverse practices for treating suffering. Everyone thinks they know what an analytic treatment is. However, it is crucial to specify what makes psychoanalysis a treatment like no other.
It seems crucial to outline the specificities of psychoanalysis, as Lacan himself did at the beginning of his teaching: “When – I am referring to the present, 1954 [. . .] – we examine now the manner in which the diverse practitioners of analysis think, express, conceive of their technique, we conclude that things have come to such a pass that it would not be an exaggeration to call it the most radical confusion. I can tell you right now, amongst those who are analysts, [. . .] there isn’t perhaps a single one who, deep down, has the same conception as any other of his contemporaries or peers as to what one does, what one aims to do what one achieves, what is going on in analysis”.[1]
Focus on Speech in the Treatment
And indeed, if, on occasion (and we shall not dispute it ), it can “be good to talk”, the treatment cannot be reduced to “a sort of homeopathic discharge [. . .] within the day-to-day experience taking place in the consulting-room [. . .]”.[2] Freud himself, addressing an audience of doctors and laymen at the University of Vienna in 1915, warned, in his own way, the candidate of analysis: anyone who commits themselves to a treatment does so “without assurance” of success because “the whole trend of [their] previous education” and “all [their] habits of thought are inevitably bound to make [them] into opponents of psycho-analysis”.
That since no obstacle is put in the way of the subject’s owning [aveu] of his desire, it is toward this owning that he is directed and even channeled.
Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment”.
So what do we say in psychoanalysis? Certainly, in a moment of subjective urgency, we hand over our most intimate, untold thoughts to someone who listens to us without judgement or preaching: we confide our shame, our misery, the key sentences and events that seem to have obscurely organised a life, what Jacques-Alain Miller calls “the envelope of analysis”. Except that analysis is not summarised in this envelope. The treatment is not a confession, and it cannot be reduced to what one already knows and has never been able to tell anyone else. As Jacques-Alain Miller reminds us, “in analysis, what we say is different”[3]; we say what we do not know. Analysis consists of saying what lies “between the lines”, what emerges in the formations of the unconscious, in dreams, in slips of the tongue, bungled actions, these “first scientific objects” of the Freudian experience that psychoanalysis concerns itself with “in so far as they involve desire”.[4]
“At any moment,” thus, the experience of the treatment “consists in showing the subject that he is saying more than he thinks he is.”[5] The treatment is not a moral experience, but a singular experience of speech which aims at the unconscious desire, veiled beneath the conscious demand addressed to the analyst.
“Let us note:
1. that speech possesses all the powers here, the specific powers of the treatment;
2. that, with the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, the analyst is far from directing the subject toward full speech, or toward a coherent discourse––rather, the analyst leaves the subject free to have a go at it;
3. that this freedom is what the subject tolerates least easily;
4. that demand is exactly what is bracketed in analysis, it being ruled out that the analyst satisfy any of the subject’s demands;
5. that since no obstacle is put in the way of the subject’s owning [aveu] of his desire, it is toward this owning that he is directed and even channeled;
6. that resistance to this owning can, in the final analysis, be related here to nothing but desire’s incompatibility with speech.”
(Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits (New York & London: Norton, 2006), p. 535.)
The Symptom is a Paradox
If analysis is a treatment, then it is oriented each time by the desire of the one taking the risk. The psychoanalyst, oriented by his knowledge of the symptom and its hidden face (that which causes suffering and also provides an unknown satisfaction), guards against the furor sanandi criticised by Freud in his time: indeed, even if the patient’s primary request is to no longer suffer, psychoanalysis as “outside the field of psychology and self-mastery”,[6] underlines the dignity of the symptom, which is what is most intimately personal for the patient, and which is not a matter of simply eradicating: “analysis aims at this point where, in his suffering, the subject is satisfied”.[7]
Therefore, as a tailor-made treatment, psychoanalysis allows the subject to grasp his own implication in the disorder that he complains about, to make himself responsible for his own desire, even what he finds the most shameful. Even if, at the end of the trajectory, the unconscious does not disappear, even if the opacity persists despite the deciphering of the treatment, undertaking an analysis has the value of an act in the sense that Lacan understood it – that of a transformation.
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York & London: Norton, 1988), p. 10.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Miller J.-A., « Quand on est en analyse qu’est-ce qu’on dit de tellement différent? », Histoires de psychanalyse, France Culture, May 30, 2005.
[4] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Polity, 2019), p. 12.
[5] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, op.cit., p. 54.
[6] Miller J.-A., « Le symptôme est un paradoxe », Histoires de psychanalyse, France Culture, June 8, 2005.
[7] Ibid.
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Freud S., “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XV, (London: Hogarth Press, 1958).
->Lacan, J., “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits (New York & London: Norton, 2006).
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Miller J.-A., “Quand on est en analyse qu’est-ce qu’on dit de tellement différent ?”, Histoires de psychanalyse, France Culture, May 30, 2005.
->Miller J.-A., « Le symptôme est un paradoxe », Histoires de psychanalyse, France Culture, June 8, 2005.