This essay first appeared in Turkish. The English version is my own. Lacan is cited in the French originals.

Le psychanalyste ne s’autorise que de lui-même.

Jacques Lacan, “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École”

I

The institutional history of psychoanalysis turns largely around one question: who is an analyst, and who says so? The International Psychoanalytical Association founded after Freud answered it with a training system: personal analysis for a set period, casework under supervision, institutional approval. Lacan’s first split in 1953 and his removal from the list of training analysts in 1963 were largely the outcome of a conflict with this system, in particular over the standard length of sessions. When he founded his own school, the École freudienne de Paris, in 1964, Lacan had to answer the same question again, and from within his own theory.

He gave his answer on 9 October 1967, in a proposal put to the members of his school. Its most quoted sentence is this essay’s epigraph: the psychoanalyst derives his authorisation only from himself.1 At first hearing the sentence sounds like a rejection of all institutional approval, a declaration of self-appointment. But what Lacan says is subtler: the decision to be an analyst is a conclusion a subject draws from his own analysis, and no institution can make it in his place. What the institution can do is bear witness to how the decision was made, recognise it after the fact. The procedure the proposal put forward, the pass (la passe), was designed precisely for this witnessing.

The pass, as Lacan set it up, works as follows. An analysand who considers that the passage to analyst has taken place in his own analysis asks the school to bear witness to it. He speaks separately with two “passers”, passeurs, themselves close to the end of their analyses, and tells them how his analysis ended, where his decision to become an analyst came from. The passers convey what they heard to a jury that never sees the candidate. From these relayed testimonies the jury decides whether the candidate’s passage to analyst has taken place. The strangeness of the procedure lies in the fact that the outcome of an analysis is conveyed indirectly, through a chain of transmission, in the words not of the one who lived it but of others who listened to him. Lacan thought of this indirection not as a shortcoming but as the essence of the procedure: what changes at the end of an analysis is the subject’s relation to knowledge, and that change shows itself only in how a speech is heard by others.

II

The proposal set off a crisis in the school. Some of Lacan’s closest colleagues, Piera Aulagnier, François Perrier and Jean-Paul Valabrega, opposed the procedure; when it was voted through in 1969 they left the school and founded their own association, the Quatrième Groupe.2 The fifteenth seminar, L’acte psychanalytique, began in November 1967, in the middle of this crisis. The seminar’s theoretical question and the school’s institutional problem were the same: how does an analysand become an analyst?

Lacan’s answer is knotted in the concept in the seminar’s title, the act. The publisher’s presentation of the seminar sums up his answer briefly: an analyst is an analysand who has carried the analytic experience through to its end.3 Within this answer lies a small but decisive change of term. For the person who enters analysis, Lacan uses not “the analysed”, analysé, but “the one analysing”, analysant. The shift from a passive to an active participle is a thesis about who does the real work of analysis: it is not the analyst who analyses, but the analysand, who speaks, associates and learns to listen to his own speech. The English “analysand”, which has become standard, carries the same choice.

The act, in the sense Lacan gives it, is not a behaviour or an action. Early in the seminar Lacan recalls that psychoanalytic experience requires both analysand and analyst to abstain from every passage to action, to do nothing outside speech. But within this abstention there is an act. Lacan likens it to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon: the crossing of a boundary, a decision from which there is no going back. An analysis begins when a new desire, the desire to enter analysis, requires such a crossing. But the properly psychoanalytic act, for Lacan, is the analyst’s: the act that makes analysis possible, that opens the field of the subject supposed to know.

III

The subject supposed to know is the concept at the centre of Lacan’s theory of transference. The analysand comes to analysis supposing someone who knows the meaning of his suffering, the cause of his symptom, the secret of his desire. This supposition rests not on something the analyst really knows but on the analysand’s transference; and it is this supposition that makes analysis work. The analyst is the one who agrees to occupy the place of this supposition without filling it, without pretending to carry its knowledge. What Lacan stresses in this seminar is that this place has an end.

At the end of the analysis, for Lacan, the subject supposed to know vanishes. The analysand realises that the analyst was never the owner of his truth, that the knowledge he was seeking has no guarantee in the Other. This realisation brings about a fall in the analyst’s position. In the image the publisher’s presentation relays, the analyst is cast aside as the residue of the operation, as waste, like Oedipus blinding himself; and the former analysand takes over the analyst’s role. In the proposal and in the seminar Lacan calls this fall a “dis-being”, désêtre, of the subject supposed to know. At the end of the analysis the analyst accepts that he has held not his own being but the place of an objet a, of the cause of desire, and that he falls from that place.

The theoretical consequence of this fall is striking. For an analysand to become an analyst is not to take his own analyst’s place, to inherit his knowledge, to identify with him; it is, on the contrary, to assume through his own act the place from which the analyst fell, the place of a residue. To be an analyst is to agree to take, for someone else, within his transference, the place of the subject supposed to know, and to do so knowing that one will fall from this place as a residue in the end. What Lacan wanted the pass to bear witness to is where this agreement comes from: why does a person who, at the end of his analysis, has seen a figure fall into the place of a residue, desire to take the same place for someone else? Lacan gave this desire a name: the desire of the analyst.

