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From the Mirages of Knowing to the Docta Ignorantia, a reading of “Variantes de la cure-type”

by | Vol 19 (4) 2001

This article offers a close reading of Lacan’s text “Variantes de la cure-type”. Starting from the notion of deviation implicit in the title of this work, it is situated in the context of the institutional crises that marked the history of psychoanalysis in France in the period between 1953 and 1964. A second step dismantles the question of variations on the standard-cure as a pleonasm. In an attempt to avoid the aporia this implies, Lacan recenters the question around the position of the analyst in the field that founds itself in the relation of the subject to speech. The notion of narcissism as a function of the death drive and as the basis of knowledge is then introduced. Where common knowledge functions as a shield, a symptomatic manifestation of our own passion for ignorance, it has to be concluded that in the formation of the analyst a changed relation to knowledge holds a central place, a relation that permits the analyst to find his standard in a docta ignorantia.

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