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Pass
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pass (passe) In 1967, three years after founding hiS SCHOOL of psycho-
analysis (the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, or EFP), Lacan instituted a new kind
of procedure in the School (Lacan, 1967). The procedure was called 'the pass'
and was essentially an institutional framework designed to allow people to
testify to the end of their analysis. The main idea behind this was Lacan's
argument that the END OF ANALYSIs is not a quasi-mystical, ineffable experience,
but must be (in accordance with the basic principle of psychoanalysis)
articulated in language.
The procedure was as follows: the person seeking the pass (le passant) tells
two witnesses (les passeurs), who must be in analysis at the time, about his
own analysis and its conclusion, and these two witnesses then relay this
account (separately) to a jury of seven (some of whom have succesfully
been through the pass themselves). The jury then decides, on the basis of
the two accounts, whether to award the pass to the candidate. There were no
pre-established criteria to guide the jury, since the pass was based on the
principle that each person's analysis is unique. If the the candidate was
successful, he was accorded the title of A.E. (Analyste de L'…cole). Unsuccess-
ful candidates were not to be prevented from seeking the pass again if they
wished to do so.
The pass was designed to be the means by which a person might seek
recognition by the School of the end of his analysis. The pass was not an
obligatory process; whether or not an analyst decided to seek it was entirely up
to him. It was not a qualification to practise analysis, since 'the authorisation of
an analyst can only come from himself' (Lacan, 1967: 14) (see TRAINING). Nor
was it a recognition by the School of the member's status as an analyst; this
recognition was granted by another, wholly independent means in Lacan's
School, and corresponded to the title of A.M.E. (Analyste Membre de L'Ecole).
It was solely the recognition that a person's analysis had reached its logical
conclusion, and that this person could extract an articulated knowledge
(savoir) from this experience. The pass thus concerns not a clinical function
but a teaching function; it is supposed to testify to the capacity of the passant
to theorise his own experience of psychoanalytic treatment, and thereby to
contribute to psychoanalytic knowledge.
Jacques-Alain Miller comments that it is important to distinguish between
(i) the pass as an institutional procedure (as described above) and (ii) the pass
as the personal experience of the end of one's analysis, the passage from being
an analysand to being an analyst, which may be testified to by 'the pass' in the
first sense of the term (Miller, 1977).
In the 1970s the institution of the pass became the focus of intense
controversy within the EFP. While some supported Lacan's own views that
the pass would yield important contributions to knowledge of the end of
analysis, others criticised it for being divisive and unworkable. These debates
became even more heated in the final years of the EFP, before Lacan dissolved
his School in 1980 (see Roudinesco, 1986). Of the various Lacanian organis-
ations which exist today, some have abandoned Lacan's proposal, while many
others retain the institution of the pass as a central part of their structure.
Lacan invented the pass to clarify and formalize the transition between analysand and analyst: "This dark cloud that covers this juncture I am concerned with here, the one at which the psychoanalysand passes to becoming a psychoanalyst—that is what our School can work at dissipating" (Lacan, 1995).
