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What’s so Different about Lacan’s approach to psychoanaLysis?

bruce fink

Clinical work based on Lacanian principles is rarely compared in the psychoanalytic literature with that based on other principles. The author attempts to highlight a few important theoretical differences regarding language, desire, affect, and time between a Lacanian approach and certain others that lead to differences in focus and technique, related, for example, to interpretation, scansion, and countertransference. Lacanian techniques are illustrated with brief clinical vignettes.

In 1995, a publisher of psychoanalytic books who was interested in a manuscript I had written (1997) to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience asked me to compare and contrast Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis in my manuscript with that of other analysts better known to that audience. I had to admit to him that I was absolutely unequipped to do so, having devoted more than a decade to grappling with Lacan’s writings and seminars, and knowing precious little about other approaches to psychoanalysis. I did, however, and still today believe that it is a worthwhile project and I have undertaken to sketch out a few comparisons and contrasts here.

Naturally, there is no single Lacanian perspective, just as there is no single relational perspective, Nancy Chodorow’s perspective differing in many significant ways from Jessica Benjamin’s, Thomas Ogden’s, and Owen Renik’s, to cite just a few theorists. Lacan’s work is open to myriad interpretations, owing to its deliberately polyvalent resonances and challenging phraseology. Moreover,

Lacan’s thinking evolved considerably from the 1930s to the

1970s, and different interpreters of his work are free to emphasize

one period and conceptual framework over another. I will thus be

attempting here to contrast my own singular Lacanian perspec-

tive with what I have grasped of literature by authors associated

with the ego psychology, object relations, Kleinian, relational, in-

terpersonal, and intersubjective perspectives. My knowledge of

these traditions is bound to be found lacking, overly simplistic,

and reductionistic by specialists—all of which I can only agree to

in advance, since I am far from an expert in these traditions. As

Mitchell and Black (1995) once put it, “At present it is very diffi-

cult to find any psychoanalyst who is really deeply conversant with

more than one approach (e.g., Kleinian, Lacanian, ego psycholo-

gy, self psychology). The literature of each school is extensive and

each clinical sensibility finely honed, presenting a challenging

prospect to any single analyst attempting to digest it all” (p. 207).

I will nevertheless hazard a few juxtapositions here which, al-

though they may seem theoretical at the outset, lead to what I be-

lieve to be important differences at the level of psychoanalytic

technique.

Lacan’s oDe to MeDiation

Reading some of the relational and intersubjective literature on

the topic of transference and countertransference, I was struck by

the debate between the so-called one-body or one-person psychol-

ogy (focusing on a monadlike individual whose intrapsychic agen-

cies are at war with each other), on the one hand, and what is re-

ferred to by some as the “two-body” or “two-person” psychology

(emphasizing intersubjective processes and exchanges across flu-

id boundaries), on the other. I was no doubt struck by this be-

cause my sense is that Lacan adopts neither of these, nor does he

adopt what both Robert S. Wallerstein and Nancy Chodorow refer

to as “a both/and” approach, which at times emphasizes the agen-

tic aspects of the one-person approach and at other times the in-

terpersonal aspects of life and analysis.

If I were to characterize what Lacan does by numbering the

parties to the analysis, I would say that, at least in his early work in the 1950s, he proposes an absolutely crucial third term: language. Language is not situated in the analyst or in the analysand per se, but rather between them as a third party, in a sense. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that language encompasses both analyst and analysand, being bigger than both, neither one of them nor both together in any way knowing or mastering the whole of the language they speak to each other.

When this language is their mother tongue for both of them (the situation is rather more complicated when it is not), they have both been thoroughly immersed in it since the beginning of subjective time: Their mothers and others around them have been speaking it to them ever since they were born and even in utero (see, for example, Lacan, 2006b, p. 214). Lacan refers to language as the Other with a capital O, thereby indicating that language is not a person like the analyst is in certain respects to the analysand and like the analysand is in certain respects to the analyst; Lacan designates persons as “others” with a lowercase o, analyst and analysand being in these respects others to each other just like any two people in the world (e.g., siblings or friends) can be. Language as Other with a capital O is something qualitatively different, a third party that is radically different from the two bodies or persons who find themselves in each other’s presence.²

It is language that allows the analysand to express the lion’s share of his or her experiences, feelings, and thoughts to the analyst, and it is language that allows the analyst to try to follow what it is the analysand is conveying. One of the parties may use certain words and expressions in ways that the other does not initially understand, and they may each have to refer to a dictionary or other definitions or usages of the words and expressions so that the other can grasp their meaning, referring in this way to something outside of both of them, whether movies, TV shows, slang idiomatic expressions, blogs, or Webster’s dictionary—something in the broader culture, that is, something in the Other with a capital O. The Other includes all of the ways a word or expression has ever been used in songs, films, books, comics, and so on.

One party may feel that the other party uses certain words and expressions incorrectly, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, and yet, having discerned how he or she uses those words and expressions, may agree to use them in the same

way or at least understand them in the way intended by the other

party. Nevertheless, for one party to begin to try to comprehend

the other party, some appeal must be made to this Other that exists out-

side of both of them; indeed, it is relied upon constantly by both of

them as they speak. It is this same Other that allows analysts to

have at least a fighting chance of being intelligible to other ana-

lysts when they discuss their cases.

