In an attempt to account for the end (the goal, the direction) of the psychoanalytic treatment, Jacques Lacan has formulated quite a few principles and ideas over the course of his seminars and writings. Amongst these principles, the notion of the ‘traversal of the fantasy’ has come to occupy a priviliged position, despite the fact that it is effectively a hapax in Lacan’s works. This paper offers a succinct study of an alternative principle, which is rarely recognised in the context of discussions on the end of analysis, notably the principle of the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ). The study of this principle generates the thesis that the end of analysis may be conceptualised as the analysis of the end, which constitutes the point where knowledge becomes ignorance, and the point where the symbolic order becomes ‘de-phallicised’. In the discourse of the analyst, the analysis of the end re-appears in the place of the product, where the master signifier symbolises the function of loss. For the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, this implies that a knowledge in the place of truth can only be maintained as a gay science, in the Nietzschean sense of a poetic, joyful and amusing knowledge.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
Institutional Psychotherapy
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing