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''A symptom is made up of words''. A metaphor involves the substitution of one element for another. This is the very structure of the symptom - one term is substituted for another, which is kept repressed. ''When it is connected with the rest of the chain of words, there will be an effect on the symptom''.
=====EditThe Variable Session=====[[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''.)
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