It is our grasp, as analysts, of the analysand’s mother tongue

that allows us to hear more in what the analysand said than in-

tended. To give a simple example, one of my analysands had been

highly ambivalent about pursuing his artwork for several decades.

There were occasional spurts of artistic activity followed by long

stretches of inactivity. In a dream he had, a former artist friend of

his looked at his paintings and told him that, although there was

some good work there, he did not have enough high-quality piec-

es for a showing in a gallery. The analysand associated at some

length to the different elements of the dream, the nature of his

relationship with the former artist friend, his feelings about gal-

leries, and so on, and eventually opined, regarding his artwork,

“It’s the last thing I need to let go of.”

He consciously meant to say that, like so many other ideals

and dreams he felt he had had to let go of in the course of his life,

he thought he needed to give up any remaining faith he had in

his own artistic abilities, get over his grandiose wish to be the most

famous artist since Picasso, and move on. But, as most native

speakers of English know, and this analysand clearly was a native

speaker, one can also mean something quite different in saying

“It’s the last thing I need to let go of”—that is, “I can let go of any-

thing but that” or “That’s the one thing I really need!”

It was a simple matter for me to rely on the existence in the

English spoken by both of us of an idiomatic expression like

“That’s the last thing I need to do” (akin to the expression “I need

that like I need a hole in my head”) to get the analysand to realize

that he perhaps thinks both that he needs to give up his grandi-

ose wish to revolutionize art and that he cannot live without his

artwork.

His grammar allowed me to highlight a statement that the analysand himself immediately recognized to be polyvalent. I did not in any way claim that I saw the reality of his artistic talents more clearly than he did, as some might.³ I simply heard quite distinctly, and he heard it too as soon as I highlighted it, that he had said two very different things at the same time: “I need to give it up” and “I need it to live.” It was up to him to decide how to reconcile the two, and find a way, if he could, to enjoy the process of artistic creation without constantly thinking about whether what he does is revolutionary or not. But if he was to do so, he first had to reckon with the fact that he was inhabited by both felt needs.

In this simple example, spoken English is the Other with a capital O that immediately allowed both of us to recognize something with a potentially unconscious meaning.⁴ Semantic ambiguity or polyvalence was there in what he said, and most speakers of American English can easily hear it. We might go so far as to say that there is something objective about it. The reader can grasp the ambiguity or polyvalence just as easily as I did and as he did, even though we said these things far from the reader, some years ago, and in a context that no reader is privy to, knowing nothing about the history of the analysand or of the analysis.

There is something about the polyvalence of a completed speech act, something about the multiple meanings of formulations as they were enunciated in the course of a session, that can be shown to other people as evidence of split or multiple intentionality, as evidence of the split between conscious and unconscious. (Tone of voice and irony or sarcasm obviously complicate matters and must, of course, be taken into account. Consider the expression “You should talk!” which can be an injunction or an accusation.) I would go so far as to say that this is the only kind of objectivity that is available to us in psychoanalysis. According to Lacan (1968), we analysts do not see reality any more clearly or objectively than our analysands do—all of us see so-called reality through the lenses of our own history, education, culture, experience, and fantasies, even after an extensive analysis. What is incontrovertible is what the analysand actually said. There are, of course, times when it is garbled, mumbled, or slurred and it is not clear to either analyst or analysand what was said. But when the analyst is listening not just for meaning but for the letter of the analysand’s discourse, much of what the analysand says is indisputable in the

sense that there is no disagreement on the analysand’s part that,

in one example, she inadvertently said “contention” instead of

“contentment” when, in talking about a “great guy” she knew,

she intended to say that between them “there’s a familiarity, a

contentment.”

Contention would appear to be something quite different

from contentment, at least for many people, and although we do

not know in advance what the slip means, we are quite justified in

treating it as a slip and in seeking another level of meaning in it

(assuming, of course, that the analysand is neurotic and not psy-

chotic). And if a colleague asked me how I can be so sure that this

analysand has some aggression that is under wraps or that she en-

joys conflict at some level, I can point to the slip. To my way of

thinking, this is the most we can hope for by way of objectivity in

psychoanalysis, as opposed to some objectively known external re-

ality or some sort of “objective countertransference” (Winnicott,

1949, p. 70). It is not the ultimate meaning of any particular bit of

speech that is objective—what is objective is the semantic ambigu-

ity itself.

When Lacan (2006a, p. 16) says that the unconscious is the

Other’s discourse, he means quite a large number of things, but

one of them is simply that the unconscious can be detected in

ambiguities that every natural language allows for and even

abounds in. Another is that the unconscious consists of all kinds

of things that we have heard other people say, whether intended

for our ears or not. The unconscious is overflowing with things we

have heard our parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and even ac-

tors on television say. One of my analysands hated grocery shop-

ping for some twenty years because her biology teacher once

characterized the placenta as the neonatal infant’s grocery store.

She also hated doing housework her whole life at least in part be-

cause her grandmother once used an incredibly derogatory term

in her mother tongue for housekeepers.

When Lacan (1998a) says that “the unconscious is structured

like a language” (p. 15), part of what he means is that it is struc-

tured by the words enunciated by those around us. Those bits of

other people’s discourse flow into us through our ears, and stick with us and affect us, often for decades. When Lacan says that “man’s desire is the Other’s desire” (see, for example, Lacan, 2006a, p. 628), part of what he means is that we hear and overhear other people expressing their desires in words and their desires too flow into us through our ears, and stick with us and affect us.

