The Presence of The Analyst in Lacanian Treatment

The Three Registers: Imaginary, Real, And Symbolic

The dimensions of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real are the basic building blocks of Lacanian psychoanalysis. These registers occupy a central place throughout Lacan’s work from the 1950s on. Lacan had set out to reinterpret the central concepts of psychoanalysis through a highly ideographic reading of Freudian concepts, using these three registers as a new conceptual tool. ¹ Lacan’s emphasis on the dimension of the Symbolic in analytic practice was one his major innovations in psychoanalysis (Vanheule 2011). The Symbolic is the order of language and the law (Van Haute 2002) and refers to the fact that our mental life and the analytic process is inherently structured through language (Strubbe and Vanheule 2014). When Lacan refers to the law he points to the acquisition of culture-specific viewpoints thanks to which we experience the world as lawful and organized. Lacan adopts the notion of signifiers from Saussure to designate the essential building blocks of language. According to Saussure, speech is composed of signifiers and signifieds. The latter are the ideas or representations that speech evokes and thus are the semantic content of speech. Lacan adopts Saussure’s idea that there is no fixed relation between signifier and signified and thus that meaning is essentially unstable and boils down to convention (Vanheule 2011, p. 36).

For Lacan, the unconscious is made of the collective of signifiers and stories that a subject has received from significant others, determining the subject’s identity, symptoms, dreams, lapses, etc. (Willemsen et al. 2015, p. 777). What Lacan emphasizes through his concept of the Symbolic is how subjectivity, meaning, and the unconscious depend on the mechanisms of language. The core of subjectivity is constituted by otherness: “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (Lacan 1957, p. 10). For Lacan, meaning is not the expression of an interior state, but is constituted from outside, from what he calls the Other; the term refers to language as a collection of signifiers and signifieds and to significant others (parents, educators, family, etc.). This dimension of otherness becomes most clear if we consider how subjects are from the outset born into a web of words. Parents may speak of their desire for a child long before the actual conception. They talk about this desire using signifiers that circulate in familial and cultural discourses. The different stories they tell are marked by their history, their desire, and thus also their lack. In the case of the Rat Man, for instance, the message of the father that his son will become either a great man or a criminal has determining effects in terms of his neurosis (Freud 1909, p. 205). The psychoanalytic subject exists as a result of an experience of loss (Wilson 2006). Thinking, representation, and desire are possible because of a constitutive lack. ²

During the 1950s the Imaginary was the central register for Lacan. He used the model of the mirror stage to explain how a sense of psychological unity and identity are attained. Originally, the mirror stage was considered to be a developmental phase, where children from six months onward are able to recognize their image in the mirror. This recognition is accompanied by a sensation of jubilation and triumph. The core idea behind Lacan’s use of the Imaginary is that this recognition is supported by an image in the outside world. Consequently, self-awareness is misrecognition ³ at its root, since we wrongly assume that we “are” the image. Lacan situates the Freudian ego on the axis of the Imaginary. The basic identifications acquired through the mirror image are formative of this ego. Not only is the ego not the master in its own house, but the house itself is a mirage. In analysis, the Imaginary occurs, for instance, when the patient engages in objectifying attempts to grasp an image of him- or herself (Van Haute 2002, p. 84): “I am a person that likes structure,” “Giving things away is just in my character,” “I am a sad person,” and the like.

The Imaginary structures not only our self-experience but also how others are perceived. In the Imaginary register, others are experienced as similar to oneself. Whereas the Symbolic is characterized by lack, the perpetual movement of the signifier, giving rise to a divided subject that can never coincide with itself, the Imaginary is characterized by meaning and fullness. It is in this register that objects in the world and others are perceived as distinct and delineated entities. Here the image of self and other are coexistent and have a reciprocal relation to each other. Imaginary relations are characterized by mutuality, narcissistic love, and hate/rivalry. For Lacan, analysis needs to counter Imaginary tendencies, since in terms of the analytic process they constitute resistance to the movement of the signifier. In focusing on our “personal” preferences, our “I,” we tend to deny the drive and the fundamentally divided nature of our being a subject.

The Real is the third register formulated by Lacan to grasp what happens in the psychoanalytic experience. Although the meaning of the term changes throughout his work, it cannot be equated with “reality.” The Real is an effect of the fact that we are speaking beings. During the early seminars, the Real is whatever lies outside language and is inassimilable to symbolization (Evans 1996). The Real thus refers to human experience to the extent that it cannot be articulated through language and discourse, nor turned into an image. It bears a resemblance to the Freudian drive and refers to an insistent tension at the borderline of the biological and the psychological (Verhaeghe 2004). One of the ways the Real can manifest clinically is as panic attacks, attesting to an overwhelming drive excitation (Strubbe and Vanheule 2014). Grotstein (2007) thinks the Lacanian Real is akin to Bion’s O: “being just beyond the veil of illusion on our way to the unknown that is immediately near, both inside and out” (p. 123). Both the Real and O are unknown. Further, this register points to aspects of being outside “deterministic certainty” (p. 123). We will return to this central aspect of Lacan’s thinking in our discussion of seminar XI.

As humans come to speak, they lose an immediate, unmediated contact with the Real. Reality is from that point on a Symbolic reality, mediated by language. The result is a divided subject (fragmented by different signifiers), experiencing unity only via Imaginary identifications and relations. Note that our focus in this paper is on Lacan’s works from the 1950s until 1964, and hence on aspects of Lacanian theory where the unconscious and otherness are primarily articulated together with the Symbolic. Lacan later developed ideas concerning alterity from the vantage point of the Real unconscious and Real elements in affects (see, e.g., Soler 2011), entailing a different elaboration of presence. However, the root of these elaborations can be found in seminar XI, which we will discuss extensively.

