Lacan Society

Two Psychoanalytic Positions

“Two opposing passages characterize the analytic process: the one from possibility to necessity, and the one from impossibility to contingency. At the level of transference, the analyst operates as the “subject supposed to know,” this is the illusory Other place at which everything is always-already written, at which the (unconscious) meaning of all symptoms is always-already fixed. This figure of the analyst stands for the Unconscious in the atemporal dimension, for the Unconscious which, as Freud put it, knows of no time …..  This aspect of the figure of the analyst, however, has to be supplemented by its opposite: the analyst’s interpretive intervention also stand for the element of surprise, of the intrusion of the Real; the passage here is from impossibility to contingency, that is, what appeared impossible, what did not belong to the domain of possibilities, all of the sudden — contingently — takes place, and thus transforms the coordinates of the entire field.” (Zizek, Parallax View 77)

Psychoanalytic transference is the process from migration but that is more a structural shift which movement is more significant than geopolitical relocation, a kind of shift that may be more than the shift in the “parallax view”. The shift in position is a relocation that the subject may suddenly encounter oneself as an inversion of the person of the analyst. This shift is from possibility to necessity in Zizekan language, but it seems better say as the shift from  immanence to transcendence. The immanence is more the status of inclusivity being embodied within itself. The inclusivity is illusory (imaginary)  and it is also the subjective position of the taking the analyst as the subject supposed to know”.  The position is like a kind of excursion toward the inwardness.

Until the intervention of the analyst, the subject ventures into the realm of representation. Within the linguistic world of symbolic, the divinity of logo has made its possible to go beyond the embodiment of the imaginary. This is how we go into a process of in-between, an atemporal situation that time is not the conceptual framework for one to understand his own subjectivity. While time is not conceptualized, subject’s decision to get back to his own primal scene become possible.  This decision is a kind of non conceptual mind directivity (i.e. the kind of unconsciousness impulse) that keeps drives the subject back to the original scene of his own subjectivity.  It repeats and returns to the same situation as it happened before. This is the passage from possibility to necessity (also an obessional tendency) – what at first looks like a mere possibility, an accidental occurrence which also may not have happened, is retroactively transformed into something that was predestined to happen from all eternity… (This position, of course, is based on a retroactive illusion, on misrecognizing its own performative dimension: the “eternal” meaning discovered by the patient is constructed in the very process of its discovery.)