What is Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
Crucial Questions and Answers

23 Crucial Questions (clicking on the question below will take you the response)

1. What is contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis? The problem of suffering
2. What is a psychoanalyst today?
3. How do I find a psychoanalyst?
4. What is the non-analyst?
5. What is an analytic practice?
6. What is it to achieve an analysis?
7. Where is the analytic cure?
8. What is the analytic cure?
9. What is the minor clinic of analysis? A history of silence
10. What is the difference between the talking and writing cure of psychoanalysis?
11. What is the difference between the major and minor clinic? Modalities
12. Where is the clinic of psychoanalysis with regard to psychosis and neurosis-perversion today?
13. What is analysis in intension and extension?
14. What is wrong with the standard tripartite model – personal analysis, formation (courses-seminars), and supervision – of psychoanalytic training? (UNDERCONSTRUCTION)
15. Has psychoanalysis been discredited today?
16. What is the relation between psychoanalysis and science today?
17. What is the relation between psychoanalysis and formalization?
18. Can analysis be used to address the contemporary issues of gender and sex?
19.  How does psychoanalysis address the modern family? Does analysis still refer to the Oedipus Complex as a model of family relations?
20. How does analysis today address the rising occurrence of autism? What is the analytic clinic of autism today?
21. What is the stance of contemporary Lacanian analysis towards madness and psychosis?
22. What is the argument of Lacanian analysis towards the 21st century ‘post-truth’ landscape?
23. What is the problem with writing books on Lacanian analysis? Why didn’t Lacan write any?

1-What is contemporary Lacanian analysis? The problem of suffering

2- What is a psychoanalyst today?

• The title of psychoanalyst is not regulated in many countries and states, so anyone, regardless of their training, can present themselves as a psychoanalyst*. For this reason, not only must one take more responsibility in identifying a ‘well-qualified’ analyst, but also more care in establishing the conditions for the practice of analysis. The commercial entry by referrals, credentialing, and photos of couches avoids the question.
• This is because an analyst is not made recognizable by a title, a credential, a school, or a professional identity, but is the effect of an object – the letter – in the production of a method. In this sense, the analyst is an effect, much as the pianist is an effect of the playing of music on an instrument, or the microbiologist is an effect of the object examined through the microscope. If the specific connection between act, instrument (method), and object is not made presentable to the general public, or is avoided by simple referrals or a reference to a credential or institutional identity, then there is no reliable way to distinguish an analyst from a therapist-coach or shaman. Nor is there any way to determine whether the claims made in the name of analytic practice are true. This is why the response to the question of how to recognize an analyst and a practice of analysis becomes more important than a simple definition. Questions 3, 4, 5, and 6 below respond to this question.
• * (The legal status of psychoanalytic titles varies by jurisdiction: in California, the title is unregulated, while New York expressly regulates the practice of psychoanalysis and the title “psychoanalyst”; Massachusetts generally treats psychoanalytic practice through existing mental-health licenses; France regulates “psychotherapist” rather than “psychoanalyst”; and Germany regulates psychotherapy and the title “psychotherapist,” within which psychoanalytic practice may be recognized.)

3- How do I find a psychoanalyst?

• It may come as news to some, but searching for a psychoanalyst is a way to avoid doing an analysis*. This is because psychoanalysis does not entail a dual or service relation between doctor-patient or therapist-client, but requires an association to be achieved. What is surprising is that older models of an analytic association – or institute – only open their schools or educational programs to those who supposedly hold the keys (students), while those ‘others’ attempting to address their suffering are redirected towards the clinic and private sessions. Further still, it is not recognized that it is the analysand that institutes the demand for analysis, and therefore should have a say in instituting the association itself. This dated organizational structure not only requires a social reform, but also explains the predictable difficulties anyone attempting to ‘find’ an analyst faces. Fortunately, today there is a more contemporary approach that neither segregates people into students/patients, nor confuses the search for analysis with the search for an analyst in the marketplace.
• * (A similar avoidance emerges in the search ‘to become’ a psychoanalyst. See Question #4- What is the non-analyst?)

4- What is the non-analyst?

