Some paraphrastic notes on Bruce Fink's supremely clear book on Lacanian psychoanalysis as a clinical practice.
What is the role of the analyst in analytic sessions? To become Other to the patient, evincing neither approval nor disapproval, providing polyvalent interpretations of what the patient says intended not so much to provide the key to the patient's symptoms as to prompt the patient to ponder his or her unconscious formations - those instances of garbled speech, slips and double entendres, botched actions, daydreams, sequences of thought and so on that are important as raw materials in analysis.
At the same time, the analyst will need to create and maintain a space in which the patient can talk, fantasise and associate - interpretative work, as it is carried out by analyst and analysand depends upon the constancy of the analyst's desire that the patient continue with the sessions. The analyst's desire bears exclusively on those sessions - on the analysis alone, and not, for example, for the patient to find a fulfilling job, meet a lifepartner and so on. It is in this way that the analyst's desire is in Lacan's words, purified - it bears upon the role the analyst must play with respect to the patient.
But why is it so important for the analysand to continue with the sessions? Because the patient will be resistant to what is demanded from analysis. Simply turning up in search of a cure for problems is insufficient, since the patient, according to Lacan, actively turns against wanting to know what his or her symptoms might be. It is this primary resistance, this will to know nothing that the analyst must overcome.
How? First of all, by emphasising the difference of the relationship to the analyst from any other relationship. There is a difference in level between analyst and analysand - clearly enough, theirs is not a reciprocal relationship; the patient is a patient, and will be required to speak, saying whatever comes to mind and doing so without unrestrainedly, fearing no censure.
As Fink puts it, there must be a pedagogical element in analysis if it is to begin to reveal unconscious formations that may then be used by the analyst to diagnose the patient's symptom; the analyst is some sense a teacher. The patient is not there to be taught about the essentials of psychoanalysis, nor indeed for a high level intellectual discussion with the analyst. Likewise, the patient does not attend sessions simply to chat about his or her life, passing a pleasant hour reviewing the events of the past few days. The analyst is not the patient's equal, entering into a relationship of reciprocity with the analysand, but nor is he or she an authority figure, who will tell the patient what to do.
Perhaps we might understand the relationship to the analyst as being one to a teacher who wants the analysand to to learn to read and interpret a difficult text not so much to provide a definitive interpretation of the text in question as to allow him or her to understand how interpretation itself, though active, is always provisional.
I think here of my own encounter with T.S. Eliot's poems in an English class when I was 15 or so; what mattered for the teacher was not to provide a key to these poems, but to show how they elicited and escaped different frameworks of interpretation. What escaped, in a sense, was the poem itself as a poem.
In the analytic session, the 'text', if it can be called that, is not something that lies outside the patient in the manner of a poem, it is the unconscious that lies within the patient that must be brought to speech and heeded. (Of course,this distinction here between inside and outside is naive; the unconscious, as Lacan shows is not buried in the profounds of mind, but is socially produced; it depends upon the relation between subject and others; and the poem depends upon those intentional acts that place consciousness always outside itself.)
The analysand will need to attend to previously unnoticed behaviour - slips of the tongue, daydreams, idle fantasies and flights of thought, musing upon what they might mean without turning immediately to the analyst for a definitive interpretation. This kind of pondering is not intended to be theoretical; the interpretative work with which the patient may be engaged aims not so much as uncovering the secret of the basic structures of the psyche as allowing that they might be more than conscious interpretations of unconscious formations. Certainly it will be up to the analyst to diagonse the patient, but this is not, at the beginning of analysis, of immediate concern; the pedagogical phase of analysis is required before any real analytic work can begin.
One model for the early stages of analysis would be that of placing the pupil in front of a poem, and attempting to let him or her heed that poem in as it were its own terms (that is to say, as it resists various techniques of reading, various hermeneutical frameworks). It must be allowed to maintain its distance, even as this distance becomes that which draws a reading after it, awakening the desire to spend time with the poem, to tarry over it, without expecting an instant interpretation or message.
Like the poem, the unconscious is mysterious. And as in a literature class, the aim must be for that mystery to summon the reader, altering the way the reader reads, eliciting particular acts of reading, particular forays, but also calling forth the desire to read.
I remember my encounter with T.S. Eliot not only for the wonder of the poems themselves, but also in terms of what it opened for me: time to spend with other poems, with other books; time to be spent with an author's oeuvre. And so too must the analysand learn to spend time with the unconscious, heeding it in its own terms (that is to say, in its ambiguities, its hesitations) and in the time it demands such that it can be made to speak.
What, then, is shared between analyst and analysand via the pedagogical element of analysis? A sense that to the patient's unconscious there belongs a specific distance, which admits only of a particular kind of approach and in relation to which, analyst and analysand are collaborators. But collaborators who have a different perspective with respect to those formations which signal the unconscious: the patient must produce material for analysis and be ready to ponder its significance; the analyst by maintaining the necessity of the analysand's continuing to attend sessions, and by withdrawing from any fixed interpretational role with respect to what it is the patient says.
In a sense, then, both patient and analyst must allow themselves to become other than who they usually are with respect to one another, the patient in order to let the unconscious reveal its play, and the analyst in order to produce those conditions that best allow for the emergence of unconscious formations. This is what the pedagogical element of analysis requires.