In this sense, everything that we have ever heard, and all of our culture and history enter the analyst’s consultation room in the form of the language spoken by the analyst and analysand. There is no sharp distinction between an individual and his or her cultural milieu; indeed, there is no such thing as a speaking being who is not thoroughly embedded in other people’s discourses, desires, and affects. As soon as one is a speaking being, one finds oneself inhabited by desires that one feels are not entirely one’s own, and one finds oneself pursuing the same things others pursue even when one consciously does not wish to pursue them. One finds oneself thinking some of the same thoughts as the characters in books one reads and movies one watches, and having some of the same fantasies as those one hears about.

Nevertheless, each of us hears and overhears different things from different people; we do not all read the same books, watch the same movies, recite the same poetry, or learn the same songs. Even if the unconscious is (chock full of) the Other’s discourse, the Other whose discourse forms each person’s unconscious is somewhat different for each of us.

I would go so far as to suggest that Lacan’s introduction of the concept of the Other with a capital O as language—and his introduction of the concept of the symbolic order, which is just a more general way of talking about much the same thing—allows for a kind of radical intersubjectivity: Every one of us is a product of the symbolic order.⁵ At the same time, however, the concept of the Other as language implies that one person cannot have direct access to someone else’s unconscious. Insofar as the unconscious is made up of language, is structured like a language, and comes to us through other people’s discourse, we can catch a glimpse of another person’s unconscious only in ways that are mediated by language and culture.

Speech is the primary medium in all forms of talk therapy, and yet there are many in the analytic community who believe they can grasp or grok another’s meaning in an unmediated way.

To Lacan’s way of thinking, on the other hand, language is a me-

dium through which we can potentially convey things to each

other, but is also a wall—a wall between us—for we never entirely

speak each other’s language (Lacan, 2006a, p. 233). We have to

work very hard to even begin to understand each other. The anal-

ysand’s speech does not give us immediate access to his thoughts

or feelings; his speech has to be interpreted and is virtually always

as least partially misinterpreted, all communication being mis-

communication. As Lacan (1993) puts it, “the very foundation of

interhuman discourse is misunderstanding” (p. 163).

Those who believe they learn more from the analysand’s so-

called body language than from his or her speech would do well

to consult the numerous books available on body language and

hand gestures in France, Italy, and other cultures, for they would

soon realize that the ways people express affects with their bodies

and in their bodies differ greatly from culture to culture, language

group to language group, and even from one part of a country to

another.

This is true even of an affect like anxiety. The French, for

example, feel anxiety above all in their throats (they have a pleth-

ora of idiomatic expressions that indicate this, including ça me

prend à la gorge, j’ai la gorge nouée, ça m’est resté en travers de la gorge,

j’ai une boule dans la gorge, and j’ai les boules), while Americans tend

to get a knot or butterflies in their stomachs, or irritable bowel

disorder. Whereas an American who has had a big meal but is

tense is likely to develop an upset stomach, heartburn, or acid re-

flux, a French person is likely to have a liver attack (known as a

crise de foie). The body speaks (in “body language”) in ways that

are not immediately understood but that, like any other form of

expression of beings inhabited by language, must be interpreted.

In other words, body language does not give us immediate access to

someone’s true feelings—if it did, we would never be fooled by any-

one’s body language, the profession of acting could not exist

as we know it today, and con artists would never get away with

anything.

A very erect body posture may, for example, have different

meanings in Asian as opposed to Western cultures, and may have several different meanings even in our own culture: It may imply rigidity, some sort of identification with the phallus (consider the fascination in the United States in recent decades with “hard bodies”), or even “uprightness,” suggesting a grafting onto the body of a parent’s moral admonitions or ethical stance. Body language is anything but self-evident. It has to be interpreted, and such interpretation requires considerable knowledge of the analysand’s cultural, linguistic, and religious context.

Everything we do in psychoanalysis involves interpretation: interpretation of the analysand’s speech, whether slurred or distinct, interpretation of the analysand’s gestures, interpretation of the analysand’s actions and emotions, and even interpretation of the analysand’s silence. (I do not mean to suggest that we must verbally interpret all of these to the analysand: much of this interpretive work goes on silently in us and guides our punctuations and other interventions.) None of these can be immediately understood by the analyst. All of them must be considered in context—in the social, cultural, and political context, but also in the context of everything that has hitherto transpired in the analysis.

Their meanings are transparently obvious to no one; they must be interpreted in every single instance. Interpretation may occur quite spontaneously for the analyst in certain cases, so spontaneously that the analyst is led to believe that he or she has access to their meanings in an unmediated way, without any filtering or interference on the part of his or her own background, education, religious training, upbringing, or neuroses. But if the analyst reflects carefully, he or she is likely to realize that the feeling of having the most immediate access to the analysand’s experience occurs when there is an especially large degree of overlap between the analysand’s Other and his or her own: when they are both from the same socioeconomic class, and from the same religious and intellectual background—in a word, are both part of the same symbolic order. My English-speaking analysands are more likely to feel I can sometimes read their minds than my Frenchspeaking analysands, and my analysands from the Northeast are more likely to feel that I am closely attuned to their ways of thinking and feeling, than my analysands from the South or Midwest.⁶

The mediation process is different in each of these cases, but in none of them do I have direct access to the analysand’s experi-

ence. Such access is always mediated by my interpretation of the

analysand’s language, body language, actions, affects, and silence.

