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==Sessions of Variable Duration==
[[Lacan]]'s [[practice]] of [[sessions of variable duration]] ([[French]]: ''[[séances scandées]]'') came to be one of the main reasons that the [[IPA]] gave for excluding him when the [[SFP]] was negotiating for [[IPA]] recognition in the early 1960s. <!-- Some people say that [[Lacan]] was expelled because he was experimenting with analytical sessions of variable duration. The conventional length of a session was an invariably fifty-minute hour. [[Lacan]] came to the conclusion that the length of the session should be adjusted according to what the [[patient]] was saying: some long, some short. He argued that the [[psychoanalyst]] attends not so much to the meaning of the [[analysand]]'s words as to their form. In his view the ritual ending of the session after a predetermined fixed length of time was "a merely chronometric stopping place." By contrast, he wanted to find for each session a stopping place suited to what the [[patient]] was [[speech|saying]]. He believed that nothing in theory warrants the fifty-minute session. Rather, the adjustment of the length of the session should become one of the tools of [[psychoanalysis]]. <!-- Lacan antagonized many people by putting the length of the psychoanalytic session into question. The difference between the fifty-minute hour and the "short" session is a difference between --> Alternatively, the [[analyst]] can also [[punctuate]] the [[analysand]]'s [[speech]] by a moment of [[silence]], or by interrupting the [[analysand]], or by terminating the [[session]] at an opportune moment.<ref>{{E]] p.44</ref>
This last form of [[punctuation]] has been a source of controversy throughout the history of [[Lacan]]ian [[psychoanalysis]], since it contravenes the traditional [[IPA]] [[practice]] of [[session]]s of [[sessions of variable duration|fixed duration]].
Today, the [[technique]] of [[punctuation]], especially as expressed in the [[practice]] of [[sessions of variable duration]], continues to be a distinctive feature of [[Lacanian]] [[psychoanalysis]].
