What Does the Future of Psychoanalysis Depend On?

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“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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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