On the desire of the analyst¹
Bernardino Horne²

Abstract: In this paper, Bernardino Horne starts from the challenge J.-A. Miller points out for the analyst's position: "how is it possible to know, in the analytical experience, not to be an unconscious subject?" He demonstrates how the position of object a in the dominant place of the analytic discourse - a characteristic of the treatment direction in the Lacanian Orientation - is sustained by the desire of the analyst, and considers different Lacanian conceptions about such desire.

Keywords: Desire of the analyst; analytic discourse; object a.

Resumo: En este artículo, Bernardino Horne, parte del desafio que J.-A. Miller apunta sobre la posición del analista: "¿como es posible saber, en la experiencia analítica, no ser un sujeto inconsciente?" Él demuestra como la posición de agente del objeto a en el discurso analítico - una característica de la dirección del tratamiento en la Orientación lacaniana - es sostenida por el deseo del analista y formula consideraciones sobre las diversas concepciones lacanianas a respecto de ese deseo.

Palabras llave:Deseo del analista; discurso analítico; objeto a

Introduction
"Para ser grande sê inteiro: nada teu exagera ou exclui.
Sê todo em cada coisa.
Põe quanto és no mínimo que fazes.
Assim em cada lago a lua toda brilha, porque alta vive."
Fernando Pessoa³

We accept Lacan's assumption according to which the desire of the analyst is ultimately what operates in analysis⁴. In the analytic discourse, the analyst does not take the subject position. That is one of the crucial differences in relation to most numerous IPA thought currents, for they take the analyst as subject when they focus on counter-transference. Miller, in a text written in 1984, "Act and interpretation" ⁵, states that the analyst's formation consists in the following: how is it possible to know, in the analytical experience, not to be an unconscious subject? For us, the semblance in the place of the discourse agent is an object, not a subject.

That position of object a in the dominant place of the analytic discourse, which is a characteristic of the treatment direction in the Lacanian Orientation, is sustained by the desire of the analyst.

Therefore, the desire of the analyst does not only operate on the established discourse, but also on the necessary maneuvers to reach it or make it effective. It appears at the moment there is a pass from analysand to analyst.

The desire of the analyst

In his written text "The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power", published in 1958, for the first time Lacan formulated the desire of the analyst as the desire to keep an opposition between demand and desire⁶. In 1964, he formulated it as the desire to find pure difference⁷.In 1974, he stated it is an unexpectedly new desire that can only appear in the end of the analysis⁸. He then declares it to be the desire of knowledge (savoir).

In the VII Congress of the Freudian Field, in Barcelona, in 1990, Miller questions: How to think knowledge as the cause of desire? He answers it by indicating it is necessary to search for the fundament of the School concept in the analytic operation itself.

The desire of knowledge is what goes against the horror of knowledge. Also in Barcelona, in a Pass testimony, I myself worked on the theme of the desire of the analyst using the matheme - SSS/S( )⁹- in which there were two arrows, one on each side, so that on the side of love for knowledge, the transference, the arrow points up, towards the SSS, in contrast to the horror for knowledge in which the vector points down towards the signifier for the barred Other [S( )]. After the Pass, the love vector was transformed into enthusiasm and the horror vector gives its place, loses its power of refusal, appearing as the desire for knowledge, desire for the knowledge about castration or about the signifier that is placed in the Other's bar. In my point of view, that condition represented the analyst's characteristic: the enthusiasm and the desire for knowledge.

I do not intend to be exhaustive. There are a number of interesting texts and important passages in the AE's testimonies about the desire of the analyst. Nevertheless, I would like to highlight that, not very long ago, in a seminar in Buenos Aires on the post-analytical, published in El peso de los ideales¹⁰ (The ideals weight), Miller changed his ideas when he stated that the desire of the analyst is not a desire for knowledge, since that is, in effect, the analysand's desire. The desire of the analyst is the desire to achieve the absolute difference.

I shall take up the desire of the analyst from the perspective of the absolute difference. First, the desire of the analyst as the function that sustains an analysis within the horizon of a contemporary symptom treatment and analysis applied to therapeutics. Secondly, as that which sustains the analyst's discourse. Finally, the desire of the analyst is considered as the one that appears in the analytic act. I shall take advantage of this opportunity to present some ideas on what seems to be, in my point of view, the absolute difference.

First point: The therapeutic analysis entrance in contemporary symptoms.

Before an analysis, the analyst must be able to formulate interpretations even if his position is outside the analytic discoursestrictu sensu. They are interpretations which have the value of an act. They are sustained by the desire of the analyst.

Nowadays we have to admit the fact that there might be analysts outside the office setting, for they can interfere in their communities in different ways and, supported by their ethical position, they make use of psychoanalysis. In fact, they apply its power as the "shape blade for cutting the truth" to several circumstances in which they act.

In our recent Encounter in Buenos Aires, we had the opportunity to discuss that. We could see how the analyst interprets before there is an analysis and, therefore, before there is an analyst strictly speaking. Celia Salles, from Bahia¹¹, presented that in a paper that had been worked out in the Psychoanalysis and Medicine Research Center, in which I take part. It was a serious case of anorexia of a 26-kilo adolescent nourished by a nasogastric tube who was taken to an analyst in order that she could be convinced to eat. At a certain moment the analyst tells her that it was not a question of eating or not, but a question on how she could be happy. The signifier "happy", in a contingence, made the girl's enigma appear: how could an ugly girl, as she thought she was, be happy? What sustains the desire of the analyst before someone who does not want to know anything, who does not accept anything to connect to his or her transference signifier?