Lacan And Transference

For Lacan (1953–1954), transference involves the three registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. The transference is polyvalent, meaning that it is related to the signifier, to images of other and self, to the body, and to what is beyond representation. And this polyvalence is not in itself perceptible, as we become aware of transference only at certain moments of the analytic process.

For Lacan, it is impossible to think of the analytic relationship as consisting of the encounter between two persons or psychologies. ⁴ Thus, transference can’t be understood simply in relation to what mediates the relation between two subjectivities. At this point Lacan introduces the dimension of “lack” as crucial to our understanding of transference. It is not hard to see how this dynamic of lack relates to analysis. A patient, perceiving that something is lacking in his or her life (at least in cases of neurosis), comes to analysis. The solution to this lack is perceived to lie in the analyst. This is what Lacan calls “the supposed subject of knowing.” ⁵ The analyst is held to detain this object (knowledge) that completes the analysand. To put things differently, the analyst attains the function of a guarantor, his presence guaranteeing that the result of free association will actually produce something meaningful, even though neither analyst nor analysand knows what it means (Grigg 2009). Of course, in Lacanian analysis the analyst does not identify with the position of the supposed subject of knowing, but instead uses the analyst’s status to set in motion the analysand’s questioning of what it is that he or she is suffering from (Lacan 1960–1961). The analyst’s desire constitutes an answer to the analysand’s aspiration and aims at provoking an exploration of the unconscious. This reduces the supposed subject of knowing to a sort of illusion, albeit a productive and necessary one. This is why Lacan (1951) says the transference is deceptive (p. 184). It is deceptive inasmuch as it is supported by a supposition that puts the analyst in the place of knowledge.

Seminar I: Presence As Resistance To The Revelation Of Subjectivity

Lacan (1953–1954) introduces the idea of the presence of the analyst, based on a remark made by Freud in “The Dynamics of Transference.” ⁶ Lacan renders the quote thus: “Just when he seems ready to come out with something more authentic, more to the point than he has ever managed to come up with up to then, the subject, in some cases, breaks off, and utters a statement, which might be the following—I am aware all of a sudden of the fact of your presence” (p. 40).

In this quote Lacan describes moments in the analytic process where free association is interrupted and a patient expresses an awareness of the analyst. This was the case for Jane, for instance, a young woman struggling with the question of what direction to take in her professional life. She suddenly stops talking about her sad and depressed mother, who always blamed her daughter for having failed in life. She silently looks at the analyst, and then breaks out in laughter. “You really are a serious bunch, you lot.” Jane often tries to please the analyst by making “funny” remarks about how analysts behave. However, the analyst does not respond in laughter. In one session, Jane recounts how her parents always said she was “an artist.” The analyst repeats this statement—“You are an artist”—because in Jane’s Dutch dialect the expression “to be an artist” has a connotation of being someone who doesn’t take things seriously. It is used in reference to people who act silly. This exchange leads to associations regarding how Jane always tried to make her mother laugh so she would feel better. Moreover, she has suffered a severe lack of confidence, because her parents were very dismissive of her creative nature. In fact, Jane had sought the consultation because her creative career (as an “artist”) was at a standstill. At an unconscious level, being inhibited regarding work meant being loyal to her parents. The point we want to make is how the “funny” remarks she made involving the analyst constituted a moment of interruption of the associations. Moreover, it was through an interpretation at the level of the signifier “artist” that the multiplicity of meanings surrounding her behavior vis-à-vis the analyst emerged. Indeed, when the presence of the analyst comes to the fore in the process of psychoanalysis, one type of Lacanian intervention consists of trying to reintegrate the Imaginary standstill in ongoing free-associative speech.

Specifically, in Seminar I Lacan opposes empty speech (or mediation) to full speech (or revelation). To the extent that something is not revealed in speech, this speech acquires the function of mediation between a subject and an other (Lacan 1953–1954, p. 49). Moreover, the other “comes into being in this very mediation” (p. 48). This thought is “vintage Lacan.” Jane mocks the analyst, not because she experiences him to be a rather silly creature, but rather as an effect of what she cannot say at that time (the deprecation she endured from her parents). The other is not some precondition of the analytic experience, but is rather constituted by it. This is similar to how, in a more everyday setting, one might resort to small talk in order to avoid difficult subjects. However, in analysis this conversational pathway is not chosen deliberately. Rather, the awareness of the analyst manifests because something cannot be revealed. In Lacan’s thought, transference arises as an obstacle to free association; it is a moment of resistance within a specific conversational context.

Indeed, the presence of the analyst is realized as a substitute for an authentic expression of the unconscious by the patient. Instead of this “authentic expression” we get a sudden awareness of the presence of the analyst. This transferential moment is consequently related to a moment in discourse that must be understood in relation to what is about to be said, but isn’t. It is a discursive phenomenon related to resistance. As such, it indicates the point where the utterance of something is avoided or deflected.

The other is realized as such by speech, at a time when discourse moves to a point that is hard to say. Full speech is the progressive unfolding of subjectivity in authentic speech. Empty speech is objectifying and puts us at a distance from what really moves us (Van Haute 2002, p. 48). Later, this is taken up again as Imaginary and Symbolic aspects of speech and transference. ⁷ The Imaginary aspects are related to a reciprocal relation between equals, to affect, and to the conscious features of what is called “the small other,” meaning the concrete other that appears similar to ourselves (an Imaginary partner or mirror image). The Symbolic aspects are related to the big Other, to the structuring and often unconscious relations between the subject and linguistic and societal structures. On this view, transference is an obstacle inasmuch as the analyst is realized as a concrete (small) other, as a counterpart to the analysand’s ego. It is the domain of the Imaginary governed by affect and by reciprocity and mutuality between two complementary counterparts, two egos, that are believed to be at the service of ignorance and resistance. The presence of the analyst is manifested at the crossroads between these two functions of speech.

