What does psychoanalysis look like?
One person speaks while the other listens. The listener reminds the speaker of a single rule that must be observed throughout: she must continue speaking whatever comes to mind.
Throughout his teaching, Jacques Lacan repeatedly emphasized this pragmatic dimension of psychoanalysis. It is not a science, he insisted, nor merely a transmissible theory, but first and foremost a practice.1
A Lacanian analysis is distinctive for the emphasis it places on language and its opacity. Lacan taught that language is the medium the speaking-being inhabits. Language and words structure the individual. Signifiers mortify the body, but as language, they also provide a means of enjoyment.
In Jacques-Alain Miller’s formulation, psychoanalysis is “an attempt to explore and interpret being-in-language.”2 The analyst listens to the analysand. By parsing the unique patterns in her speech—recurring words, discontinuities and gaps in discourse, equivocations, and fixations—a Lacanian analyst subtly shifts the analysand’s relationship to language and, by extension, to herself and to others. By providing a new punctuation, the analyst highlights the disruptive presence of desire and the shadows cast by the individual’s enjoyment, her jouissance.
What is the clinic in psychoanalysis? It’s not complicated. Its foundation is–what is said during psychoanalysis.
Jacques Lacan.3
ignacio adriasola 