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[[Lacan]]'s sensitivity to discontinuity led to a radical change which he introduced into the practice of psychoanalysis. Whereas his contemporaries worked with an average 50-minute session, Lacan made the length variable. (I never know when the session is going to end....) ''The session is stopped on an important word or phrase'', and the patient is then left to meditate on this until the next session. This technique has several advantages over the standard 50-minute session. First, it has been demonstrated that interrupted activities produce more associative material than completed ones. This capacity of interruption to generate memories and associative amterial forms one part of the rationale of the variable session. The broken sessions may evoke the broken Oedipal love relations. There is also the effort to avoid suggestion or, in everyday language, brainwashing the patient. Thus, instead of being offered a running commentary on the analytic material, the patient himself or herself is, through the breaks in the sessions, allowed to do much of the work. (Variable time is invaluable in combating many forms of resistance, such as the common one of patients' preparing their sessions in advance.) In the atmosphere of a variable session, there is a certain degree of tension - one does not know when it is going to end - and this tension serves to generate material and upset standard patterns of resistance. To understand what a variable session is about, one has to experience it, as the real experience of time which it introduces is startling, disturbing and completely unexpected. (The dimension of discontinuity and rupture introduced by the variability of the length of the sessions is thus effective in ''generating the most hidden material''.)
=====EditSpeech and Language=====[[Lacan]] elaborated on his conception of the relatiosn of the [[imaginary]] and the [[symbolic]] in his famous [[Rome Discourse]] of 1953, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis". This paper served to dispel a common confusion between speech and language. Language, as we have just seen, is considered as an abstract structure, a formal system of differences. But speech supposes the [[existence]] of a speaker ... and a listener. If language is a [[structure]], [[speech]] is an [[act]], generating [[meaning]] as it is spoken and giving an [[identity]] to the speakers involved. Saying "You are my master" gives a [[signification]] to the position of the speaker: either as the slave, or, more likely, as someone who does everything apart from accept the position of slave. Speaking thus determines one's position as speaker, ''it gives one a place''. As a [[patient]] speaks, such [[signification]]s will emerge which are [[unconscious]]. (he words I use mean more than I mean in using them. They carry meanings which are beyond his or her conscious understanding and control. As the analysis continues, the message can be sent back to the patient. (The subject receives the message in inverted form. His desire can finally become recognized.)
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