Seminar XI: Presence As A Manifestation Of The Unconscious

Whereas in seminar I Lacan describes presence from the perspective of Imaginary resistance that obstructs the work of symbolization, Seminar XI embraces a view of the analyst’s presence as a manifestation of the unconscious.

Indeed, Lacan takes up the question of the analyst’s presence again in seminar XI. In retrospect, this seminar is a turning point, along with the seminar on anxiety the year before, because it sets the stage for a focus on the Real in psychoanalysis. Verhaeghe (2001) describes seminar XI as a “hinge between the Lacan of the signifier and desire and the Lacan of the Real” (p. 72). The shift implies an interest in subjectivity at the limits of the Symbolic (Vanheule 2011). The focus on the Real brings Lacan (1964) to a reinterpretation of some of the classic psychoanalytic concepts: repetition, transference, drive, and the unconscious. In the opening lesson, Lacan refers to psychoanalysis as a “praxis”: “It is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action . . . to treat the real by the symbolic”; moreover, “The fact that in doing so he encounters the Imaginary to a greater or a lesser degree is only of secondary importance here” (p. 6). Lacan clearly puts the interrelation between the Real and the Symbolic on the agenda. The Imaginary becomes of secondary importance. The ego is now in the background. Whereas Lacan at the outset believed that through the Symbolic a subject was able to absorb the Real, the Lacan of seminar XI does not attribute such powers to the Symbolic. The Real is not a wasteland waiting to be cultivated; rather, it is the insistence of an excess. Whereas the early Lacan assumed a Symbolic determinism (symptoms and the psychoanalytic process are dependent on the mechanisms of language), he adds an aspect of indeterminism to this, in the guise of an incessantly resurgent Real that interrupts the Symbolic machine. Key to understanding how Lacan interprets the fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive is to consider these concepts in relation to the central questions of causality and determination, core themes in seminar XI.

Lacan approaches the interrelation between chance ⁸ and determinism through the concepts of tuchè and automaton, borrowed from Aristotle’s theory of causality (Verhaeghe 2002). “Automaton” refers to the causality we associate with the functioning of machines, determined by strict laws and as such constituting a closed circuit. In terms of the analytic process, it points to the determining effects of language and to the repetition of signifiers. If we associate “freely,” the same old stories, words, themes, and preoccupations return. One might think of how the signifier “rat” returns numerous times in different guises in the case of the Rat Man, referring to the father’s difficulties in choosing whom to marry (Heiraten), but also pointing to money and of course the ugly rodents from the torture the Rat Man had heard described when he was in the army (Declercq 2004). However, there is a limit to the Symbolic. Something beyond words that Lacan relates to trauma keeps popping up. It is a missed encounter in that the experience cannot be inscribed through the signifier, while at the same time it is insistent in mental life, like traumatic dreams that are repeated compulsively. This is the “tuchè” component, the open and living side of repetition beyond words. Over and over again, we try to grasp what moves us (through the Symbolic), producing a remainder. This leftover pushes us again to speak more to grasp the insisting Real. This process continues constantly: language and its limit are caught up in this circular dance.

The unconscious is related to this undetermined Real: “For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis is tied to a real—a real that may well not be determined” (Lacan 1964, quoted in Verhaeghe 2002, p. 130).

This statement reveals how the unconscious is considered against the background of enigma (the Real). The unconscious may very well still be operating with Symbolic material, but at its core this constitutes a cover-up for something beyond and amid the realm of the Symbolic. The unconscious of seminar XI is not the unconscious that is a kind of reservoir of repressed elements and unavowed desires or a content that is temporarily unavailable. In seminar XI, Lacan describes how the unconscious is manifested in a flash. It is characterized by a pulsating movement, an alternation between opening and closing. When it manifests, it serves as a starting point for the production of signifiers. It is the undetermined aspect in the signifying chain, the gap that enables the structure to exist. In that sense, the unconscious is preontological. This means that it is not an aspect of psychic reality that is already caught in mental representations. After all, for something to exist for someone, it needs to be taken up in the signifying chain. The unconscious comes into being at the limits of the signifying chain, in a moment of discontinuity. The closing of the unconscious is the interruption of the signifying chain: it refers to the dimension of the Symbolic and the signifier. In seminar XI, the “presence of the analyst” is understood as a manifestation of the unconscious. If we combine that idea with the unconscious that is marked by a pulsation between opening and closing, it can be seen that this manifests in transference as well. Two seemingly paradoxical statements that describe the relation between the unconscious and transference in seminar XI pertain to this link: transference is the closing-up of the unconscious and “the enactment of the reality of the unconscious” (Lacan 1964, p. 146). The closing-up of the unconscious refers to the interruption in the chain of signifiers: what is halted is the flow of words (Miller 1995). This refers to the automaton aspect of repetition: the structured and underlying determination of the signifying chain. “The enactment of the reality of the unconscious,” on the other hand, points to tuchè, to a dimension beyond the signifier. What interrupts the working of the signifier is no longer the actualization of the analyst as an imaginary other (as in seminar I), but is related to an aspect of the Real, to unrepresented aspects of the drive. The presence of the analyst is then an incarnation of the Real.

Repetition occurs when a missed, traumatic encounter beyond the pleasure principle is integrated within the network of signifiers operating according to the pleasure principle (Nobus 2000). From then on, signifying repetition is distinguished from transference (Miller 1995). That is to say, the essence of transference is not the signifying repetition characteristic of the Symbolic (automaton): “the dimension that is always eluded when transference is at issue, namely, that transference isn’t simply that which reproduces and repeats a situation, an action, an attitude or an old trauma” (Lacan 1962–1963, p. 128).

