THE LETTER 09 (Spring 1997) pages 73-83

We do not pay enough attention to the fact that the unconscious was not discovered alone, and that something else saw the light at approximately the same time, I mean: the psychoanalyst as such, as he appears in the sheer movement of transference. We regularly lean to those last years of the previous century as to a cradle into which, in the shape of a certain Dr. Freud, a sort of psychoanalytical Adam emerged. We admire the feat through which Freud gave birth to a new kind of being, and we comment untiringly on the old story of the dawn of psychoanalysis.

I would prefer to consider each of these – the unconscious and the psychoanalyst – as a pair, from their very beginning right up to today and even, while I am at it, for the foreseeable future. During the first half of this century, the psychoanalyst was not the main problem; at first he was simply someone deeply interested in the new field of the Freudian unconscious; then, on top of that, he became someone having experienced, more or less, a psychoanalytical treatment; but he has become something else too, through Lacan’s teaching; a sort of product, or shadow, or scrap of the unconscious.

I suppose some of you see me coming: he is going to talk, once again, about the object a\ But this time I promise I am not about to do that, because here I am more interested in studying the relationship between this analyst and the unconscious. I cannot say the unconscious ‘itself since this unconscious knows no reflexivity. So I am initially going to approach the question of transference as the only place where the unconscious and the psychoanalyst are supposed to meet. If we take a look at the analyst at the moment where he leaves room to the transference itself (here I can use this reflexive term), is it not obvious that this analyst is playing a double game? …