• The non-analyst is a term coined by Lacan to open the analytic clinic by putting into question the place of the analyst. This term is introduced for two reasons: (1) to make room for the singularity of an experience that would not be reduced to the conformity of a group or profession, (2) to separate the analyst from a therapeutic function. The non-analyst is not simply someone outside analysis or who does not practice analysis, but someone who would have the courage not to confound the analytic act with a professional being. (Scilicet, 2/3)
• With the title of non-analyst in place, contemporary analysis makes room for its own internal critique. It allows a necessary question to be posed about the resistance to analysis, not of the patient, but the analyst themself. For example, how can someone called a professional psychoanalyst claim to address the singularity of another’s desire, when their own desire has been so focused on general knowledge, licensing, clientelism, and a career? Or again, if psychoanalysis sets as its goal a kind of emancipation (Befreiung), why is the contemporary formation of the analyst so heavily monitored by institutional rules: academic guidelines, control analysis, pre-licensure hours, supervision, professional conduct codes, and so on? What distinguishes this kind of training from the initiation rites that were practiced by guilds in the Middle Ages?
• The non-analyst addresses this paradox of emancipation by introducing a kind of zero-element into analytic practice: a place on which institutional rules and professional titles depend, but which is systematically excluded as nothing. The introduction of the nonanalyst into psychoanalysis makes a progress similar to the addition of a zero numeral in mathematics: it founds a structure of exchange that no longer relies on mere speech and institutional rules to account for what is lacking.
• For this reason, not only do many people work at PLACE without prior titles, credentials, or institutional backgrounds, but we have also kept the admission procedures to a minimum. This is not a liberal gesture of simply welcoming everyone or engaging in interdisciplinary research. On the contrary, welcoming the non-analyst is a commitment to transmitting analysis in a way that does not collapse into jargon among initiates while reproducing the very symptoms it claims to treat. Indeed, there are those who, after a career spent trying to practice analysis at their jobs – as psychologists, psychotherapists, and so on – retire early, start from scratch, and finally find the time to work (see Research in Lost Time).
  

5-What is an analytic practice?

• An analytic practice begins when at least two people meet in a setting that provides adequate conditions for an analysis. As mentioned in (3) above, these conditions are provided by an analytic association, but it is the analysand that institutes the demand and, therefore, sets up the institution in the sense that the association is run from the bottom up by analysands, not from the top down by analysts. Therefore, it is up to each practitioner, not simply the analyst, to assume responsibility for its method and object. The fossil of someone lying on a couch, simply emoting and consuming, while the analyst does the work and provides a service, has long passed. Today, both the analysand (formerly the patient) and the analyst have become responsible for the practice and theory they are engaged in.
• As a consequence, the analytic clinic begins not with a signal or index – when a patient complains of a symptom or points to a pain – but when the patient’s language and speech begin to be listened to as providing a reason for the symptom, as ‘off’ as such reasoning may first seem. At which point, one may begin to recognize the transformation from the medical clinic and the patient to the analytic clinic and the analysand. Or begin to recognize how not to simply go into an analysis, but take it out into a cartel (work-group), course, seminar, or the procedure of the pass.
• Yet, even when considered at the furthest remove from therapeutic platitudes – as a safe space where you can explore desire, where a new beginning is within your reach, and you can free up your unconscious! – the possibility of doing an analysis has always been taken for granted. Setting the conditions such that the analysand institutes the analysis, while including the didactic dimension in the session, may make analysis less possible and touristic, but as a result, it has become more necessary and achievable.

6- What is it to achieve an analysis?

• Anyone can begin an analysis with just about anyone, by rumor or referral, though it is much more difficult to achieve an analysis. What is meant by ‘achieving an analysis’ is to become the analyst of one’s own speech and writing, which makes the difference between a therapeutic or training analysis moot, since any achievable analysis is itself didactic. In spite of the doctors, educators, legislators, scientists, business and religious leaders, and before claiming to help or be helped by others, it is the difficulty of making this self-reflexive moment effective in the city that becomes necessary in the achievement of an analysis.

7- Where is the analytic cure?