Transference is not merely the repetition of a certain stance toward an infantile love object in the here and now of the analytic encounter, nor does the Freudian schema of the oedipus complex suffice to situate the analyst within the transference. With this loosening of the relation between transference and repetition, Lacan points to the essentially creative function of transference, to the ability of the analytic encounter to bring forth something new. The contingency of the encounter with the analyst is put to work in the analytic experience, necessarily transforming it (Dolar 1993). It is precisely toward the point of enigma that the analyst must direct the treatment. The treatment aims not to clarify how the present is obscured by the shadows of past love, but rather to confront the patient with the Real that is at stake: the desire of the Other. For Lacan, the desire of the Other is essentially enigmatic. A subject can to a certain extent frame the Other through Symbolic and Imaginary representations, but there always remains an unexplained remainder of the Other’s involvement in the subject. It is in this zone of interpretation that the subject makes a choice, through the fundamental fantasy, as to what it is that the Other wants. In hysteria, for instance, the subject fantasizes that he or she is what the Other is lacking. The fantasy is marked by an aspiration to complete the Other. The separation of transference and signifying repetition entails that transference is connected not to a determined point residing in the history of the subject, but rather to enigma. Whereas before, if one makes transference dependent on repetition, transference could be “deciphered,” reduced to its roots in the patient’s history, now it rests on an indeterminate encounter. Of course, both aspects are at play in analysis, but its structure is an alternation between determination and indeterminacy.

Lacan links this aspect of the tuchè to transference: “The relation of the Real that is to be found in the transference was expressed by Freud when he declared that nothing can be apprehended in effigie, in absentia—and yet is not the transference given to us as effigy and as relation to absence? We can succeed in unraveling this ambiguity of the reality involved in the transference only on the basis of the function of the real in repetition” (Lacan 1964, p. 54).

This very dense quote points to three possible figures of transference, with different implications for how the treatment is directed (Silvestre 1987). We will first discuss the analyst as effigy (Imaginary), then as a relation to absence (Symbolic) to conclude with the analyst as Real.

The original use of the term in effigie by Freud probably refers to the practice whereby a crude representation of someone is used as a focus for contempt or ridicule and often hanged or burnt in public. A contemporary example would be to burn a photograph of a political leader as a form of protest. If Freud states that it doesn’t suffice to destroy someone in effigy, we could translate this as meaning that it doesn’t suffice that the analyst is there merely in an Imaginary guise. Transference would then be a decoy, a situation where the analyst is but the support of the patient’s Imaginary projections, a pure illusion. However, if this were the case, it is hard to imagine how analysis could lead to modifications in symptoms or in the patient’s subjective position. This is akin to the Freudian version of transference, wherein analysis would, by implication, amount to the correction of a misattribution (“It’s not me you are angry at, but your mother/father/brother/sister/uncle . . .”). The corollary of this theoretical position would be the dark-clothed, silent analyst acting as a blank screen.

A second approach can be found in how Lacan interprets the presence of the analyst in seminar I. As discussed earlier, the presence of the analyst can be seen as that which substitutes for the unsaid when the associations stop, as we illustrated with the vignette about Jane. The moment that the presence of the analyst is actualized is meaningful: it indicates repression. The analyst’s presence is not the shadow of a former love, but a discursive phenomenon. Here the analyst tries to steer the patient away from associations regarding his person, by pointing to the signifiers used at moments the analyst is addressed as just another person. Thus the focus is on the text (the Symbolic) not the perception of the analyst (the Imaginary). This way, the patient can eventually completely articulate (in “full speech”) what was left out.

In these interpretations, the analyst is absent. He simply lends his persona to projections made by the patient. Further, to the extent he is present, it is but as an effigy, an image representing someone else. In both cases the analyst must somehow lose his identity if the work is to progress (either by untying a false connection or by attending to the signifier). Still, there is a third feasible approach to transference: “The analyst is neither an absence nor an effigy but a presence, a body, real” (Silvestre 1987, p. 59).

The implications of incorporating the Real in transference are manifold. We will outline how the real presence of the analyst points to the element of surprise (tuchè) in the analytic encounter. Clinically significant episodes in analysis are related to these contingent moments of interaction that can provoke important further analytic work. We will briefly compare the similar concept of “enactment” to the Lacanian approach to these moments.

Lacan’s work at the time of seminar XI anticipated a number of contemporary ideas and concerns about how the analyst becomes present in the course of the analytic process. First of all, it points to the importance of the here-and-now ⁹ manifestation of transference that is obviously implied by the term presence. Second, the analyst impacts the treatment through her presence, not solely through absenting herself as a person (Imaginary). Lacan expressed this in the phrase “desire of the analyst,” as opposed to the notion of countertransference.

The Real Analyst: A Strange And Clownish Character

From the perspective of Lacan in seminar XI, the analyst can become a real presence. It is a presence differing from the supposed subject of knowing (Symbolic) and the analyst as a person or a familiar mirror image (Imaginary). What is the nature of this presence?

As Real, transference manifests in its aspect of immediacy: it is the here and now of the encounter that is at the forefront, based on a contingent element. This contingency is made possible by the indeterminate, open atmosphere of the analytic session suggested by Lacan’s “gardez-vous de comprendre” or Bion’s call to “abandon memory and desire” ¹⁰ (Grotstein 2007, p. 2). The presence of the analyst as Real, from a Lacanian perspective, indeed refers to the ability of the transferential bond to introduce novelty. Poland (1992), similarly, describes how transference is “an original creation” (p. 189). He emphasizes how the past is shaped by the present, attesting to a special temporality in psychoanalysis.

The analyst as Real appears as an enigmatic presence. The analyst so construed manifests in the here and now, the immediate, with no possibility of being interpreted in terms of patterns or historical schemas. The presence of the analyst as Real is thus the point where the radical otherness of the Other becomes actualized. For Lacan, the Other is fundamentally unknowable. Confronting the Other’s radical otherness provokes anxiety, at times horror. This confrontation revolves around the question “What does the Other want from me?” The fundamental fantasy for Lacan is the unconscious interpretation of the desire of the Other, a defensive attempt to answer this question (Verhaeghe 2004). The Other can never be fully known, comprehended, or localized. The fundamental fantasy, for Lacan, serves the function of allowing us to nevertheless orient ourselves in relation to this Other.