I may not be aware how I arrived at a particular interpretation,

but that simply means that my interpretive process was implicit,

not explicit. What led me to interpret the analysand’s discourse in

one way or another may have been preconscious, not conscious—

indeed, it very often is, and I can only explain why I interpreted

something as I did after the fact.

This implicit, preconscious mediating process is confused, in

my view, by some analysts, who believe they have direct access to

another person’s experience, a kind of access that short-circuits

interpretation. Some refer to it as intuition,⁷ while others seem to

believe they have an exquisite sensitivity and are able to feel other

people’s feelings if not all the time, then at least a good part of

the time. I would counter that there is a necessary mediating pro-

cess that is occurring, of which they are simply unaware. When

they have supposedly felt the other’s feelings, they have rather, I

would suggest, simply had experiences similar to the analysand’s

and thus easily find themselves attuned to the analysand’s feel-

ings, or have correctly interpreted the analysand’s facial expres-

sions, ticks, and body language. But there is a world of difference

between attunement and actually feeling (much less being “invad-

ed” or “penetrated” by) someone else’s feelings.⁸

Rather than lament that we cannot grok each other directly

in some sort of Vulcan “mind-meld,” like the kind Mr. Spock used

on Star Trek, which allowed him immediate contact with the pains

and wishes of other beings, Lacan would, I think, have us sing the

praises of mediation and indeed offer up an ode to mediation.

For it is mediation itself that forces upon us a recognition of dif-

ference: a recognition that other people are so fundamentally dif-

ferent from ourselves that it generally requires a great deal of ef-

fort on our part to fathom their incredibly complicated split

subjectivities. And there can be no interpretation without mediation:

The Other is always there as a third party, making it such that

there is no direct connection between self and other, between

analyst and analysand.⁹

Where there is a belief in unmediated or objective ESP-like access to the other’s experience, as we find in the work of certain self psychologists like Doris Brothers (2008, pp. 126–134), there is very likely to be a reduction of the other to the same—other people are viewed as fundamentally like ourselves. Where, on the other hand, there is an appreciation for the necessity of mediation, there is likely to be a recognition that other people are radically different from ourselves, operate according to different principles than our own, fantasize about things we ourselves would never fantasize about, and feel conflicted about things that are not a problem for us.¹⁰ Similarly, there is likely to be a recognition that the things that generate anxiety or conflict in us may be of negligible importance to other people, and that the things we analysts think and feel during sessions cannot possibly be put into us by our analysands in any sort of transparently immediate way.

Desire is (stiLL) the essence of Man

Spinoza suggests in his Ethics that we are essentially desiring beings. The philosopher’s viewpoint was heartily endorsed by Freud (1900) in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he says that “nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work” (p. 567). It was taken up by Lacan as well, who devoted numerous writings and seminars to the topic. Nevertheless, the possible wishes or desires that lead to slips of the tongue or to the formation of dreams, daydreams, or fantasies seem less and less often explored in contemporary psychoanalytic work, if I may judge on the basis of the many traditionally trained analysts I have supervised and the myriad case presentations I have heard in the United States. Or, when wishes are highlighted by analysts, they are not explored with a view to bringing out something truly new, but simply to confirm the viewpoint or transference interpretation the analyst has already arrived at.

One male analysand who began to work with me after fifteen years of analysis with several different clinicians was shocked to hear me say that a dream, in which he called his boyfriend and revealed something very private to him, but the boyfriend put him on speakerphone and broadcast his revelation to the entire office, might possibly suggest that he wished all the world would know his secret. He seemed no further advanced than the novice

who complains that he is upset because he does not like what hap-

pens in his dreams. When a dream does or performs the precise

opposite of what the analysand thinks he wants, it is, as Freud

(1900) tells us, because he has an unconscious wish that is pre-

cisely the opposite of his conscious wish. When we talk about wish-

fulfillment, we mean that the dream does something, enacts something,

stages the performance of something: we mean that, in the working out

of the plot or action of the dream, a desire is expressed and ful-

filled. We must obviously not take at face value the fact that the

analysand claims, when he tells us the dream, that what happened

in it is precisely what he did not want to have happen.

Whatever is brought about in a dream was probably wanted in some

way by the dreamer.¹¹ Although it is difficult to say who “orches-

trates” what happens in a dream, there being a complex interplay

between the unconscious, the censor, and consciousness, we must

nevertheless reckon with the fact that dreams are no longer con-

sidered by most of us to come from the gods, or to be inserted

into our heads from somewhere else or by someone else. As Freud

(1900, pp. 48, 536) taught us, the “other scene” or “other stage”

on which the unconscious unfolds, on which the dream action is

played out, is still somehow our own scene, our own stage, and

something in us is the puppet master that stages all of that.

The desire that is staged in a dream may, of course, be dis-

guised through condensation and displacement, and very often

is. But notwithstanding the dreamer’s protests, if something “hor-

rible” happens in a dream, something in the dreamer wanted that

“horrible thing” to happen. We can take it a rule of thumb: Once

the analysand’s associations have led us to peel back the layers of

disguise, whatever happens in a dream is wished for in some way

by the dreamer. (There are some exceptions, of course, such as

dreams that repetitively present a traumatic event from the past.)