• Habitually, the analytic ‘cure’ today is reduced to therapeutic modes of managing others’ symptoms in the clinic and private sessions (through empathy, listening intently, a ‘talking cure’, etc.), while any attempt to develop the truth or knowledge such symptoms present is set aside in favor of the doctor’s theory and school. The bias of this approach is not surprising, since its lineage goes all the way back to Freud himself who took the position of the master, although his psychoanalytic method was only achieved through his own self-analysis. The numerous histories of Freud’s psychoanalytic case studies reveal there is no clear conclusion as to whether his method was successful when applied to others. Contemporary outcome research does not resolve this problem but repeats it in another form: it may demonstrate comparable therapeutic effects, but it does not show that these effects verify the analytic method, much less that they define the analytic cure.
• But what is undeniable is that, if there was a specifically analytic method and cure, it was on the side of Freud himself rather than his patients. It is for this reason that if anyone can be credited with achieving the first analysis, it is not to be found in the inertia of Freud’s case studies (the celebrated Dora, the Wolfman, Little Hans, etc.), but in Freud’s own self-analysis. The consequences of this change in focus are far-reaching enough to require a remake of the analytic clinic, which is underway today. The well-known minor clinic of patients and doctors in a talking-cure is giving way to the lesser-known major clinic of Freud’s own analysis in a writing-cure.

8- What is the analytic cure?

• Freud claims that the cure (Heilung) is a bonus: that psychoanalysis does not attempt to cure people, but that a cure, if there were one, would count as something extra. Instead, Freud first proposes that psychoanalytic practice is conducted so that someone becomes better through a kind of emancipation (Befreiung). Lacan adds that this position is correct, but insufficient. This Crucial Questions section introduces the reasons for this Lacanian critique. (Under construction).

9–What is the minor clinic of analysis? A history of silence …

• It is well known that the phrase “talking cure” was coined by Anna O. to describe Breuer’s therapeutic procedure, not Freud’s psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalysis depends on speech, its common identification as a talking cure belongs largely to what may be called Freud’s minor clinic: Dora, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and other case histories organized under neurosis and perversion. This clinic is called ‘minor’ because its status remains uncertain, even though its success is often taken for granted by many contemporary psychoanalysts. Yet, Freud’s psychoanalysis may have helped some patients; he may also have failed to do so. In Lacanian terms, it is therefore a possible treatment: one that may or may not work.
• What is striking, however, is that Freud repeatedly leads his treatment of others to a point of impossibility — a rupture, impasse, or end of treatment, which appears in his work under the name of a negative therapeutic reaction. Examining the current psychoanalytic literature, the question remains as to whether Freud or the modern-day psychoanalytic therapies – Lacanian, post-Freudian, or otherwise – ever arrive at anything more than possible/impossible treatments.
• Do your research; we only list here a couple of the most well-known studies. For example, Deutsch’s 1957 follow-up interview of Dora, Freud’s first case history, concludes that even after treatment, she was plagued by her neurosis for the rest of her life; or read Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen’s critique in Freud’s Patients. Left at this level, what is usually encountered in public is a contentious set of arguments from those, pro or con, about the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis.
• What Lacan effectively did, however, was to situate these symptoms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the minor clinic, then show how to found psychoanalysis in the major clinic. Even so, it is surprising that this difference still goes unheard of today: the majority of neo-post-Lacanian analysis remaining at the level of the minor clinic.

10- What is the difference between the talking and writing cure of psychoanalysis? Introducing the major clinic

• One response to the symptoms of the minor clinic is to recognize that Freud’s psychoanalytic method is not merely — or even primarily — spoken, it is written and read. When an analysand says, “They love me,” Freud writes: erotomania. Across the twenty-four volumes of his written work, what was said in the session appears only as reported speech; what remains directly available is Freud’s writing. This distinction is decisive. Freud’s own analysis was itself a written analysis — as his own comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet suggests — and the only analysis that was more than merely possible or impossible. After the early work with Breuer, Freud’s own writing cure introduces the major clinic, in contrast to the minor clinic of the case histories, since Freud’s own self-analysis marks the first attempt to achieve an analysis in a written body of work presented to the public.
• Freud’s written clinical analyses are not limited to the spoken material of treatment. They also include cases constructed from texts, memories, works of art, and biographies — Gradiva, Leonardo, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Michelangelo — where analysis proceeds through reading, deciphering, and rewriting an object already inscribed.
• Schreber, however, occupies a singular place. Unlike Freud’s other written clinical cases, Schreber’s Memoirs do not merely provide material for a psychoanalytic interpretation; they already contain a systematic theory of nerves, language, God, sexuality, and bodily transformation that Freud, in many instances, considers a rival to his own (read Constructions in Analysis). Freud is therefore not simply reading or interpreting a text, but confronting a competing theory of psychosis. This makes Schreber a decisive part of Freud’s own analysis: the written text of Schreber is no longer interpretable in the metalanguage of analysis, but puts Freud’s own theory into question by retranscribing it in the very object language of the patient he sought to interpret. Or in the parlance of Lacan: “there is no metalanguage”. This difference is crucial since if Schreber was a psychotic for Freud, by the time of Lacan, Schreber had become more precisely Freud’s symptom and a sinthome for contemporary psychoanalysis in the major clinic.

