La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir
1958 (51 pp.)-LA DIRECTION DE LA CURE ET LES PRINCIPES DE SON POUVOIR (THE DIRECTION OF THE TREATMENT AND THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS POWER) 1961 Nowhere else did Lacan try as hard to communicate to analysts coming from different perspectives what constitutes the ethics, the concepts, and the inter�rogations of his practice. He made an effort to situate himself in the global field of psychoanalytic thinking (there was even a bibliography), he revealed his desire for pedagogical clarity, mentioning concrete problems and numer�ous examples. Paradoxically, this address, which was meant for a limited public (the audience of the International Colloquium in Royaumont, orga�nized by the S.F.P.) seems to me to be a good introduction (for the general public) to his thinking of the time. The dream of the Beautiful Butcher's Wife (Freud) allows him to define hysterical desire as the model of human desire (the subject's desire is the desire of the Other), and desire as "metonymy of the lack-to-be" whose dream would be metaphor. Elsewhere, relatively simple formulations discuss the unconscious as a structure of signifiers and ana�lyze fantasy or primary identification, here based on the mother's Demand. The text is violently polemical: analytic literature is assimilated to "the pile of dung from the Augean stables" in front of which Leonardo's St John stands with his finger raised. Mistakes are always attributed to others while the author claims "to hear and understand" and not "to auscultate": "My listening is one of understanding [entendement]." The suggested solutions The WorkJ of Jlcqueillcan 111 are then discussed, whether it is a matter of transference, or interpretation, or of the ultimate rule: "One must take desire literal/yo " However, many of the problems that are raised are important ones: the fact that Freud did not nec�essarily "cure" his patients while making "the discoveries on which we live"; the patient's acting-out, linked to the analyst's passage a /' acte; the analyst's desire producing in the subject an effect in which "that which is not forbidden can become mandatory"; the money given in exchange for a "nothing" that the analyst does not even give. Ultimately, who is the analyst? He is the one who must "pay with words," "pay with his person" and "with that which is essential in his most intimate judgment, in order to intervene in an action that goes to the heart of being. "
