The Psychoanalytic Act, Book XV

This Seminar is a turning point. It deals with a single question, to which hitherto Lacan had never responded unless obliquely: 'what is an analyst?' His reply is that an analyst is an analysand (a word which Lacan introduces to replace the term 'being analysed') who has seen the analytic experience through to its end. What is this ideal end? To find out, one needs to articulate the logic of the pathway though an analysis. At its beginning, there is an unprecedented desire, which presupposes a breach, that is to say an act, in the manner of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. This act is the analysand's act, but the psychoanalytic act in the strict sense is performed by the psychoanalyst by opening up the field of 'subject supposed to know' to the analysand, in which the unconscious is deciphered. At the end, the s. s. k dissolves, while the analyst, its support, is evacuated as the discard of the operation, like Oedipus ending his life with his eyes gouged out. The analysand, now analysed, takes over as analyst. But why, when he now knows what lies in store for him? A few lessons are devoted to the logic of quantification, which Lacan starts to explore and which will later develop into his theory of sexuation. The unforeseen conclusion sees Lacan commenting in the heat of the moment on the events of May '68, which were coeval with the end of the Seminar. Jacques-Alain Miller