The Act of the Writing and the Times in the Analyst’s Training

FLESLER Alba

In the issue of the end of analysis, Lacan does not propose us a return to Freud but an advance. As from the alive stone of the Freudian castration he opens a furrow towards investigation .

With the pass device, a bet to question the logic included in the passage from the analysand’s position to that of the analyst is done.

As proper of a strict analytical logic, the position of the analyst remains hold to the necessary production of a "pas", passage from the analysand to the analyst which inevitably includes the experience of one’s own analysis.

This logic does not allow excuses for any kind of bureaucratism: the analyst is a product. If he authorizes him from himself it is not because he has been able to put together his ego perspective but because he has proved the deep flavor of his most extreme division. Something not so easy to accept for the human structure, in front of the "dystychia" that makes it difficult for him to connect with the Real.

In this way, can this passage from analysand to analyst, be definite? If this were the case, what did Lacan aim at, nevertheless, when saying "I spend all the time passing the pass"? A return to endless analysis?

Freud had already warn that an analyst could only guide the treatment of his patients up to the threshold of his own analysis.

With his mathemes, Lacan showed in act the value that writing reaches to advance as far as the limits of the real: the impossible is defined then as that which does not cease of not writing.

From the castration, alive stone, to the castration of the Other, border limit, the end of the analysis and "la passe", for Lacan, they are a bet to the writing of the impossible which does not cease of not writing.

If the analyst is at least two, according to Lacan’s aphorism, the one who carries out his practice and the one who reflects on it, how does an analyst train for the practice of psychoanalysis? How does he learn this practice?

Basically doing his own analysis, going through the experience of an analyst as analysand. Why? Because in it one apprehends what can not be learned in the books: the experience of the unconscious which implies the division of the subject and his relation to the jouissance.

For this reason, the first step in the training of an analyst is to have real trust on the unconscious, certainty of the unconscious which is only obtained in the passage throughout the experience of analysis.

In a different way from other clinics, that one of psychoanalysis can not be apprehended by observing. The analyst, is part, he himself of the real experience, not an outside element which observes an experience per se. The psychoanalysis as an experience of the discourse becomes such considering that the subject and the other, whom the discourse is addressed to, are linked to the structure of the discourse itself. Due to this the analyst does not graduate with a degree, he trains himself.

Habitually, even in different geographic areas, the young people start their clinical practice when graduating from university. Generally, everybody agrees to the consensus of not taking patients up to "graduation", up to the moment they receive their "degree". By this time, some of them have already started their own analysis and their study groups and it is then that they add, together with the patients, the practice of the control.

But what happens in between this time in which the certificate authorizes the practice and that one in which the analyst authorizes him from himself?

I will place some coordinates over a matter of principles, a matter referred to what I will call the times in the authorization of the analyst, considering the fact that the psychoanalytic trainees start such practice before having concluded their analysis.

If the first step in the training is one’s own analysis, guaranteeing the Freudian tripod for the analyst training, when is the analyst trained?

It is possible to answer that although the analysis ends, the analyst training is endless. There is an end of the analysis but there is not an end for the training. The analyst’s training is always to be confirmed. The analyst confirms himself, each time he carries out his function, each time he holds the analyst’s wish, each time he endures the analytic act. Each time the "degree", us a title, moves away and the knowledge of the profession becomes craftmanship which allows to celebrate the analysis.

Some years ago, in the Event organized by the Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires in the year 87, I proposed to knot the three mentioned, own analysis, seminar and control to a fourth one: the writing. Its function: to place the limit, to write the lack. To locate the obstacle, to the real limit in the training, to the limit in the three. The three knotted ones will only find a borromean efficiency in the hole that the writing, as a fourth one, will be able to circumscribe.

An obstacle which is not an imaginary limit belonging to a logic of wholeness that believes to reach the whole if it skips such a limit. The placement to which writing refers, as act, is to place the real limit, impossible, which makes of the lack the occasion for a further step. The passage which turns the impossible task of the analyst into a performable act. Taking into consideration the previous times as well as those following the experience of the end of the analysis.

It is in this direction that I understand Lacan’s sentence "I spend all the time passing the pass".

I have been guiding, for the last fifteen years, an experience with training groups of analysts about The Writings of the Clinic. In that moment an initial experience, today it is possible to explicit the logic of its efficiency. It deals with the aptness of the act of writing to act on the times of the analyst’s authorization. A writing which is an act of reading too.

Which is the structure of a text of the clinics?

In the text of the clinics it is possible to place a material, a function and an objective.

The material of a text of the clinics is in the letter of the analysand. It permits to summarize by its border, a real of the clinic, an act which makes of the limit an occasion for movement. The reading of the texts in the group is aimed at marking the limits of the obstacles in the material the analyst wrote. As many as those that the case shows due to structure itself, or those which appear in the direction of the treatment for the analyst. This reading is focused locating that real which the clinics shows, restricting itself to the material of the letter summarized by the analyst from the discourse of the analysand.

Right now, even though they will be defined in another text, the places which the members of the group in charge of the writing and the reading have, are necessarily different from the one the person guiding the experience has.

In a first moment of writing, the retelling, whose modality near to the act of talking always invites to a further work, appears. The text as a second time of writing claims for a top, a punctuation, a point of limit to the jouissance of the word.

In turn, the function of the text must be that of transmitting that real, making it pass through, when delimiting it. Finally, its objective is aimed at making the psychoanalysis progress, at giving a further step into investigation, never at going backwards in front of the real.

As from the pass device, thought of with the object of going forward on the investigation over the end of analysis, it is possible to expand the interest for a device which acts on the times of the analyst’s authorization.

Since, although the analyst in order "to authorize him from himself", does not show certificates of his training, he does have to give, instead, a proof of that. In this direction, his authorization is legitimated far from the ideal of autonomy which leaves back the testimony of lonely ostracism.