Paper read at the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, 14th October 1955, and at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, 3rd December 1955
Published Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Vol 4 p199 – 223 (1956)
Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Szasz)
Cited by Jacques Lacan
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-30th January 1963, Seminar X, pX99 of Cormac Galagher’s translation
I think that you will not confuse, after today’s discourse, this remark with the one which is usually made about frustrations. Something else is involved. What is involved is the frontier, the limit where the place of the lack is established.
A continuous, I mean varied reflection about the different, metonymical forms in which there appear in clinical practice the focal points of this lack, will constitute the continuation of our discourse. But we cannot but treat it ceaselessly along with the putting into question of what one can call the goals of analysis. The positions taken up in this respect are so instructive, educative that I would like at the point that we are at, that besides this article to which it would be appropriate to return, to follow it in detail, you should read another article by someone called Szasz on the goals of analytic treatment, “On the Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment”, in which you will see that there is advanced the following: it is that the aims of analysis are given by its rule. And that its rule, and at the same time its aims can only be defined as promoting as a final goal of analysis, of every analysis whether it is didactic or not, the initiation of the patient into a scientific point of view – that is how the author expresses himself – concerning his own movements.
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-27th February 1963, Seminar X, pXII 103-104 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation
The fact is that effectively these remarks about anxiety can no longer be kept at a distance from a more precise approach to what has been present in an always more insistent fashion for some time in my discourse, namely the problem of the desire of the analyst.
For when all is said and done, this at least cannot fail to escape the hardest-hearing ears: the fact is that in the difficulty of the approach of these authors to counter-transference, it is the problem of the desire of the analyst which creates the obstacle, which creates the obstacle because in short taken generally, namely not elaborated as we have done it here, every intervention of this order, however surprising this may appear after sixty years of analytic development, seems to share a fundamental imprudence.
The people involved, whether we are dealing with Szasz, or with Barbara Low herself, whether we are dealing still more with Margaret Little – and I will say later how things have been advanced in this respect in the extraordinary confidences in which Lucia Tower, the most recent author, has spoken about very profoundly on this subject, more specifically has made a very profound avowal of her experience – none of these authors can avoid putting things on the plane of desire. The term counter-transference, as it is envisaged, namely, in general, broadly speaking the participation of the analyst, but let us not forget that more essential than the engagement of the analyst, in connection with which you see there being produced in the texts the most extreme vacillations from their hundred-percent responsibility to staying completely out of it I believe that in this respect the final article, the one which you unfortunately know only under an indicative form, the one by Lucia Tower, highlights well, not for the first time, but for the first time in an articulated manner something that is much more suggestive in this order, namely that which in the analytic relationship can occur on the side of the analyst in terms of what she calls a small change for him, the analyst – this reciprocity of action is here something which I am not saying at all is the essential term, let us say that the simple evocation of it is well designed to reestablish the question at the level at which it should be posed. It is not a matter in effect of definition, even of an exact definition of counter-transference, which could be given very simply, which is simply nothing other than the following which has only one drawback as a definition, which is that it abandons completely the question which is posed about its import, namely that counter-transference is everything that the psychoanalyst represses of what he receives as signifier in the analysis. It is nothing else and this is why this question of counter-transference is really not the question. It is from the state of confusion that it is brought to us in that it takes on its signification. This signification alone is the one from which no author can escape precisely in the measure that he tackles it and in the measure that this is what interests him, it is the desire of the analyst.
If this question is not simply not resolved, but finally has not even begun to be resolved, it is simply because there is not in analytic theory up to the present, I mean up to this seminar precisely, any exact positioning of what desire is.
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Seminar X – The Anguish (L’angoisse) (1962-1963) : from 14th November 1962 : Jacques Lacan. See this site //4 Jacques Lacan (19621114 or 19630130 or 19630227)
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