# Where Does an Analysis Lead?

- Link: https://eksis.eu/ou-mene-une-analyse/?lang=en
- Published: 2026-10-17T11:24:11+00:00
- Author: 

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? […]

^(1) C. Fierens, “La négation et le refoulement”, in _Transmission de la psychanalyse–
Les ateliers d’Athènes_, vol. 2, Paris, Les éditions de l’insu, 2024, pp. 251-317.

^(2) F. Balmès, _Structure, logique, aliénation_, Toulouse, Érès, 2011, pp. 28-29.