The difference with Poland’s view, in which unconscious fantasy bridges past and present, is that from a Lacanian point of view the fantasy is constructed as an interpretation of a moment of tuchè that is in itself nonsensical. So even if we agree that the present shapes the past via the encounter with the analyst, this is based not on a latent point of determination (such as an unconscious fantasy), but rather on a structural point of indetermination (tuchè) that the work of analysis inevitably encounters. Both the actualization of the fundamental fantasy and the construction of an historical narrative are secondary to this encounter. For example, such fantasy is often actualized in how an obsessional patient treats free association: she meticulously keeps on talking in order to avoid surprising interventions by the analyst. From a Lacanian point of view, transference also carries an aspect that is pre- and posthistorical. The Real (analyst as tuchè) provokes both a defense and a further elaboration through the signifier, as the analyst destabilizes significations and incessantly provokes a restructuring of Symbolic and Imaginary material.

A moment in a treatment conducted by the second author (SV) exemplifies how this Real aspect of transference is actualized through a contingent encounter with an aspect of the analyst that does not fit the established (Symbolic and Imaginary) framework of transference. Ethel, a woman in her forties, decides to consult him after hearing one of his lectures. The beginning of the analysis reveals that this way of choosing her analyst is in line with an overall tendency to be infatuated with “knowledgeable people.” She has a deep regard for intellectuals. The transference is characterized by an idealization, based on signs indicating the analyst is knowledgeable (the lecture, his being a university professor and published author). Ethel is very much surprised that such an important person, as she perceives her analyst to be, even has the time to take her on as an analysand. However, one moment in the treatment shakes Ethel to the core. Upon showing Ethel out of his office, the analyst sees a spider on the doorstep and immediately crushes it with his foot. Ethel is flabbergasted and disgusted by this gesture. She cannot reconcile this aspect of the analyst with the image she has of him. Moreover, she entertains a deep respect for all life, and always asks her children to treat animals with kindness. She would first capture them before setting them free in the garden. The brutality the analyst manifests by his act is discordant both with her ideals and with her transferential “understanding” of him. This is the moment the analyst cannot be represented; he is literally unthinkable. In search of knowledge, she encounters death, destruction, and an opaque enjoyment. In subsequent sessions, she associates this moment with her husband, who for the first time is described as a “cruel man,” since he too kills spiders. This initiates a discourse about her marital problems, a topic that hadn’t been touched on before.

Ethel approaches the analyst through coordinates that can be understood (and to a certain extent disentangled) in the context of her life history, revolving around the signifier knowledgeable. Nevertheless, this aspect of transference can hinder the work of free association, inasmuch as a patient is too heavily attached to the image of the analyst as a respectable figure.

The crushing of the spider can hardly be considered a classical intervention, in that it was not intended to have an effect on the patient. Moreover, the analyst’s behavior is not verbal in nature. It is not a play on signifiers, a construction, or an interpretation. Nonetheless, its effects on the transference and the treatment process in general are profound. A contingent encounter with the analyst as Real destabilizes Symbolic and Imaginary constructions marked by a fixation on and infatuation with the image of the analyst and ideals of knowledge. This provokes a further elaboration of the unspeakable (rather than uncovering a hidden truth). The literature is rife with similar incidents in or around the cure that prove to be impactful. Poland (1992) provides an example in which he hands over the phone in a spur-of-the-moment fashion to a patient because he cannot understand what his Italian interlocutor on the other end is saying and he knows his patient to be fluent in Italian. This moment of complete contingence, or tuchè (Poland acknowledges the act was out of character for him) has a profound impact on the treatment.

We describe these events as contingent, or tuchè, because of the element of surprise (for patient and analyst alike) that characterizes them. Indeed, to systematically look for ways to anguish or upset patients would amount to sadism on the analyst’s side (it would suggest that some sort of libidinal satisfaction is operative in a systematic way of handling transference). From our perspective, these moments are not the acting out of unconscious meanings, but rather are pure contingencies that only later are inscribed in a narrative.

The unexpected that appears in this way can have an anguishing quality. However, it is also here that we would situate the analyst as a clownish character. If Lacan says “Don’t imitate me,” it points to moments and interventions on the analyst’s side that can’t be scripted in advance, nor can they be mirrored from another analyst as if they were ready-made techniques. Moreover, the analyst can thus provoke something new, from a more comical angle. This often leaves the analysand wondering about what kind of species the analyst is. Grotstein (2007) beautifully describes how Bion had a dry sense of humor, but was also a Zen master to him. He was in the dark about Bion’s intentions, but the strange interventions hit a spot: “Often when Bion spoke I did not understand much of what he was saying—and he said a lot—but I did seem to resonate with it preconsciously. It always had an effect” (p. 33).

If the analyst to a certain extent embodies what may be Real to a person—unpredictable, impossible, shocking—this allows the traumatic experience to be worked over within the transference (Laurent 2011; Strubbe and Vanheule 2014). This amounts to what we could somewhat paradoxically call a “therapeutic traumatization.” Of course, it is not the traumatization per se that is responsible for the therapeutic effects, but how the transference provides access to a different kind of material: namely, the way a subject responds to the Real. It is the Lacanian version of the transference neurosis: the actualization of the Real in treatment opens up the possibility of a reorganization of psychic material via the Symbolic and the Imaginary. ¹¹

The vignette above is similar to clinical moments described in the literature as “enactments” (Hirsch 1998). However, in contrast to enactments, their relevance does not necessarily derive from an unconscious reaction of the analyst to the patient. The Lacanian analyst will emphasize the opportunity this provides for the construction of a Symbolic framework to keep the Real at bay. The Lacanian analyst prompts the patient to “strive to put into words what he has never said before” (Fink 2007, p. 81). It is not assumed that the meaning of the event already exists (unconsciously) in the analyst.

