The Letter No57 (Autumn 2014) pages 1-27
PRESENTATION
Discourse creates a social bond. How express (dire) the social bond specific to psychoanalysis? Must we base ourselves on the persons concerned by analysis?
Discourse in general does not have protagonists; it is not determined by the agents that are supposed to precede it. On the contrary, it is the discourse which gives their place to people who will find in it their consistency by allowing it to resonate in them. It is the master discourse which determines the master and not the inverse. It is the hysterical discourse which challenges the hysteric and makes her exist and not the inverse. It is the academic discourse which knows how to organise the academic and not the inverse. In the same way, the psychoanalytic discourse is not the discourse held by the analyst, nor is it the discourse held by the analyser. There is no analyst and no analyser who maintains the psychoanalytic discourse. It is on the contrary the latter which maintains and sustains them. One should not confuse the psychoanalytic discourse and the discourse of the analyst.
The discourse of the analyst consists simply in discoursing on the analyst, about the analyst. Anyone engaged more or less closely in the process of analysis can discourse about the analyst in one fashion or another, master, hysterical, academic. That is called transference whoever may be the semblance who engages in it, the analyst, the analyser, or a simple individual outside a psychoanalytic treatment.
From the Rome discourse to the end of his life, Lacan did not cease to inscribe himself in this transference by constantly putting the psychoanalyst ‘on the spot’. From start to finish, the thread of his discourse has as object the analyst and his function.
One can discourse in a thousand ways about the analyst. Rightly or wrongly. And if it is wrongly (which never fails to be the case), it is better to traverse its impasses and its impossibilities to discover a path.
To speak about the analyst, it is better to follow the thread of psychoanalysis itself, it is better to stick to a discourse which is properly analytic, it is better to tack the discourse on the analyst onto a psychoanalytic discourse.
This is the crux of psychoanalysis: to weave the chain of the discourse on the psychoanalyst, that of transference, with the texture of an experience of free speech, that of the psychoanalytic discourse. …