We cannot pay attention to wishes only when the analysand spon-

taneously views a dream as wishful, as he or she is likely to do in

the case of erotic dreams. We must always pay attention to wishes,

whether in “accidental” forgetting of sessions, payment of the

wrong amount for treatment, slips of the tongue, dreams, day-

dreams, or fantasies.

This is no more than elementary psychoanalysis, of course, but as Lacan (2006a) pointed out in his famous “return to Freud” (pp. 221–234), Freud’s emphasis on unconscious desire has all too often been ignored or forgotten. Yet, one very simple way to try to begin to get at wishes is simply to ask an analysand who has recounted and associated at some length to a dream if he or she can see any wish in the dream. Often that is enough to get the ball rolling, even if the analysand is likely to begin with something like a conscious wish. When something unpleasant happens in a dream, I find that it very often suffices to ask something like “Can you think of any reason why you might possibly want X (that unpleasant thing) to happen?”—any reason why, to return to the example I briefly mentioned earlier, you might want your secret to be broadcast to a whole group of people?

Earlier, I mentioned an analysand who had been ambivalent about pursuing his artwork for several decades and who dreamt that a former artist friend of his looked at his paintings and told him that, although he had done some good work, he did not have enough high-quality pieces for a showing in a gallery. After the analysand had associated to quite a number of the elements in the dream I simply asked him, “Why do you think you had this former friend of yours say that to you in the dream?” A very simple question like that obviously insinuates that the analysand has something to do with creating his own displeasure in dreams, that his displeasure is not foisted upon him by some evil demon who appears out of nowhere. If we take it one step further, it insinuates that he has something to do with creating his own displeasure in life as well. The analysand was quite easily able to conclude that he would like to be free of the pressure he felt to become as famous an artist as his friend was, free to drop his whole artistic project by the wayside. As I mentioned earlier, he concluded with the ambiguous formulation, “It’s the last thing I need to let go of.”

As we can see in this example, the wishes fulfilled in dreams are often counterintuitive: They are often the exact opposite of what we consciously think we want, suggesting the presence in us of unconscious wishes that are precisely the opposite of our conscious wishes.¹² The same kind of conflict between conscious and unconscious wishes can quite easily be brought to light in daydreams, fantasies, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and so on.

Lacanian-oriented work takes seriously Spinoza’s dictum that “de-

sire is the essence of man” and focuses on desires and, in particular,

on unconscious desires in a way that seems rare in many other forms

of psychoanalysis today. Like Freud, Lacan (2006a, pp. 522–525)

teaches us not to be content with the first desire to suggest itself in

the interpretation of a dream, and discusses the dream by “the

butcher’s wife” (Freud, 1900, pp. 146-151) extensively to lay out

the conscious but also the not-so-easy to flesh out unconscious

wishes that can be found in it.

interpretation aiMs at transforMing the anaLysanD’s subjective position

Lacan also focuses on the kinds of jouissance people derive

(whether they are aware of it or not) from their dreams, fantasies,

and actions, “jouissance” referring to satisfaction that may be ex-

perienced by them as enjoyable or distressing, and often is experi-

enced as both at the same time. Freud (1909) provides a nice il-

lustration of what Lacan means by jouissance in the case of the

Rat Man; Freud notes there that when his analysand tells him the

story of the infamous rat torture, “his face took on a very strange,

composite expression,” and continues by saying, “I could only

interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he

himself was unaware” (pp. 166–167). This form of simultaneous

satisfaction and horror was articulated and emphasized most

forcefully by Lacan in his work in the 1960s and 1970s, and is cor-

related less with the symbolic order than with the real. His focus

on jouissance as real can be usefully contrasted with many con-

temporary psychoanalysts’ focus on affect, which, as Freud (1900)

taught us, is often deceptive as it is so often displaced, exaggerat-

ed, or performative.¹³

Like anxiety, jouissance (which often appears in the guise of

anxiety) does not lie or lead astray the way other affects often do.

It must be determined where the analysand’s jouissance comes

from if the analysand’s complaints that he or she disapproves of

his or her own ways of enjoying—thinking them morally wrong or

disgusting—are ever to be addressed. What brings the analysand jouissance is related to the broader problematic that Lacan terms his or her “subjective position”—that is, his or her most general stance in life. I will broach this through the topic of interpretation.

From a Lacanian perspective, interpretation (as employed with neurotics, as opposed to psychotics) aims not at providing meaning—as is the case in many other contemporary forms of psychoanalysis—but rather at making waves, at shaking up analysands’ long-standing views of who they are and why they do what they do in the world, leading to the generation of new material. To achieve this aim, Lacanians use language that is deliberately polyvalent and evocative rather than unequivocal and concrete. The goal here is not to make the unconscious conscious—here Lacan (2001, pp. 139–140) differs from Freud (1916–1917, pp. 282, 435)—in the sense that the analysand would come to understand what is in his or her unconscious, but rather to bring the analysand to say what is in the unconscious—that is, what has never before been spoken out loud by him or her to another person, whether dimly known before or not—and let that saying affect the analysand, without him or her necessarily knowing what it means (if indeed it means anything at all; see Fink, 2010).

More generally speaking, interpretation is designed to home in on and shake up the analysand’s subjective position. It is always best when interpretations come from the analysand, but this is especially true when we try to detect the role a subject played in his or her own history which he or she initially claims to have played no role in whatsoever—that is, to have been little more than a pawn in schemes far bigger than himself or herself, and to have gotten nothing by way of enjoyment from his or her position in those schemes.