The Desire Of The Analyst: The Real Motor

What does including the Real in transference imply for the handling of transference by the analyst? Lacan does not seek an answer to this question via the concept of countertransference, as many of his contemporaries had done (see, e.g., Lucia Tower, whose 1956 paper Lacan discusses admiringly in seminar X); rather, he puts the “desire of the analyst” at the forefront as a motor force in the treatment.

“Desire,” of course, is a central concept in Lacan’s work. To understand its role in transference, we have to look at the relational model that underpins the analytic encounter for Lacan. ¹² At the outset, desire was conceptualized as the desire for recognition (by the other). This implies that there exists a rapport between two desires, following the logic of intersubjectivity. However, from seminar VIII on, Lacan emphasized the disparity in transference. Transference entails asymmetry because of the supposed subject of knowing. Moreover, he radically rejected the idea of an inherent, prescribed relation between desiring beings. This leads to the idea, expressed throughout seminar XX, that “there is no sexual relation,” meaning that between two desiring beings there is no prescribed or natural harmony. We deal with the Other’s desire via the screen of the fundamental fantasy. This fantasy, largely unconscious, points to “the lasting relation that was originally constructed between the subject and the Other on the basis of repeated exchanges at the level of desire and lack” (Verhaeghe 2004, p. 227). Since there is no symmetrical rapport between desires, countertransference cannot be equated with the response to the patient’s transference, as if they were complementary. Renik (1993) and McLaughlin (1981) reject the term countertransference for similar reasons.

The desire of the analyst is first of all a desire that is related to analytic work per se. In that sense, for Lacanian analysts the desire of the analyst is a function incarnated in the analyst. It is not to be confused, however, with the analyst’s personal desires as they relate to the patient. In fact, inasmuch as these manifest themselves (vaguely as unease or in a more elaborated countertransference impasse), analysts resolve these in their own analysis or in control sessions (supervision). The desire of the analyst is sustained in relation to these spaces outside of the consulting room. This doesn’t mean that Lacanian analysts strive toward a posture of aloofness: they too experience anxiety, joy, excitement, interest, disgust, and other emotions vis-à-vis their analysands. However, these countertransferential affects and experiences are taken as a cue to work them through in the analyst’s analysis or control sessions. As such, countertransference is considered a potential obstacle to the continuation of the analysand’s work. That is why Lacan stated that the analyst should “pay with his person” (Lacan 1958, p. 490). Lacanian analysts will not express their experience with regard to their analysands, nor will they explain why they act and speak as they do. Fink (2007) considers this to be one of the reasons that Lacanian analysis will remain at odds with Anglo-Saxon inspired psychoanalysis. We believe that it is important to explore moments of surprise (or enactments) after they have taken place by inviting patients to elaborate on them. However, the analyst’s contribution will not be explored mutually with the patient but in a space outside the consulting room.

Wilson (2013) convincingly demonstrates how certain countertransferential impasses can be traced back to how the analyst’s desire for a particular experience of analytic progress is frustrated. To interpret the stalemate, one must resort to the analyst’s desire, as obviously the analyst’s presence in the consulting room attests his or her desire to engage in the analytic process. That the analyst operates with desire also means keeping a spirit of being open to surprise, of maximizing the possibility that the analytic hour is indeed an encounter. In that sense, the desire of the analyst is the principle that underwrites the possibility of an encounter with the Real within the framework of an analysis.

Transference must be understood as a complex relation between absence and presence. Wilson (2006) identifies “biases within our theory toward presence and plenitude” (p. 403). We could say the opposite is the case regarding the early Lacan, who mostly stressed how the analyst should avoid an Imaginary or “dual” relation (Wilson 2003) by incarnating an absence: not by providing meaning, nor by responding from the role the analyst is placed in, nor by abstinence, nor by being the “dummy” (Lacan 1958, p. 492). By avoiding the Imaginary, the analyst can be addressed as a representative of the Symbolic order (the Other). Nevertheless, testimonies like that of Jean Clavreul in the documentary Quartier Lacan (Weiss 2001) teach us how Lacan himself radically departed from a completely abstinent position: when Clavreul was at the psychiatric hospital, Lacan visited him often to continue the analysis. The desire of the analyst is manifest here: it is a desire for the analytic work to continue. It doesn’t suffice to merely assume the position of listener for this; often it requires a more active, even directive, intervention. To operate with desire thus refers to an active invitation and endurance on the part of the analyst. It also refers to the analyst’s ability to contain anxiety in the face of whatever horror the patient is struggling with. Roudinesco (1993) recounts how Lacan dared to take on patients who were manifestly suicidal, patients his contemporaries often refused to treat.

Presence in the case of mr. P

The case of Mr. P (Leuzinger-Bohleber 2015) illustrates how the Real in transference impacts treatment, regardless of the psychoanalytic school or current the analyst embraces. Moreover, the case exemplifies how dealing with the Real in transference strongly requires a desiring analyst, willing to encounter the horror that intrudes on this patient.

Leuzinger-Bohleber (2015) demonstrates the importance of “the reactivation of the trauma in the analytic relationship” (p. 96), accompanied by helplessness and anxiety in analytic work (with depressive patients who have a history of trauma) through the case of Mr. P, a man in his fifties who has been in intensive psychoanalytic treatment for several years. Leuzinger-Bohleber emphasizes the help a restored trust in the “helping object” might provide.

