Psychoanalysis, if it has any expected therapeutic effects, is in no way the same “thing[1]” as psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis remains a discipline criticized like no other within the field of “human sciences[2]”. Indeed, its message is scandalous: Man is no longer the center of himself; neither his reason nor his ideals guide his actions. Inside each of us, there is another Subject which determines us, one which Freud calls the Unconscious, and which Lacan, in his first approximation, refers to as the Other, the great Other.

Lacan pushed the point which common sense hates to concede: not only are we lead by our most vile passions, namely sexual ones, but this link within us has its own logic, a quasi mathematical causality, “the logic of fantasy[3]” as indicated by the title of one of his seminars. In its own way, it is the very content of what neurosis repeatedly voices: sexuality organizes an articulated discourse, a language organized around forgotten words and which the analyst proposes to read. Better yet, the analyst proposes a reading of these forgotten terms to the patient.

The first intention of psychoanalysis is precisely this reading. It does not aim to drain or heal the scars of the soul; it does not aim for “the Good[4]”. Psychoanalysis takes seriously the Freudian proposition that repression is at the same time the return of the repressed –  something is trying to be said, a hidden truth wants to be heard from below – unterdrückt. Thus the symptom, the psychoanalytic phenomenon, the acting out[5]…. This thing which must be said will have to be inscribed somewhere and will insist on being deciphered, decoded.

“At that moment, we are no longer capable of deciphering which one is the speaking Subject, but only that “it” speaks, that “it” continues to speak; and what is happening is decipherable entirely in the same way that a lost script is decipherable, meaning painstakingly.[6]”

Following Freud – the science of dreams, the witty remark, the slip – Lacan will insist on language[7]. The business of humans is first and foremost language and a psychoanalytic cure consists in speaking. This aspect is both obvious and ordinarily unrecognized. Are we truly accustomed to listening to the word of our fellow man?  Do we not generally remain connected to our own interior monologue? The psychotherapist knows what is mourning, divorce, trauma…. The psychoanalyst doesn’t. He listens to associations according to how they are organized by the patient, and gradually recognizes its determinants as they appear, each time singular.

Psychoanalysis draws its efficacy from this simplicity: to listen with benevolence – meaning without judging or interpreting, without understanding. Gradually, through this silence, the great signifiers of the Subject’s history will appear, plotted and woven by strange attractors, the objects of jouissance which, from drive to fantasy[8], polarize the life of the body and sexual life.

The patient takes on the habit of associating, of moving from one signifier to the next, pushed by a mysterious necessity for truth – a word which psychoanalysis shares with a few philosophers and theologians, but which modern science, medicine and even psychiatry, reject as being obsolete and without interest.

Like in the Greek language of Aristotle and Plato, psychoanalysis considers a Subject without concern for general notions of Good, a Subject divided here and now by his words: a “decidedly human[9]” Subject, with his desire, his anxiety, his fear. The goal of an analysis resides in not knowing the singularity which characterizes this desire and which ultimately constitutes the Subject’s only reality, his only opening onto the world, onto what surrounds him, what he loves or abhors. It is this desire – constantly unknown[10], travestied, opposed – which seeks to tell itself, if only negatively at first – through negation, refutation, denial, forclosure – because language itself is Man’s place of dwelling. It is this “desire” (a word accentuated by Lacan throughout his work as he re-opened and renewed Freud) that constitutes the very heart of an analysis.

Aristotle spoke of “hexis”, commonly translated as “disposition, moral disposition, habitual state of character”. In his recent translation of the Fifth Book of Nicomachean Ethics, Philippe Arjakovsky interprets it as  “the possibility of being”. According to him, “hexis” in to Greek thought is the holding of one’s soul[11], the way one conducts one’s existence. Man always thinks of himself as the master of his destiny and actions.  But the usual situation, the one recounted through neurosis tells another story, tells the story of renouncement. We generally give way ; we give up on our desire. That is Lacan’s decidedly sulfurous and often wrongly interpreted message.

It is here that we encounter the thorny topic of the Subject’s responsibility, a question central to psychoanalysis but absent from psychology and psychotherapy. The fact that the Subject of the unconscious decenters the very notions of Subject and causality doesn’t in any way imply a doctrine of irresponsibility. Quite the opposite. Freud would say: “Wo es war soll ich werden”. Lacan made this thought more precise by stating: “From our position as Subject, we are always responsible[12]”.

Psychoanalysis is regularly accused of making families, parents, especially mothers feel guilty. But does it actually cause feelings of guilt to say that a symptom is always embedded within a history, within words, secrets, within motifs which, like with rugs, repeat themselves from one generation to the next? Or is making this statement just a way of reminding each person, child, parent, educator, politician of his responsibility as a speaking subject?

Psychoanalysis names the logic of servitude better than any previous discipline: the automatic nature of the drives, the fact that the child’s[13] immersion within sexuality and language distorts his relationship with his surroundings, a relationship which used to be considered instinctive. But psychoanalysis doesn’t in any way promote transgression or a doctrine of innocence ; it addresses itself to the Subject capable of thinking his actions and decisions. In this manner, it has its own ethics of action like very few discourses have today. And it is here, at this turning point, that psychoanalysis separates itself radically from any form of psychotherapy.