Recall that in the case of Dora, Dora initially blamed her predicament on her father and Mr. K, claiming to have been forced into an awkward position by their tacit exchange of women in which Dora was given to Mr. K in exchange for Mrs. K being given to Dora’s father. Freud concluded from what Dora told him that this exchange was aided and abetted by Dora herself, who frequently took care of the K’s children so that Mrs. K would be free to spend time with Dora’s father, and steered Mr. K off on walks with her so that he would not interrupt Mrs. K and her father’s trysts. Even though Dora herself began to wonder why she did

some of the things she did, Freud (1905, p. 95) unfortunately

seemed to prefer to interpret them for her. As the subsequent

evolution of the case showed, pointing out a subject’s own partici-

pation in a predicament that she initially feels has been thrust

upon her can be experienced as accusatory by the analysand and

must be handled delicately, to say the least.

Rather than focusing explicitly on day-by-day or minute-by-

minute feeling states or affects, as is done in many contemporary

forms of psychotherapy, Lacanians focus on the kinds of jouis-

sance their analysands complain of, in order to have an impact on

their ability to enjoy life and to shake up the fundamental fantasy

or subjective position that is making them so miserable.

In one case, an analysand of mine began a session with a dis-

cussion of something he had mentioned several times in the past:

the fact that, from the time his father had died when he was a

small child until he was a teenager, he had slept right next to his

mother, and that she would put her hand on his penis and testi-

cles while they slept. He averred that this was a sort of model rela-

tionship for him that he kept looking for with other women. With-

out any transition, he turned to another topic that he had

repeatedly complained of in the bitterest of terms: the fact that he

was humiliated and beaten up by other boys when he was young.

I knew his history quite well, including the fact that there had

been one occasion on which he had very successfully fought back

against a boy who was considerably bigger than himself. I thus

knew that what generally stopped him from fighting back was an

internal inhibition, not some physical inferiority on his part; this

internal inhibition appeared in other contexts as well, for exam-

ple, when his mother was battling with an uncle of his who was a

violent drunk. The analysand’s sister, who was no stronger than

him, would try to break up the frequent altercations between the

mother and the uncle, but the analysand himself would often

cower in a corner or run away.

It was a simple matter for me to make a connection between

the two topics that had appeared without any transition in this ses-

sion: The reason he had usually felt unable to fight back against

the other boys was that he was ashamed of what he was doing with his mother. Even from a very early age he knew that it was considered “taboo” and “sinful,” and that he was in a sense a criminal for having taken his father’s place in his mother’s bed. This made him feel that he was doing something wrong and that he deserved to be ridiculed and punished by anybody and everybody.

The interpretation had a big impact upon him, involving as it did a significant reversal of perspective. The view he had always propounded prior to that time was that he felt inferior because his father had died when he was young and he consequently had no one to defend him. He had never understood why he would stand idly by while his uncle would verbally and physically attack his mother in a drunken rage, feeling awful all the while, although we had at least explored the possibility that he was angry at his mother for being so harsh and critical with the analysand himself and that he was thus secretly pleased in some way that his uncle was punishing her. Nevertheless, that plausible explanation had never had much enduring impact upon him. This new interpretation, based on the propinquity in the session of two seemingly unrelated topics, brought with it a new perspective: He felt that both he and his mother were criminals due to their incestuous behavior, and that they both deserved whatever punishment they got. She deserved to be punished by the boy’s uncle and he himself deserved to be punished by any male who felt like punishing him.

Here the kind of connection involved in interpretation involved establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between two different ideas or facets of the analysand’s life. In the case of this particular analysand, he usually allowed himself to be beaten because he believed himself to be a criminal; he had the impression that his hands were tied when he was faced with bullies because he felt he deserved to be punished for his sins. More broadly speaking, he felt that a great many people in his adult life as well were just looking for an opportunity to bully him, no doubt because he had continued, as an adult, to engage in activities that he associated with his criminal sexual activity with his mother. He felt under continual attack—indeed, his overriding stance in life was that of a criminal who was constantly worried that his crimes would come to light and that he would be helpless to defend himself from being punished for them. He wished both to go on sinning and to be punished (that is, castrated) for doing so. As far

into adulthood as he continued his transgressive behavior, he was

plagued by thoughts that other men were out to expose and at-

tack him. As counterintuitive as it may seem to say so, his primary

satisfaction and dissatisfaction in life—that is, his primary jouis-

sance—revolved around: (1) transgression of sexual taboos and

mores, and (2) fearing (which, as Freud tells us, means wishing)

punishment for doing so. His subjective position involved daring

the Other to punish him as he feared, and yet believed, he deserved.

Of course, not every interpretation (whether made by the

analyst, by the analysand, or the two working in tandem) aims

quite so directly at the analysand’s fundamental subjective posi-

tion in life, even if it aims in more or less the same direction.

Some of the simplest kinds of interpretations make connections

between two topics that are broached in a session, but seem to be

unrelated to each other. Just as Freud (1900, p. 247) tells us that

there is a logical connection of some kind between two scenes in

a dream that follow each other directly, it being up to us to deter-

mine what the connection is since the dreams themselves rarely

tell us what it is, two topics that come up one right after the other

in a session are very often connected in an obscure manner.

