Prelude 2
An act that is not for sale: What does the analyst pay with?
The analysand pays; the analyst charges. However, Lacan introduces a third operation: the analyst also pays.
In The Direction of the Treatment, this payment is not reduced to money. The analyst pays with his words, when they attain the value of interpretation; he pays with his person, which he lends as support for the transference; and he pays with that which is essential in his most intimate judgment[1]. It is striking that, when questioning the direction of the treatment, Lacan so quickly shifts the question of payment to the analyst’s side.
However, the fact that money does not exhaust the question of payment does not mean it is irrelevant. Where it enters the transference, it can introduce a measure against debts that would otherwise remain open to love, gratitude, guilt, or sacrifice. Cichello starts from a provocative premise: “nothing is free; one always pays with something”[2]. Even where no money changes hands, the function of payment operates through other channels in the course of the cure.
The issue takes on another dimension in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In analysis, access to desire entails paying a price; Lacan situates that payment on the side of jouissance: “I pay for that mystical operation with a pound of flesh”[3]. If access to desire does not occur without loss, what, then, is paid in analysis? Who pays, and with what?
From the analyst’s perspective, the question of payment reappears in another form: what returns to the analyst from what his act produces? Colette Soler reminds us that “the analytic act is the only act [...] whose benefit does not go to the agent of the act [...] in the end, nothing returns to him from the benefit of the act”[4]. Thus, the analytic act would have the peculiarity of not guaranteeing its agent a gain equivalent to what it produces.
What does it mean today to pay to sustain the analytic act? Todd McGowan points out that the commodity form[5] offers us objects that invite us to partake of “pure excess while leaving all loss definitively behind”[6]. A logic of total gain—without limit, without remainder—continues to resonate here. What happens when the cure itself becomes ensnared by that promise and begins to be measured in terms of efficacy, performance, or adaptation? McGowan also takes up a critique that he does not entirely dismiss: that psychoanalysis can function as one of capitalism’s “ideological handmaidens,” enhancing “the docility of its patients” rather than unleashing their revolutionary passion[7]. Thus, the problem would not be solely that the cure becomes a commodity, but that the act itself ends up serving that logic.
With what, then, does the analyst pay to avoid turning transference into a debt, the cure into a commodity, or his knowledge into a guarantee?
Perhaps one of the current challenges in directing the cure lies precisely there: in being able to charge a fee without reducing analysis to an exchange, and in being able to pay—through his position—for an act whose effect he does not guarantee and whose benefit does not belong to him.
Jorge Ramírez Richmond
Foro del Campo Lacaniano de México
San José, Costa Rica, September 20, 2026
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Notes
[1] Lacan, J. (2009/1958). La dirección de la cura y los principios de su poder. En Escritos 2. México: Siglo XXI, p. 561.
[2] Cichello, G. (2010). Función del dinero en psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires: Letra Viva, p. 93.
[3] Lacan, J. (2007). Las paradojas de la ética o ¿has actuado en conformidad con tu deseo? En J.A. Miller (Ed.), Seminario 7: la ética del psicoanálisis (pp. 370-388, cita en p. 383). Buenos Aires: Paidós.
[4] Soler, C. (2004). “¿Qué se espera del análisis y del psicoanalista?” En ¿Qué se espera del psicoanálisis y del psicoanalista? Buenos Aires: Letra Viva, p. 233.
[5] Commodity-form (Warenform): a concept Marx uses to describe the specific social form that the products of labor take on when they are produced for exchange. In this form, products possess both use value and value, and the social relations among those who produce them appear as relations between exchangeable things. Therefore, a commodity is not simply an object that is bought and sold, but rather the elementary form of wealth in the capitalist mode of production and the expression of specific social relations of production. Cf. Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1, B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books. [Original work published 1867]. Book I, Chapter 1, Section 4.
[6] McGowan, T. (2025). Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity. New York: Columbia University Press, “Introduction,” p. 3.
[7] McGowan, T. (2016). Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, “Introduction,” pp. 1–2.
Prelude 1
What Does the Future of Psychoanalysis Depend On?
“Psychoanalysis will not triumph; it will survive or not”[1]
Lacan wondered why someone, after realizing what the analyst is reduced to at the end of an analysis, would nevertheless choose the “aberration” of occupying that place for another.[2] The answer must be found in each case, but we might venture one point in common: the desire that psychoanalysis, as one has experienced it, survives for the generations to come.
Unlike the other discourses, the analyst’s discourse is not sustained by the advances of civilization which, more often than not, serve a refusal to know anything about the structural lack of the speaking being. We live in the era anticipated by Lacan, in which the marriage between technoscience and capitalist discourse produces the height of segregation, accompanied by the foreclosure of the things of love and desire in favor of the promise of eradicating lack.
What place, amid all this, is there for a discourse that calls each person to assume their responsibility in the face of the hole? In a market where every kind of promise of completeness is sold, what could the psychoanalyst offer, the one who has only lack to offer?
Lacan gives us a clue: “everything depends on the real insisting”.[3] But is it not also necessary that, when the program fails, someone circulates in the marketplace to sustain the offer of another possible way out? “An analysis is what is expected of a psychoanalyst”,[4] he says. In other words, there must be a psychoanalyst to sustain an analysis, but there must also be analysis for there to be analysts.
Thus, for whoever is prepared to occupy that place, it is necessary to commit to one’s own analysis to the point at which a desire may emerge that does not yield to the demands of ideologies and that makes possible another mode of satisfaction. But it is also necessary, as Nguyên[5] argues, to resist—not like a wall facing a flood—but in the sense of returning to the foundations of the direction of the cure, affirming its extraterritoriality amid other forms of knowledge.
This is the movement Lacan himself makes in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, [6] by addressing the questions of his time, questions that I invite you to bring up to date: what are the deviations to which psychoanalysis is subjected today? Where do we stand with the Lacanian hypothesis of trauma and repetition? Do we understand them as the consequence of an Other who enjoys and subjugates, or in terms of the effects of the subject’s subordination to a signifier? Who analyzes today? The one who interprets through a social reading of the symptom, or the one who interprets by making use of the transference? And what about the analyst’s place in the treatment? Do we sustain the place of lack-in-being that Lacan reserves for the analyst, or do we fall into the traps of making use of the power granted to us by transference?
It is in the face of this scenario that the theme of our VII Inter-American Symposium of the IF-EPFCL—“Current Challenges in the Direction of the Treatment”—assumes its full relevance. It is a true call to return to the foundations of our practice if we are to be up to the task of sustaining the analytic discourse in the Babel of the subjectivity of our time.
And so, shall we meet in Fortaleza to move these questions forward?
Lia Silveira
Psychoanalyst, AME of EPFCL, member of FCL - Fortaleza.
[1] LACAN, J. A Terceira, 7th Congress of the École Freudienne de Paris, 1974.
[2] LACAN, J. O Saber do Psicanalista, lecture of June 1, 1972.
[3] LACAN, J. A Terceira, op. cit.
[4] LACAN, J. The Seminar, Book XVII — The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, January 14, 1970.
[5] NGUYÊN, A. En attendant Lacan... Paris: Éditions Stilus, 2025.
[6] LACAN, Jacques (1958). “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power.” In: LACAN, Jacques. Écrits. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed