The beginning of analysis in Psychoanalysis

When we say that a person is undergoing analysis, we mean that this person is undergoing clinical treatment with psychoanalysis, that is, he is undergoing therapy with a psychoanalyst.

In this text you will learn how the beginning of an analysis process is, and we also talk about the difference between demand and desire. We will use Freud’s theory and some elaborations by Jacques Lacan, referring mainly to Jacques Allain Miller.

See also Miller’s interview on Psychoanalysis and Love.

The beginning of an analysis, according to Jacques Allain Miller, cannot be thought of without its intrinsic interrelationship with the end. This is because, for the patient himself to enter analysis, it already implies designing an end for it, and for the analyst, the beginning signals the shaking of the ghost (or fantasy), and the end, its crossing.

The issue of desire, on the theoretical level of psychoanalysis, can be traced back to the Project for a Scientific Psychology (which as a project was only published posthumously) in which Freud elaborates it. Since what exactly marks this elaboration – in the theoretical field of psychoanalysis itself, although this concept permeates all of the author’s work – can be better traced in Interpretation of dreams.

In this book, Freud defines desire as being the force that brings the mnemonic element of an experience of satisfaction. In this sense, the primordial element of the subject’s satisfaction, the prototype of satisfaction, is the mother’s breast. In this way, we read Freud when he wrote that the “meaning of all dreams is the fulfillment of a wish”. (Freud, 1992 :153). For Miller, “desire is a complex concept, which, according to Freud, can be repressed and realized there in dreams, and, above all, can be modified in the analytic experience”. (Miller, 1997: 35).

“desire is always a lament, a regret, a nostalgia or a yearning, in such a way that, if we look for the word desire in Freud, we will find it predominantly in the word Wunsch – the yearning that, according to him, is in every dream and then you are satisfied” (Miller, 1997:447).

Desire “is a question, an interpretation, it converges with the discourse” (Miller, 1997: 339); the relationship between demand and drive: “drive designates a level where the subject seems to be under a demand, from which he cannot defend himself”. (Idem).

In other words, “In Freud, the drive is a very particular demand: it asks nothing of anyone” (Miller, 1997:445). Still according to Miller, “what we call desire is something that we place not at the level of a signifier, but under this articulation, (S1 S2/d), as something that circulates between the elements of the mechanical articulation and that does not respond to the mechanism” (Miller , 1997: 340)

It was Lacan, who introduced this distinction between demand and desire (D/d) of which, according to Miller, “the matrix of all these distinctions is the primary distinction between signifier and signified (S/s; S1 S2/d; E/ and ; D/d)” (Idem). So the wish cannot be said, at least directly; it is what cannot be said within what is said: “desire points to an impotence of the word and, beyond that, to an impossibility”. (Miller, 1997: 449).

There is the Lacanian formulation, developed, according to Miller, from the Rome Report, that “Desire is the desire of the other” (Lacan apud Miller, 1997: 50). Ambiguous definition, or rather one that can be developed in the openness that it allows in the very words of the formulation, in its oscillation of imaginary desire or symbolic desire.

Miller (1997: 353), in his seminar The pathology of ethics, says that in analysis: “there are moments of ‘I want to know’ and others where, on the contrary, within the ‘I want to know’ there is the ‘I don’t want to know (…) To use the slash (…) there is a ‘I want to know’, which can be presented as a demand, when the secret desire inside is ‘I don’t want to know’ about anything.

“I want to know” D

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“I don’t want to know” d

In relation to the entry into analysis, following Miller’s path, in his text Demand and Desire, demand must be abandoned at the beginning of an analysis, since “all demand is fundamentally without exit and because it is necessary to give up on demand itself” ( Miller, 1997:440), and at the same time the end of analysis could be defined as the radical abandonment of all demand addressed to the Other, without this demand being displaced to others.

The demand, according to the same text, tries, in its request to the Other, to fill a lack that is impossible to be filled in the lack-to-be that is the subject. The withdrawal of such a request, of such a demand, can be related to subjective destitution, in which “the subject loses all possibility of obtaining a place in the Other” (Miller, 1997: 441).

And, the same desire can, can be described according to the lack, insofar as “its motor and its cause are always a lack (…) An object is missing – which we say lost – and the essential thing is that the rediscovered object it’s never right.” (Miller, 1997: 447).

Miller, in this excerpt quoted below, correlated the two Lacanian terms, demand and desire, with the entry into analysis:

Entry into analysis needs to be requested, but the subject making an analysis demand does not know what he is asking for. A demand for analysis should only be accepted if, beyond the analysis requested, the analyst is able to understand what the subject wants.

That is why what is needed is not a determined demand, in order to accept a subject under analysis, but a decided desire that has nothing to do with the imperative, with the urgency, the pressure, and which is heard between the words . (Miller, 1997:451).

The theoretical importance of the concept of desire is evident, and on several occasions, and through different authors, it was placed as the central point of the theoretical elaboration of psychoanalysis.

On the other hand, the concept of demand was not used by Freud, but elaborated by Lacan, both of which represent a fundamental opposition in the clinic and in its theoretical elaboration, which can be referred to its primordial distinction between signifier and signified, to the as he elaborates the idea of ​​the unconscious structured as a language.

The relationship of these two concepts, as fundamental as they are complex, in their relationship with the clinic, both in its beginning and in its conclusion, must be first of all thought in terms of the three clinical structures developed by Lacan: neurosis, perversion and psychosis.

However, some principles can be placed, in a preliminary way, that is, the need not to meet the demand of the analysand, or of the subject who starts an analysis, so that the question of desire emerges. In other words, the demand must be abandoned by the subject.

In addition, as exemplified in Miller’s aforementioned statement that correlates demand, desire and the beginning of analysis, that for the analyst, from his point of view, a specific demand is not necessary, but that he perceives beyond the requested demand the subject’s desire as such, even if this desire always escapes words.

Bibliographic references

Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. Volume 1, , São Paulo: Circulo do Livro, 1992.

Miller, J. Lacan elucidated: lectures in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1997.

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