Propinquity—the nearness of two topics in time during a ses-

sion—is something that must be deciphered. This is part of the

paradox of free association: When we allow analysands to simply

speak their mind, they often say the very next thing that pops into

their head. Although it seems unconnected to them, since it was a

“free association,” nothing could be less free (as Freud tells us).

Let me illustrate how the interpretation of two seemingly unre-

lated topics, the one following directly upon the other, allows for

an at least partial situating of subjective position.

An analysand with erectile problems was telling me about

what he believed to be the first occasion upon which he had had

problems getting and maintaining an erection. He went into a

long, elaborate story and then made an incidental remark, as if

changing the subject, that he had never mentioned before about

a poster he saw in a girl’s dorm room during his freshman year at

college. The poster showed a handsome man with a naked torso

and bulging muscles, and the caption read: “A hard man is good to find.” The analysand commented that he concluded upon seeing the poster that “that was what women really wanted.”

Several years prior to his freshman year he had been lifting weights in order to have a “hard body.” Since seeing the poster, however, he had stopped lifting weights and stopped getting hard with women. In prior sessions we had discussed the possibility that he was in some way determined not to give women what they wanted, just as he was determined to frustrate his mother’s requests and wishes. He agreed that something of that kind seemed to be going on, but he could not understand how or why, so it remained somewhat abstract to him. In this session we were able to establish with pretty good confidence that he saw this poster shortly before his first problem getting and maintaining an erection that was not alcohol-related. Believing he now knew exactly what women wanted, he knew exactly how not to give it to them! The proximate cause of his erectile problems was thus established to be his wish to deprive women of something, to disappoint them, to not be what he thought they wanted him to be. Why he wished that was a far more encompassing question, but at least a certain course was set thereby. The incidental remark about the poster allowed a connection to be made between his erectile dysfunction (connected quite obviously to his jouissance or, rather, to his lack thereof) and his wish to frustrate and disappoint women, both of which seemed to go to the core of his subjective position in life.

tiMe as technique

Unlike any other analyst of his time, Lacan recommended that, rather than continue a session after analysands have said something that seems very significant, and allow them to bury a weighty phrase under things that might be of far less importance, we stop or “scand” the session immediately after the significant formulation (this leads the analyst to hold sessions of variable length). After all, we remember best what we said last, just as we remember best what the last speaker in a series said or the last portion of a politician’s speech.¹⁴ Rather than risk having the analysand forget what seems so significant, Lacan would have us stop the session there. Even if the analysand does not consciously remember where we ended when next we speak, the scansion will neverthe-

less have done its work, for he will almost always have thought

about it somewhat in the interim and it will often have affected

his dreams or daydreams. In other words, it will have impacted

the analysand, it will have had an effect on his unconscious, even

if he no longer recalls it.

Rather than try to justify here what has proven to be a re-

markably controversial technique,¹⁵ I will confine myself to simply

exemplifying in brief a couple of different types of scansions: end-

ing a session on a particularly striking formulation and ending a

session after a significant reversal of perspective has occurred.

An example from my work with a female analysand came af-

ter a long discussion of a complicated dream that involved nu-

merous people in the analysand’s life and considerable ambiguity

as to whether each of the figures in the dream was male or female.

I ended the session when the analysand, who, even after two years

of analysis was quite reluctant to speak about sexual topics, came

out with the words, “Maybe I wish [my husband] was a girl.” This

scansion came after about a 35-minute discussion of the dream,

and it led her to comment in the very next session that something

had changed in her marriage since the analysis had begun: Sex

with her husband had become more of a chore and more distaste-

ful to her. This was something she had never paid any attention to

before, much less articulated.

The striking formulation after the enunciation of which the

analyst ends the session can also be a question. For example, an

analysand who suffered for many years from migraine headaches

complained at length in a session that she never received recogni-

tion from her colleagues, or from her parents for that matter. But

as she was talking she recalled that she did begin to get some rec-

ognition from her usually highly critical father for some successes

she had had in her field right around the time her migraine head-

aches first began. I ended the session when she wondered aloud if

there was any connection “between getting recognition and my

headaches?” Perhaps it was a big headache to her to be given re-

sponsibility and authority and to be recognized for it. She had

never considered that possibility before, and the question she

herself raised led to several fruitful sessions.

As for an example of ending a session after a reversal of perspective has occurred, consider the following: A man came to me for analysis after twenty-odd years of different kinds of therapy and analysis in which conclusions he had arrived at about his family as a child had never been called into question. Over the course of a year and a half of analysis with me, he had often repeated his claim that his mother was ferocious and out to get him—even though his current relations with her were generally cordial and often even friendly. He was convinced that she had punished him brutally as a child, but could recall nothing worse than her throwing away a toy he had placed in some feces. He would rage at her in sessions and yet none of his dreams or daydreams suggested the existence of spankings or beatings by her or by anyone else in his past. When I would ask if he recalled any examples of punishment, he would say I sounded like I did not believe him; to him it was obvious that he had simply repressed all traces of them.

Nevertheless, his more overriding complaint seemed to be that his mother never paid enough attention to him. One day he began talking again about how he was convinced his mother wanted to kill him, and I commented that one might have to be awfully important to someone for that someone to want to go so far as to kill one. He was obviously ready to hear the implication, for he concluded something like “So you’re saying I want to believe she wants to kill me because that would mean I’m incredibly important to her.” This exchange occurred in the early minutes of the session, and the analysand later returned to a theme he had often discussed, which was that he always seemed to want to be involved with muscular girls. His standard explanation for this had been that since he himself had always been weak, in his own view, he needed a strong woman to take care of him, to defend him against the cruel world out there.