IV

The seminar’s last lessons were interrupted by an event Lacan had not planned. From April 1968 the student movement began to affect the running of the seminar; in May the streets of Paris filled with barricades. In solidarity with the student movement, Lacan followed the strike call of the national union of higher education teachers and cancelled some of his lessons; in the very short lesson of 8 May he declared his solidarity with the strike. In the lesson of 15 May he said that what was at stake was being equal to the events.4

Lacan’s attitude to these events would harden in the following years into a sharp formula. In December 1969, at the new university of Vincennes, he told the students heckling him: what you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master; you will have one.5 As Roudinesco also stresses, the first form of this thought is found in the last lessons of the fifteenth seminar: revolution is an impasse that puts one master in the place of another, and for Lacan only psychoanalysis can escape this vicious circle. Here too lies a paradox of the seminar. For a year Lacan had discussed the relation between master and pupil, analyst and analysand, how a pupil can take his master’s place; in the street, meanwhile, students were revolting against the kind of authority he represented, the authority of professors. The following year’s seminar would set out for the first time, systematically, the theory of the four discourses, the master’s discourse and the university discourse.

V

The publication of the seminar in 2024 also offered a current example of the problem discussed in the essay “The Established Text” on this site. In her review in Le Monde, Roudinesco criticised the absence from Miller’s established text of two lessons, that of 31 January 1968, in which Lacan’s pupils discussed his teaching in his absence, and that of 8 May, in which solidarity with the strike was declared; she also criticised the removal from the transcription of the names of some twenty participants, among them Félix Guattari, Jean Oury, François Tosquelles, Xavier Audouard and Jean Ayme. For Roudinesco this choice is regrettable, since these interventions show how Lacan developed his concepts in dialogue with his supporters.

Beyond an editorial dispute, this criticism bears directly on the seminar’s own subject. A seminar is not a lectern from which Lacan speaks alone, but a stage on which a community of listeners is present: pupils, colleagues, representatives of the tradition of institutional psychotherapy who were thinking the institutional transformation of psychiatry together with Lacan’s teaching, clinicians from Saint-Alban and La Borde. In a seminar on the analyst’s act, on the analysand’s becoming an analyst, removing the voices that answer Lacan’s speech from the text is a decision about the transmission of the teaching. The reader should know of this decision, and keep in mind that beside the established text there exist the stenography and the texts that carry the voices of the listeners.

VI

The pass itself did not produce the expected results in Lacan’s lifetime. At the school’s congress held in Deauville in January 1978, after listening to testimonies on the experience of the pass, Lacan said in his closing remarks that the pass was a complete failure.6 Two years later he dissolved his school. But the pass lived on in most of the schools founded after Lacan. Today the procedure continues in the schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and in other Lacanian institutions, and the testimonies of those recognised as “analysts of the school” are published and read at congresses. Seen in this light, Lacan’s declaration of failure can also be read not as the end of the procedure but as an acknowledgement that it is an experiment that must constantly be questioned anew.

What the fifteenth seminar tells us today is perhaps this: the training of a psychoanalyst is not the completion of a curriculum, the obtaining of a certificate, the filling of a quota of hours. All of these may be necessary; but what makes someone an analyst is having lived, at the end of his own analysis, the fall of the subject supposed to know, and desiring, despite this fall, to take that place for someone else. In an age in which psychotherapy is increasingly standardised, tied to protocols and measurable outcomes, Lacan’s thesis keeps open one of the most uncomfortable and most necessary questions about how the profession is transmitted: if an analyst’s authority is born of an act no institution can confer, how can institutions bear witness to that act?

Notes

  1. J. Lacan, “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École”, first published in Scilicet, 1, 1968; Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001, pp. 243 ff. In 1974, in the twenty-first seminar, Lacan would complete the formula: “and from some others”. ↩︎
  2. On the adoption of the pass by vote at the École freudienne in 1969 and the founding of the Quatrième Groupe, see E. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, Paris: Seuil, 1986; and E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée, Paris: Fayard, 1993. ↩︎
  3. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique (1967–1968), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2024. The publisher’s presentation stresses that in this seminar Lacan uses the term analysant (the one analysing) in place of analysé (the one analysed). On the Turkish pages of this site the word analizan is the Turkish form of this term. The English translation, by A. R. Price, has been announced by Polity as The Psychoanalytic Act. ↩︎
  4. On the May 1968 lessons of the seminar, see C. Ruby, “Lacan et le statut du psychanalyste”, Nonfiction.fr, 24 January 2024; and E. Roudinesco’s review of the publication of the seminar in Le Monde, 12 February 2024. Ruby also reports that in those days Lacan jokingly cited a cobblestone, a pavé, as an example of the objet a. ↩︎
  5. Lacan’s talk at Vincennes on 3 December 1969 was published under the title “Analyticon” in the appendix to the seventeenth seminar, L’envers de la psychanalyse (ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1991): “Ce à quoi vous aspirez comme révolutionnaires, c’est à un maître. Vous l’aurez.” ↩︎
  6. J. Lacan, closing address at the congress of the École freudienne in Deauville, January 1978, Lettres de l’École freudienne, 23, 1978. Lacan says in it that he had expected testimonies on how the pass was working and had not heard them. ↩︎

References

  • Lacan, J. (1968). Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École. Scilicet, 1.
  • Lacan, J. (1978). Intervention de clôture aux Assises de l’École freudienne de Paris, Deauville. Lettres de l’École freudienne, 23.
  • Lacan, J. (1991). Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (1969–1970). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2001). Autres écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2024). Le Séminaire, Livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique (1967–1968). Seuil.
  • Roudinesco, E. (1986). Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Vol. 2). Seuil.
  • Roudinesco, E. (1993). Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée. Fayard.
  • Roudinesco, E. (2024, February 12). [Review of Lacan, L’acte psychanalytique]. Le Monde.
  • Ruby, C. (2024, January 24). Lacan et le statut du psychanalyste. Nonfiction.fr.