Mr. P comes to analysis after attempts at an array of treatment modalities. The author emphasizes an episode early in Mr. P’s life, a “severe separation trauma” at the age of four, when he was separated for a few weeks from his parents, with no contact whatever. Mr. P brings a series of complaints that do not represent a “classic psychoanalytic symptom.” What stands out, besides a chronically depressed mood, is the primordially real (in the Lacanian sense) nature of the symptomatology: pain in the body, an eating disorder, suicidal tendencies, and trouble sleeping. Mr. P seems to function in a mode of permanent crisis, attesting the overwhelming presence of the Real in his functioning and the lack of Symbolic and Imaginary means to counter them. Leuzinger-Bohleber reports that Mr. P dreams about “a badly injured man lying by the side of the road—his intestines are hanging out and everything is drenched [in] blood” (p. 612). The man in the dream is in a helpless situation, saying “Why is nobody coming to my aid?” Eventually, “a woman hands him the lid of a cooking pot—which he is meant to place over the wound.” The dream is connected to “the danger of a re-traumatization in the analytic relationship” (p. 625). The dream undoubtedly expresses a quality of anxiety (Real). However, it also shows an interesting attempt at treating the fragmenting of the body via an object (the cooking lid) offered by “the woman.” We interpret this dream as an expression of how through transference (the woman in the dream referring to the female analyst) Mr. P is able to treat the Real threat posed by the disintegration of the body. The lid is an element that covers up what is all too present here (intestines / the inner body). In a more classical analytic setting, symbolic formations (e.g., dreams) would be deciphered. But in this case it is not so much the appeal to signification or meaning that is at the forefront of the analytic process. This is evident from the way this patient handles interpretations: “When, after five months of treatment,” the analyst reports, “I cautiously indicated a likeness between his unbearable chronic widespread pain and his life-threatening illness in the home, Mr. P fiercely dismissed this with the words: ‘Now, don’t you start with this nonsense. Even previous therapists would repeatedly try to palm me off with the idea that the depression had something to do with the stay at the home. This is just absurd’” (p. 625).

Mr. P insists that his symptoms have a physical cause and subjects himself to numerous medical examinations. When the analyst offers Mr. P an interpretation in which she connects the symptom with an aspect of Mr. P’s life history, he rejects any possible link between the two. It does not at all provoke a symbolic elaboration, as he turns to an intensified appeal to medical discourse as a frame of reference to understand his complaints. This phase of treatment seems to have been marked by sustained attempts at constructing a representation of the body in the transference, rather than providing insight or exploring meaning. The Real that manifests in the analytic process is in our view generic and central to all analytic work.

Mr. P’s analyst struggled to come to terms with the difficulties posed by the treatment: “the processing of the traumatization, by contrast, confronted . . . the analysand as well as the analyst with the limits of the bearable” (p. 626). The following fragment nevertheless shows how it is the desire of the analyst to work with this patient, demonstrated by the phone calls she made (representing a departure from the classical analytic frame), that gets the treatment going again:

In the third year of treatment, Mr. P reacted intensely to the separation from the analyst. During a holiday break, he underwent a disputed medical operation (an operation on his nose), without discussing this with me. Following the operation, he found himself in a terrible state, and he was unable to work for the following two months due to massive headaches and chronic widespread pain, threatening circulatory failure and panic. He also cancelled the analytic sessions after the operation by email without giving any details or reason. Finally, I became concerned at such long interruptions; I decided to call him and thus found out about his serious physical and psychic state. Through several crisis intervention discussions via telephone, I was finally able to help him to emerge from the “black hole” [p. 626].

This moment in the treatment is explained by the author as Mr. P’s “directly acting out his early experience of separation” (p. 626). Even though it is beyond doubt that Mr. P can’t rely on the Other (concrete other / Symbolic means) in certain moments of distress, it is not so much an absence in front of him as an excess localized in the body. Yet through the phone calls the analyst enters the scene again, makes herself present, thus opening up a space for analytic work via desire. It is precisely through her active presence that the crisis and the experience of excess can be limited and elaborated symbolically. It is indeed a very existential question that is being played out in transference: “Does the Other want to lose me?” Be that as it may, we believe that the analysis gets under way again because the analyst, through her actions, answers at the level of desire: I do want to work with you. This understanding of the case puts less emphasis on the element of repetition in transference (playing out the experience of separation).

Discussion

We have discussed how transference constitutes the “navel of the treatment.” Much as Freud (1900) describes how the interpretation of dreams runs up against a point where the different dream-thoughts can no longer be analyzed, “the spot where it reaches down into the unknown” (p. 525), transference in its Real dimension is the moment the associative work is halted and the analyst appears as real. Analogous to the dream interpretation, this moment presents an aspect of the analytic relation that can’t be analyzed in the classical sense (reducing manifest content to latent thoughts). It presents the analyst as an “unknown.” In Lacanian terms, it is no longer a question of finding the roots in the Symbolic of how the analyst is perceived on the Imaginary plane at this point. The unknown is much more radical: the appearance of the analyst shatters the habitual frames the patient adopts to understand others and oneself. The aspect of the Real in transference is reminiscent of Freud’s discussion (1920) of the repetition compulsion in treatment: “But we now come to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed” (p. 20). Analysts thus serve a function beyond partners in the process of meaning making. Rather, they help to discover the non-sense and contingence at the heart of meaning and to find a way of dealing with this non-sense. In order to reach this, the analyst has to be included in the suffering. We wholly concur with Bird (1972), who advocates that analysis needs to evoke the development of a “transference neurosis.” This prevents analysis being reduced to “an exploratory art” (p. 280). Transference neurosis, from a Lacanian viewpoint, is the actualization of the unknown, of chance, of non-sense. This necessitates endurance on the side of both analyst and analysand.

