Ethics in the Cure

Colette Soler

Lacan's work is vast: twenty years of seminars, the long and difficult volume Écrits, several other articles and the Television interview we have discussed here. That means weeks, months, years of work and effort for the reader who wants to understand something about it. One could say the same thing about psychoanalytic treatment itself: so many years, so much time, so much money. Is it worth it?
If it is worth dedicating so much libido to psychoanalysis, it's because psychoanalysis is not psychotherapy. If it were only to cure the neurotic symptom, if it were only to put an end to the neurotic complaint, it would be out of all proportion to do so. Psychoanalysis has therapeutic effects, but psychoanalysis is much more than psychotherapy.

[...]   [L]et's turn to the interpreting of the analyst. In a certain sense we can say that this is what the analyst owes to the analysand. To interpret seems to be something active, not something passive, but it is nevertheless important to see the extent of what is excluded by this duty of interpretation, the area of what we can call the abstention of the psychoanalyst. To interpret means not to evaluate, not to judge, not to act and even to leave aside any feelings. No doubt there is something else that the analyst requires here: he has to make the rule of free association apply. So there is a demand for speech, but he has nothing to discuss; he has nothing to say about what is said; he isn't there to agree, to condemn or to blame; he neither censors nor endorses. So he does not say anything, only interprets. This is a choice, sometimes a difficult one which needs to be repeated every day with each patient.

To interpret is only to designate what was said in what the subject articulated, and in that sense the desire of the psychoanalyst — you know that Lacan gave a key function to this desire — is first of all a desire for interpretation. We could say that the desire of the analyst emerges in the interpretation.

[...]

 

* The Lacan Conference, April 15, 1990, at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. back to top

Illustration: Donald Baechler Corbu Chaise, 1982.

 

 

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