In this regard as in many others, psychoanalysis draws from the heritage of classical thought.  What is intelligence, consciousness, reason or even wisdom to some – meaning something fundamentally permeated with a sense of truth – psychoanalysis proposes to consider in line with Aristotle and a few others after him as a form of prudence, a “concern[14]” in the strongest sense of the term, in the sense understood by German phenomenology – knowledge, but incomplete knowledge, knowledge formed around a void[15]. Regarding the all so necessary heritage of Greek tragedy, Pierre Aubenque[16] asks: “What is Man allowed to know?  What must he do in a world governed by Chance? What can he hope for from a future which remains hidden from him? How do we, humans that we are, stay within the limits of Man?[17]”

Psychoanalysis does not know. And it is from within this non-knowledge that it grounds its actions and its questioning. It operates from an entirely different position than, for example, that assumed when treating mourning as a depression, and then defining it as that which can be healed with antidepressants. It is the epistemological rupture which separates current scientism and all tasteful[18] psychotherapy, on one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, which grants affect, pain and time their necessity and humanity. What is distorted – pseudo – in any psychotherapy is this non-separation, this non-disjunction between knowledge and truth. In its suggestion that it can lift tensions, it veils its ethical deficiency.

Lacan lent the symptom its credibility[19]. It is not just a nuisance or a strangeness on the road to a longed-for completeness. It is the mark and the style of a Subject who questions himself and resists in his own way to the messages coming from a culture of wellbeing and commercial conformism. For Lacan, the Subject, despite all opposition, is the divided Subject, a Subject who can never be reduced to a simple definition of his being and his need.

From a certain point of view, this is the topic of the question raised by the Jewish tradition – not the topic of the answer, were it to come from God, from the Master or, more currently, from consensus.  Without going too deeply into polemics, let us remember that an entire North American tradition has chosen narcissism as the essential axis of the cure in promoting a strong ego[20], an individual in tune with a mercantile and consumerist society. Freud had already anticipated these “pseudos”. Very early on, Lacan indicated how, for psychoanalysis, narcissism could not remain knuckled under the myth of a unity, a totalizing entity[21], an ideal of consciousness.

It is a crucial lesson for the young generation: the Subject, according to psychoanalysis, the desiring Subject[22] cannot be reduced to the “service of goods”. This is the topic of Lacan’s extraordinary seminar “L’éthique de la Psychanalyse” : the tragic hero (Antigone facing Creon) representing the rights and the duties of the Polis. The Subject of desire cannot be reduced to the always destructive and aggressive dimension of narcissism. To revere image is to kill the Subject of desire – and God knows we are currently knee deep in this issue. It is worth noting that as soon as he formulated the mirror stage, Lacan insisted not on the function of knowledge but on that of lack of knowledge of the Ego[23]. He also keenly criticized the interpretation and orientation introduced by Heinz Hartmann in the fifties. Lacan did not hesitate to refer to the notion of “value” to highlight a kind of questioning often left aside by any approach which favors care, empathy and relief: what is the value of what surrounds me? Do I have any value myself? In whose eyes? According to whom? What is the value of my commitments? Such questions are an exit through the narrow door of a judgment that is never moralizing, a way of making audible that the Ego is in no way the Subject.

The answer that presents itself is always wanting. I am not a model husband, I am not a consistent father, I am not a teacher celebrated by his peers and students…. Like narcissism, ideal and perfection fall upon the necessity of loss. But the question remains and pushes the Subject in analysis, the analysand, to gradually accept limits, impossibilities which are neither forms of impotence nor cowardice.

Psychoanalysis is a discourse which acts upon the idea that lack is necessary to humanity. In this manner, it offers all those who undertake analysis a refuge from omniscience, from the modern wish for transparency and communication. It offers them shelter from super-egotistical exigencies[24] of generalized performance. It makes the word singular in a world where universalism takes on a conformist and consumerist tone.  Lacan worked hard at specifying the circulation of this dimension of lack.  His work on the notion of “object” in psychoanalysis best exemplifies this contribution.

Starting from the Freudian partial object, and after Melanie Klein and Winnicott, Lacan moves through diverse categories of objects: the fetishised object, the object in the clinical treatment of psychoses (especially the gaze and the voice); he approaches the object as a void, a void within the fabric of language as such (which he names “object a”), a void which enables one to treat the object as symbolic, not as imaginary or material.  When we lack something, it is generally not a specific object we lack, nor an imaginary acknowledgement. It often means that something within us is not in its place, has not come to pass or no longer exists in relation to the notions of value or truth.

Psychoanalysis is not an apology of conservatism, nor is it a promise of progress.  Psychoanalysis reminds us that language has a certain order and especially that its significance touches upon sexuality. That is why, in its own way, it tends to the distance between words, it preserves their difference and does not support indistinction and indifference.  Thus, psychoanalysis differentiates between “man” and “woman”, a distinction which is oddly so controversial nowadays.

The psychoanalyst takes the underbelly of things seriously ; he considers himself to be part of the clinical tableau, of the world in which he finds his gaze and from which he is gazed upon.

Taking each word seriously, the analyst is concerned with each of his translations, his mutations, his impasses and his inventions. Thus, I have said my refusal to use the French word “genre” – gender– to say “sex”. Because the analyst can say “no”, he can authorize in silence a “yes” to life.