The case of Mr. P exemplifies how psychoanalytic work involves different registers of psychic functioning. The case illustrates that the Real in transference is generic, in that it occurs independently of the theoretical current the analyst adheres to. How it occurs, however, is highly singular and depends on each specific encounter between an analyst and a patient. Mr. P starts analysis after a trajectory marked by the inability of different caregivers to address his many symptoms. This is hardly an uncommon starting point, as many analysts are familiar with receiving “hard cases,” where therapeutic means seem exhausted. Moreover, what is striking about this case is the predominance of corporeal elements, in the patient’s complaints, as well as in what he perceives to be a solution. Mr. P suffers from sleep disorders, facial neurodermatitis, unbearable pain in his entire body, and eating problems. Both before and during the analysis, Mr. P often expects the answers to his bodily disturbances to reside in medical discourse, eventually leading to an “acting out”: an operation. What is more: he turns to analysis only because his application for a retirement pension gets turned down. The case is marked by an acute sense of helplessness and demoralization. The excessive presence of anxiety-related symptomatology contrasts heavily with an almost complete absence of the Other. The author understands this from an historical perspective (the separation at an early age), as an event with an historical truth. From a Lacanian perspective, anxiety is interpreted as a “lack of lack” (Strubbe and Vanheule 2014, p. 244). The Symbolic is seen as the dimension instituting lack, against the overwhelming presence of the Real. It is not so much the historical events as the inability to regulate distress via the Symbolic that we perceive to be at the root of Mr. P’s suffering.

Interestingly, in the course of his analysis, this also seems to creep up on the analyst, demonstrating how sustaining an analytic position requires psychic endurance. The excess of free-floating anxiety is central to the suffering of this analysand. What Leuzinger-Bohleber calls embodiment summarizes much of the effects of the analysis: Mr. P is able to connect a part of his life history to the body via transference. The framework of analysis provides a means to elaborate the Real elements of suffering. This requires an active position in the treatment, where the analyst is “a friend of crisis” (Caroz 2015, p. 158). The desire of the analyst is operative here in terms of the determination to start and continue the analytic process. The analyst expresses this through the frequency of the treatment. Mr. P had been in different kinds of psychotherapy (and was prescribed various medications), leaving his symptoms largely unaffected. We believe that it is precisely the more laborious process an analysis requires in terms of frequency that allowed the effects of Mr. P’s analysis. We have also pointed to the intervention of phoning Mr. P after a prolonged absence as a manifestation of the desire of the analyst to keep the analytic process going with this patient.

Despite their similarity in terms of the actualization of the Real presence of the analyst, the cases of Mr. P and Ethel are different in terms of how transference develops. In Ethel’s case, the Imaginary dimension is very present at the outset of the treatment. To a certain extent, this leads to a Symbolic elaboration of Ethel’s fascination with knowledge. The moment the killing of the spider happens, this framework is shattered. We could hardly turn this intervention into a rule (“in case of stagnation due to excessively positive transference, kill insects”). In that sense, the case also demonstrates how contingent aspects of the encounter always play a role in the process of analysis. The case of Mr. P is much more complex in terms of the interplay between Real and Symbolic material. After a few months of treatment, the excessive presence of the Real is interwoven with the Symbolic through dream material. However, the analytic work is repeatedly interrupted by irruptions of emergencies, of crisis, forcing the analyst to intervene with desire, not interpretation. Whereas the Real startles, shocks, and immobilizes, analysis provides the means to symbolically elaborate these moments in treatment. The moments where the patient stumbles upon the Real are precisely opportunities to construct a different way of treating the Real.

The Lacanian approach to transference is similar to other modern perspectives in which the actuality of transference is emphasized. Incorporating the Real in transference means that the immediacy of the analytic encounter is of prime importance in the analytic process. Analysis revolves around the development of a transference neurosis (Verhaeghe 2004; Bird 1972). Without it, analysis would be reduced to a mere hermeneutic practice, an endless play on words, with no visceral impact. Nevertheless, from a Lacanian perspective, the transference neurosis is constituted by an encounter with the oddity of the analyst. So metaphors of the analyst either as a surgeon or as a surfer or skier (Renik 1993) fail to adequately grasp the Lacanian analyst’s position. That is why we propose the analyst as a clown as one incarnation of this Real presence: an odd and provoking figure.

The Lacanian analyst supports the analytic process through his or her desire. This desire is an integral part of treatment, not an interfering factor (Kirshner 2012). The analyst’s desire entails an endurance that is sustained through a personal analysis, regular supervision, and other forms of collegial reflection on the analytic work. Leuzinger-Bohleber describes how she was able to maintain an analytic position through regular supervision. Analytic work is then always articulated in a triadic structure between analyst, patient, and these spaces outside the dyad. Lacanian analysts do not interpret transference, nor will they disclose their thoughts, feelings, or associations regarding the analysand. Countertransference, if pervasive, is examined in supervision or analysis, so as to avoid Imaginary stalemates. Inasmuch as certain emotions or experiences regarding the patient are hindering the progress of the analytic process, they are probably more focused on the person of the analyst than on the work of analysis. The analyst’s desire is manifest as a sustained invitation to let the work continue.

Considering transference from the perspective of the Lacanian triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real opens up interesting avenues for intervention. Attention to the Real in treatment, however, does not exclude the work of searching for unconscious knowledge. It merely highlights the treatment as a dialectical interplay between a Real destabilization and a Symbolic working through of this real event. However, the early sessions of analysis are aimed at getting the flow of associations going. This evidently entails a (re)construction of a subject’s history in relation to his or her suffering, as well as an attention for the specific signifiers that mark a subject’s history. This work of symbolization and amplification (Miller 1997–1998) of meaning provides the context of an encounter with the Real. The navel of the treatment is relevant only in the context of the associative context that supports its emergence. Neither process can be considered in isolation. Insight, understanding, and personal experiences of love, hatred, and fascination (in short, the Imaginary) are necessarily present in every analytic context. However, from a Lacanian perspective, these Imaginary phenomena do not orient the analytic process.

We believe that a Lacanian perspective on transference can enrich the understanding of the process of transference. Moreover, we hope to stimulate dialogue between the various approaches.