More sketchy notes closely paraphrasing Fink's book on Lacanian psychoanalysis in the clinic, following posts here and here.
1. Unconscious desire reveals itself in the analytic session through that associative process through which interpretations proferred by the analyst in response to the patient's unconscious formations (slips of the tongue, botched actions, double entendres, etc.) Even as analysis involves a certain kind of pedagogy, it does not take the form of the analyst's propounding a general theory of psychoanalysis to the analysand, or indeed, in the case of interpretation, fixing and determining the meaning of unconscious formations once and for all. Of course, the analyst must reach a diagnosis of the patient, identifying his or her symptom, but what is important in that give and take in the session is to let the patient gain confidence in an open-ended interpretational process in which he or she is a participant.
For Lacan, the analyst's interpretations of the patient's unconscious formations should aim at providing enigmatic statements that frustrate the desire of the analysand to work them out at the conscious level. The unconscious must be engaged as it presents itself to the analysand who has been taught to abandon the notion that there can be a single, unequivocal meaning which unconscious formations reflect. As such, the analyst's interjections in the session must be polyvalent if he or she to avoid spoon-feeding the analysand, and creating a relationship of dependency, whereby he or she stands in relation to the analyst as a child to a parent, or a pupil to a teacher.
It is in this sense that Lacan calls analytic interpretation 'oracular speech'. What matters is the way the analyst's interpretations resonate (Fink's word) with the patient. The analyst will play on the sound of words - 'that word sounds like ...' and point out double entendres; scansion may be employed. This will be intermittently frustrating for the patient, but what matters each time is to find provocative ways of intervening in the session that sends the analysand back to the mystery of his or her own unconscious formations. It is essential the analyst resists standing in as an authority figure, maintain him- or herself as the abstract, formal Other to the patient in order that transference may reach the real.
2. What does Lacan mean by the real? It can be considered, says Fink as the connection or link between two thoughts that has succumbed to repression and must be restored. It can also be thought of in terms of traumatic events (usually sexual or involving people who have been libidinally invested by the subject) that have never been talked through.
As such, the real is what must be symbolised through analysis: it has to be spoken, put into signifiers. As Jacques-Alain Miller has put it, analysis provides the progressive 'draining away' of the real into the symbolic. Aiming at the real, interpretation helps the analyand put into words that which has led his or her desire to become fixated or stuck.
Interpretation can be said to hit the real, in Lacan's expression, when it permits an encounter with what it was the analysand had been trying to formulate all along. For Lacan, it is the real that brings the analysand incessantly to the same subject or event, letting him or her feel stuck, something essentially not yet having been formulated.
Hitting the real means the interpretation has been able to symbolise something that has not yet been put into words - when the analyst says, to use an example from Fink's clinical practice, 'Your mother turned you against your father', this reveals the cause of the analysand's anger, which, now symbolised, restores the missing link in the patient's thoughts and feelings.
In the example in question, the analysand, Fink says, had discussed her anger toward her mother in several sessions; more recently, the analysand's love for her father, long repressed, had also emerged. Analysis allowed the two themes to be connected. In previous sessions, the analysand's anger with her mother had been linked to various events, but the analyst's interpretation, linking this anger to her repressed love for her father, can be said to hit the real as it symbolised the cause of her anger. And, having done so, the interpretation has prepared the way for working through that anger.
As Fink notes, the interpretation in question does not supply the meaning in an unequivocal way to the patient. The phrase, 'Your mother turned you against your father' can be understood in many ways; as Fink recalls, the analysand heard this statement not figuratively, as one might expect but as referring to the physical sense of being turned up against her father. She was able, as a result, to associate to other significant events in her life (and note this lovely expression: associate to).
Then the analyst's interpretations must remain oracular - as Fink notes, 'an interpretation plays off ambiguities in its very formulation'; the analyst should prefer to present formulations that are able to sound other words and names that have been important to the patient. As such, it prevents the analyst from simply feeding the analyst's demand, maintaining the desire of the analyst as the Other.
3. Through the process of analysis, the analysand is supposed to begin to work out what is being addressed to him or her through the unconscious. The patient must learn to want to know, pondering unconsicous formations as they operate as what, for Lacan, is the cause of the analysand's desire.
Cause, in this context, is to be understood in a very specific sense. In Fink's example, an analysand fixates on women who are indifferent to him; here, the cause of his desire is not to be confused with his relationship to a particular woman, but rather upon being refused by women as such. Desire does not have a specific object as its correlate but seeks to incarnate what it looks for in that object. A particular woman, in this sense, is only the avatar of the cause of the analysand's desire, to the extent that the cause can be subtracted from this woman or any other.
Crucially, for Lacan, desire as such has no object - the satisfaction the analysand in question might feel when a previously unobtainable women decides she wants a relationship with him may well kill his desire. What he desired was something unsatisfiable; after all, as Lacan says, human desire seeks to go on desiring, looking only to perpetuate itself.
Lacan's expression for the cause of desire the 'object a', which may take an infinite number of guises - the shape of someone's hands, the timbre of a voice, for example (each time, I suppose, it is a part, rather than a whole that is in question; a fragment, a nugget). Over the course of the analysis, the analyst prompts the patient to want to discover something, to attempt to understand what his or her unconscious is saying.