Given what we had discussed in the early part of the session, it was a simple matter to turn that formulation around: He actually was trying to maintain his belief that a woman wanted to attack him—for that would mean that he was important to her— and he felt compelled to find muscular women whom he believed could successfully attack him. I stopped the session after we had articulated this reversal of perspective, rather than let it get obscured by some other topic, and this set off a chain reaction. He

realized that for him, to be loved meant to be under siege. Al-

though he had up until then firmly believed that women never

really loved men, only loving the money men could give them, he

suddenly felt that there was hope for him, that love between the

sexes might actually be possible someday in his future.

In the weeks that followed he began fantasizing about what

he called lovable, girlish women, as opposed to muscular women,

and scenes of tenderness began to appear in his dreams, whereas

there had never been anything but scenes of violence and power

struggles before. It was, in his words, a “very profitable couple of

sessions,” and the effects of the reversal of perspective and the

scansions that accompanied it continued to bear fruit for some

time.

Another reversal of perspective occurred with an analysand

when he had a dream about being held back by his father on a

boat so that he was unable to get to work. We discussed the role of

boats in his father’s life, but it was especially the verbal phrase

“held back” that led to a long chain of associations. The analysand

had always portrayed himself as having been held back by every-

thing and everyone, and felt cheated and mistreated in life in gen-

eral. He recalled that he had been held back in junior high school,

and when he began to talk about the actual circumstances in-

volved, he indicated that in fact his headmaster had not required

him to stay back but had simply recommended that he stay back a

year. The analysand himself had been happy to do so because his

best friend was a year behind him at the same school and he rel-

ished the idea of being with that friend rather than continuing on

with the students in his current year whom he did not like. He

suddenly realized that he himself had participated in being held

back, which was a considerable reversal of perspective for him. I

scanded the session there and in subsequent sessions he began to

talk about how he had often participated in holding himself back

and continued to hold himself back even today.

As is no doubt apparent by now, it is impossible to present

any one scansion without a good deal of the context in which it

occurred. The goal of scansion is, however, very often the same:

to keep the analysand focused on what seems to be the most poignant, electrifying, radical, or perplexing. Scansion is obviously one of the means by which we can convey to analysands what we consider to be the most salient, and at the beginning of the next session they very often come back to the precise point where we ended; on other occasions what we ended on turns up in a dream that they recount during the next session. In the interest of free association, we must nevertheless allow them to bring up whatever it is they choose to in the next session, but they often spontaneously begin with the place where we scanded. Inevitably, some scansions fall flat or only generate new material after a longer or shorter period of time has elapsed, not right away. As with any interpretive technique, one does not always manage to strike gold.

In Lacan’s view, numerous analysts have confused Freud’s notion of neutrality—whereby the analyst is not openly (or hopefully even secretly) judgmental about the analysand’s thoughts, beliefs, wishes, and fantasies—with some kind of virtue of nonaction, whereby the analyst, for fear of directing the patient, no longer directs the treatment at all (Lacan, 2006a, p. 490). Yet it is the analyst’s responsibility to direct the treatment by ensuring, as Freud certainly did, that the analysand speaks at length about the things that are hindering him or her most in life. By encouraging the analysand to speculate about desires in dreams, daydreams, and fantasies, and scanding sessions at what the analyst considers to be the most significant, provocative, or even puzzling points, the analyst seeks to keep the work focused (even if it is in that typically unsystematic psychoanalytic way) on the nub or crux of the patient’s difficulties in life, rather than allow him or her to spend the lion’s share of a single session—much less of the entire analysis—talking about matters of little psychoanalytic import. Although analysts obviously cannot know in advance what topics will be of most significance, they obviously do know that childhood experiences, sexual fantasies, and dreams tend to move therapy forward far more than detailed accounts of day-to-day life, with its little ups and downs, as dramatic as they may at times appear to the analysand.

Analysis does not require that the analysand recount everything that happened to him or her in the course of the days or week preceding the session; indeed, such discussions are very often distractions from the primary work of the analysis. Analysts

do, of course, need to know a good deal about the analysand’s

daily life, but they do not generally need a blow-by-blow account

of his or her life. Scansion allows analysts to keep the focus on the

important work of the analysis.

This does not mean that the analysand is required to stay on

one topic for an especially long period of time. As most analysts

are aware, it is rarely by trying to deal with a particularly problem-

atic symptom, fantasy, or relationship directly that any headway is

made. Analysis often proceeds by moving from one topic to an-

other, perhaps related, topic and back again, circling around and

going deeper and deeper each time. It is often only once part of

the terrain has been explored in one facet of the analysand’s life

that another terrain even comes into view, another facet of the

analysand’s life becoming open for discussion. This is usually any-

thing but a linear process. Rather, it is generally a dialectical pro-

cess whereby the analysand, having explored a certain period of

his or her life, begins to change in one direction, but after explor-

ing another period of his or her life, begins to change in a dia-

metrically opposed direction. It is only once the analysand has

explored the vast majority of his or her history that a single over-

riding direction seems to distill out. It is this change that we aim

at, as opposed to the elaboration of a grand narrative of the analy-

sand’s life or some psychological understanding on his or her