11-What is the difference between the minor and major clinic?

• Contemporary Lacanian analysis is divided between two registers: a possible/impossible minor clinic, organized around speech and neurosis-perversion; and a necessary/contingent major clinic, first introduced around Freud’s own analytic writing: his self-analysis and his reading-writing of the case of Schreber. The major clinic can be called necessary because, if anyone in psychoanalysis made a progress, it was Freud himself, and it is by replicating these conditions, not those of his patients, that an analysis becomes achievable today. It is contingent because not only did Freud approach his written clinic indirectly and without systematizing his self-analysis or the problem of psychosis, but because today the major clinic is still largely unheard of within commonplace opinion. It was not until Lacan that the modalities of the symptom were established in a logical writing.

12- Where is the clinic of psychoanalysis with regard to psychosis and neurosis-peversion today?

• The inclusion of psychoanalysis into its own clinic and the division between the minor and major clinic has significant consequences in the practice of analysis today. If the minor clinic offers only a possible treatment of neurosis and perversion, then Freud’s well-known exclusion of psychosis from analytic treatment can no longer serve as a useful demarcation today – since it is not certain he could treat neurosis or perversion either.
• Furthermore, post-Freudians and modern psychoanalysis have sought to surpass Freud by claiming to treat psychosis today, whereas it is said that traditional Freudian analysis could only treat neurosis and perversion. The predictable difficulties that such claims have encountered are noteworthy: psychoanalysis has been largely sidelined in most countries and is not recommended for the treatment of psychosis according to the psychiatric and evidence-based theories.
• From within Lacanian analysis itself, the critique is more structural: psychosis cannot be treated by simply extending the minor clinic of neurosis and perversion. The question is therefore not whether psychoanalysis can add psychosis to its list of treatable disorders, but whether the clinic itself can be extended once psychosis is not presented as a psychiatric category of the asylum. On the contrary, analytically defined psychosis is first and foremost a symptom in conjunction with the place of the analyst in the major clinic. Lacan called contemporary analysis itself ‘a controlled paranoia’. Neurosis, perversion, psychosis, along with psychoanalysis itself, must be reconstructed from the distinction between the minor clinic of speech and the major clinic of writing. The information on the Clinic and Research page of this website situates this transformation in what Lacan began to call psychoanalysis in extension.

13 – What is the difference between analysis in intension and in extension?

• The opposition between intension and extension comes from two traditional ways of defining a term: a definition in extension is made by showing or determining a reference, while a definition in intension is made by specifying a meaning or sense. For example, if someone wants to know what a shoe is, it can be defined intensively as an item of protective footwear, or it can simply be shown or constructed in extension. Clinically speaking, a symptom shows what is impossible to understand and, therefore, lends itself to an extensive presentation. It is surprising, however, that psychoanalysis is traditionally defined in intension: within a pre-understanding of the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, reducing it to various types of talking cure. Left at this level, the extension of analysis becomes nothing more than a question of ‘interior design’: Which side of the couch does an analyst sit? Yet, with a more serious entry, we can begin to determine the extent of the analytic act itself in what Lacan first described as a topology of the subject. A construction that now opens up to the Cartesian notion of the extent of space and the attempt to situate an observer, which will only be made explicit in the move from Leibniz’s analysis situs to Kant’s Das Ding. The reader is referred to the Research page on this site for constructions that make use of this lineage.