Where Does an Analysis Lead?

The chapter “Negation and Repression”¹, initially presented by Christian Fierens at the “Athens Workshops” in March 2018, begins with a seemingly simple question: “where does an analysis lead?”. Our habitual way of thinking would readily lead us to retain first the “where” of the sentence: what is the final destination of an analysis? What must be reached for an analysis to be considered finished? Such could be the entire stake of the pass. However, placing the emphasis on the finality of the cure would risk leaving in the background another essential element of the sentence, namely the verb. We recall that in his critical reading of the Freudian fantasy “A Child Is Being Beaten”, Lacan indicates bringing the verb into play insofar as it opens onto the dimension of jouissance, otherwise than from the angle of the pleasure and reality principles. As a structure to be enacted in the psychoanalytic process, the fantasy is fundamental in that it operates from the punch/lozenge ($diamond$, another name for the verb) from which the question of the object small a arises, and in doing so, that of the barred subject. In the same way, when Christian Fierens asks: where does an analysis lead?, he first asks: what does “leading” mean with regard to analysis? Or again: in embarking upon the process of the cure, into what movement is one introduced? I add that the question holds equally for the analysand and for the analyst.

By proposing this subtitle, “thinking psychosis in particular” seeks to emphasize that if there is a stake concerning psychosis, it is above all for what such questioning enables with regard to the thinking-in-motion inherent to the unconscious itself. I quote François Balmès: “Far from having to be thought first in terms of symbolic deficiency or defect, psychosis shows the truth of structure, the truth of humanity prey to the symbolic. (…) Beyond the opposition between relative peace where there is the Name-of-the-Father and disorder and chaos where it is foreclosed, there is from the point of view of structure what one could call the essential symbolic disorder. This duplicity is therefore not only that of the superego or the father, but more radically that of language itself.”² Let us specify: on the one hand, the ambiguity of the symbolic is preserved in psychosis, and on the other hand, it is illuminated when related to the question of knowledge which accounts for heterogeneous logics simultaneously at work: that of thinking-in-motion and that of thought which secondarily gives rise to any formalization.

Let us begin almost at the end, making the opening sentence “Where does an analysis lead?” resonate with another sentence stated on page 308: “We are (…) led to a thinking in motion in order to think (…)”. What of this thinking in motion? How is it to be grasped? […]