Granted, not all the work in analysis falls within the Discourse of the Analyst. At times, other ways of relating may be required to preserve the analysis, including the holding provided by imaginary relating for a traumatised patient who is fragmented and actively dissociated, or a more robust position to protect the analytic frame from aggressive attacks or the unmanageable effects of a symptom. The clarity and formalisation of the Four Discourses should not imply a purist or instrumental approach to clinical technique. However, it does offer an opportunity to consider whether or not suggested incidents of excess, suggestion and gratification are as they appear, and allows us to understand when a theoretical analytic position places a demand on the analyst to occupy simultaneously two conflictual discursive positions and the effect of that in terms of analytic excess. Even if one is not inclined to adopt the Lacanian emphasis on the signifier, the Discourse of the Analyst provides a useful model for the positioning of Knowledge and Desire. A positioning on the side of elaboration and enlargement, mindful of the fact the same speech/act may be neutral or abstinent in respect of the structure one analysand but not in respect of another.
We finish with a vignette recounted in an interview that forms part of Gérard Miller’s film ‘Rendez-vous chez Lacan’, a video excerpt of which can be seen at http://www.Lacanonline.com/index/2012/08/a-story-from-Lacans-practice, together with a discussion by Owen Hewitson, (Hewitson, 2012). Interestingly, in this vignette, the intervention is made through touch rather than speech. Suzanne Hommel recounts an episode from her analysis with Lacan in 1974, in which she describes her traumatic childhood experience of the Gestapo in wartime France.
Suzanne Hommel: One day, in a session, I was telling Lacan about a dream I had, and I told him, ‘I wake up every morning at 5 o’clock’, and I added ‘It’s at 5 o’clock that the Gestapo came to get the Jews in their houses’. At that moment, Lacan jumped up from his chair, came towards me, and gave me an extremely gentle caress on my cheek. I understood it as ‘geste à peau’, the gesture…
Gerard Miller: He had transformed the ‘Gestapo’ into ‘geste à peau’…
(N.B. In French, the signifiers ‘Gestapo’ and ‘geste à peau’ are pronounced almost identically).
Suzanne Hommel: A very tender gesture, it has to be said – an extraordinarily tender gesture, and that surprise, it didn’t diminish the pain but made it something else. The proof now, 40 years later, when I recall that gesture, I can still feel it on my cheek. It was a gesture as well which was an appeal to humanity, something like that…
This exchange could be misread as an example of the analyst moving into the imaginary dual relationship, when they should remain ‘out of it’. In fact, there is no staying out of the imaginary – as portrayed by the Borromean knot in Lacan’s Seminar XXII, ‘RSI’. (That seminar was being conducted the same year as this clinical work). The point is not to move from one register to another – all three are always and necessarily in play. Rather, what is important is that it is a shift within the symbolic that provides the fulcrum of change for the neurotic subject. Further, the nature of the shift is to be divined by the structural effect of the intervention – not merely by its behavioural manifestation. A touch on the cheek does not necessarily represent a move further into dyadic relationship – and cannot automatically be labelled as an instance of gratification.