End of analysis
Lacan conceives of this end-point in various ways.
1. In the early 1950s, the end of anlaysis is described as "the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of his history."[1](See Speech)
"The subject ... begins the analysis by speaking about himslef without speaking to you, or by speaking to you without speaking about himself. When he can speak to you about himself, the analysis will be over."[2]
The end of analysis is also described as coming to terms with one's own mortality.[3]
2. In 1960 Lacan describes the end of analysis as a state of anxiety and abandonment, and copares it to the helplessness of the human infant.
3. In 1964 he describes it as the point when the analysand has "traversed the radical fantasy."[4] (See Fantasy)
4. In the last decade of his teaching, he describes the end of analysis as "identification with the sinthome, and as "knowing what to do with the sinthome'. (See Sinthome)
Common to all these formulations is the idea that the end of analysis involves a change in the subjective position of the analysand (the analysand's "subjective destitution"), and a corresponding change in the position of the analyst (the loss of being [Fr. désêtre] of the analyst, the fall of the analyst from the position of the subect-supposed-to-know).
at the end of the analysis, the analyst is reduced to a mere surplus, a pure objet petit a, the cause of the analysand's desire.
Since Lacan argues that all psychoanalysts should have experienced the process of analytic treatment form beginning to end, the end of analysis is also the passage from analysand to analyst.
'the true termination of an analysis" is therefore no more and no less than that which "prepares you to become ann analyst."[5]
In 1967 Lacan introduced the procedure of the Pass as a means of testifying to the end of one's analysis.
By means of this procedure, Lacan hoped to avoid the dangers of regarding the end of analysis as a quasi-mystical, ineffable experience.
Such a view is antithetical to psychoanalysi, which is all about putting things into words.
Lacan criticizes those psychoanalysts who have seen the end of analysis in terms of identification with the analyst.
54