By offering tentative, oracular interpretations of the patient's unconscious formations, the analyst now becomes the cause of the analysand's desire, the 'object a' having been displaced onto him or her. Once this has happened, analysis can really begin in earnest, as it consists in 'working through' - in the work of transference.
3. Lacan calls the 'fundamental fantasy' that fixation of the analysand on the object a, the object cause. Fantasy, here, is understood to frame the way in which the subject imagines him or herself in relation to the cause. For Lacan, there is but one single fantasy, akin to Freud's notion of a 'primal scene' that is fundamental to each analysand. A successful course of analysis will see the transposition of the analysand's fundamental fantasy - but what does this involve?
For Lacan, our desire always involves others around us. Growing up, we are likely to have focused on whatever it is our caregivers spoke of wanting; our desire to this extent is aroused by the desire of parents and other caregivers. We often want what others around us want, modelling what we want on the desires of others. And we may unconsciously want to desire in the manner of others around us, to the extent that the desire of the Other may be said to cause our own desires. Our most intimate desires may well in fact be modelled on the desires of our parents or others who have been close to us.
A persistent danger over the course of analysis is that the analysand takes the Other's desire to coincide with his or her own, installing the analyst in the position of parent or judge. This is why the analyst cannot rest in the symbolic stage of transference: he or she must embody desire as the 'object a', and as such, avoid being pinned down by the patient.
By withholding a definitive interpretation of the analysand's behaviour, the analyst becomes a difficult and problematic figure for the patient. What does he or she want? What is the nature of the analyst's desire? The analysand will characteristically try to pin it down, to classify it, and thereby have done with what Lacan calls angoisse, angst. This is because the analysand finds the analyst's desire unbearable, attempting to transform it into a specific, intelligible demand, in terms of which the analysand might then moderate his or her behaviour in a way pleasing to the analyst. This, of course, falls far short of what is required in analysis. The analyst's desirousness must remain enigmatic, however difficult it is for the patient.
3. As we grow up, restrictions are placed on our behaviour: eating and excretion are carefully managed, and autoerotic behaviour discouraged. Lacan calls castration the loss of the possibility of immediate gratification. This loss, however, is transformed by the prohibition placed on the child's behaviour such that it becomes jouissance. Bodily pleasure is transformed into something enticing and erotic; the strength of the prohibition can be directly correlated with the erotic charge borne by the forbidden act.
Of course, at the time of its upbringing, the child has no choice but to accept the giving up of immediate gratification. But this relinquishment is equivocal: the jouissance sacrificed by the child plays a role in constituting the subject it becomes. In Fink's words,
the subject constitutes him- or herself as a stance adopted with respect to that loss of jouissance. Object a can be understood as the object (now lost) which provided that jouissance, as a kind of rem(a)inder of that lost jouissance.
I desire, now, what I gave up, and it appears all the more attractive for the fact that it is vanished. This is not a desire among others, but plays a crucial role in determining who I am. As Fink puts it, the subject constitutes him or herself with respect to the loss of jouissance, and, indeed, to those who brought about this loss: parents and caregivers in the subject's early years. The 'object a' can now be understood more precisely as having its origin as what is left over from that forbidden jouissance. It is a reminder of what was lost.
Freud noted in frustration that analysis often came to an end when confronted with the rock of castration: the patient can only be brought to the state of giving up of satisfaction made according to the desires of his or her caregiver. As Lacan might put it, this would mean the patient remains fixed or stuck by the giving up of jouissance to the caregiving Other.
How does this manifest itself? The neurotic may appear to be an obedient son to his parents, taking on a job in the family firm, marrying a woman from an approved family, etc., but may still harbour a resentment towards his parents. As Fink puts it, 'Every neurosis entails [...] a resentful stance toward the Other's satisfaction'. The neurotic views giving up his or her jouissance in terms of a reward that has never manifest itself.
For Lacan, the neurotic's position does not need to wreck analysis upon the rock of castration. It is possible in his expression to traverse the fantasy via the encounter with the desire of the analyst. In so doing, the analysand's fundamental fantasy can be reconfigured, and along with it, a new relation to the Other achieved.
Whereas the neurotic is marked by resentment for what he or she has given up, and is therefore in a stance of resentment towards the Other's desire, the patient who has traversed the fantasy is no longer stuck; the Other's jouissance is no longer a frustration. No longer does the analysand seek recompense from his or her parents or caregivers for lost jouissance. By the end of the analysis, the analyst, who occupies the position of the 'object a', will likewise no longer be blamed for what the analysand has lost.
4. Analysis ends with what Lacan calls 'precipitation', the completed transposition ot reconfiguration of the fundamental fantasy. The analysand is now able to take responsibility towards his or her castration; the analyst as Other, standing in for the analysand's parents and other caregivers is no longer blamed for stealing jouissance from the patient.
Something else occurs, too - all along, the analysand will have been aware of the analyst's desire for him or her to continue the process of analysis. The end of analysis is not announced by the analyst, but by the analysand, over whom the analyst's desire no longer has a hold.
But this is not a simple breaking off. As Fink stresses, if analysis comes to a peaceful end, this can suggest acquiescence to the analyst as an authority figure. The analysand must be brought to the point where the analyst's desires have no more hold upon him or her, but this presumes the arduous work that analysis involves. As such, analysis will usually end only after a serious struggle.