That case involves an interpretation out of the analytic device, for the subject is surrounded by the discourse of capitalism. There is no analysand, nor an analyst, strictly speaking. It is an interpretation as valuable as an act, which means that, in case it succeeds, from then on, things will never be the same. It introduces a subjective division by the strength of a Signifier One (S), thrown by the analyst. A brand new subject relationship to knowledge in the place of a truth appears where it, so far, did not exist. Without the SSS introduction, the symptom does not say anything to anyone: it is pure jouissance of a written piece.

In such a way, part of the analyst's discourse is traced. We can write it in a matheme, which makes this idea synthetic: a/ S2 - S1 -S/ S1 S2/a.

Let's reconsider the question on what sustains the analyst in such an action. I think he does it because he has achieved the non-sense of the unconscious derived from his own analytic experience, from his experience as an analysand, and from the experience of his analyst. From soi (himself), as Lacan says in the "Préface à l'édition anglaise du Séminaire XI" ¹²: "Quand l'espace d'un lapsus, n'a plus aucune portée de sens (ou interprétation), alors seulement on est sûr qu'on est dans l'inconscient. On le sait, soi" ¹³. So the desire of the analyst, responsible for the stability in the treatment direction of Lacanian orientation, is what also allows the act, not neutral at all, of introducing a Signifier One which divides the subject as well as it puts some tension on the knowledge. That makes possible the enigma which starts SSS, a necessary operator in psychoanalysis.

Second point: the desire of the analyst is what operates on analysis in order to maintain the analytic discourse as well as retake it and, permanently, sustain it. The guarantee of an orientation towards the real appears out from an orientation against the meaning. That march against the meaning, towards the real, is sustained by the desire of the analyst. I shall not extend on that aspect which comprehends the analysis experience itself.

The third point deals with the desire of the analyst in the analytic act itself as the appearance of the desire of the analyst in the analysand.

Everyone here, for sure, knows the surprising summary Lacan made of the analytic act. It still surprises me each time I read it. That is why I repeat for you these two passages:

"Never seen or heard, unless among us, that is, never underlined or even questioned, we suppose the analytic act as what comes out from the selected moment the analysand becomes an analyst".

And next: "as it is an act which is reproduced by a make do ordinance, the analytic act seems to be fit to enlighten the act" ¹⁴.

The analytic act takes place in the clinic of the pass. A subjective destitution is produced there.A dark shadow which makes difficult to understand the act must be cleared out. It covers and hides, as a last veil, the remaining pieces that may direct knowledge towards the real. Enlightened by the act flash, they are presented as new knowledge. For the male speaker, that knowledge is to know that the subject is equivalent to the object and that the object indicates his feminine jouissance position. To become aware of that, a man had to make an extraordinary effort and trace back his reactive formations, isolations and annulments to reach the flesh and the painful mark in his own body.

In order to make the pass possible, in order to extinguish the lack-of-being which alienated the subject to the symbolic, the symbolic must have arrived at a point of impossibility. According to what Miller tells us, that implies a lot of previous elaboration, otherwise it would be a mere passage to the act.

The pass to the analytic act implies that the object becomes truly real to the subject as it is not a semblance anymore. It is from that real that the absolute difference is established. We have always thought that the absolute difference, cause of the desire of the analyst, was established between a and -j. I propose here that it is established between the truly real and the semblance.

At the end of the analysis there is a practical and radical subject expulsion out of the analytic discourse.The analyst, as the result of an act, is caused by two desires: as an analysand, in the School, by the desire to know, not about one's personal enigma, but about the real concerned in every analyst's formation; as analyst, by the desire of being oriented towards the truly real of the experience.

How can we understand a passage of Lacan in his Seminar L'insu que sait une-bévue s'aile à mourre¹⁵? It says: "What happens when you change meaning, when someone orients the thing in a different way?" and he adds, "the analyst's neutrality is nothing else than just that, that meaning subversion, that is, that kind of aspiration, not for the real, but by the real." That question on the aspiration by the real interested me most. In "El pase perfecto" ¹⁶, Miller says something which apparently has to do with that: "The castration (-j) in the subject's place becomes the channel itself by which the surplus-jouissance is drained and poured into the real. The subject follows that and finds in it the being he is as a necessary result of the contingencies which determined him that way".

That aspiration by the real is a passage from having a symptom to truly being a symptom. That is the way of talking about the symptom identification, about the passage from unconscious subject to be what one is. The symptom identification means that the subjectal pass towards the truly real took place.

As Fernando Pessoa says: "Be whole in everything. Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you." Instead of having a symptom, become the symptom. Make that pass. The kind of knowledge one has to deal with is proper to the act. Such knowledge appears at the moment when, caused by the distance one passed from the real to the semblance, the desire of the analyst is revealed.
Translated by Heloisa Caldas
Reviewed by Bogdan Wolf

¹Translated from: "Sobre o desejo do analista" in Opção Lacaniana. Revista Brasileira Internacional de Psicanálise, nº 40, São Paulo: EBP, agosto 2004.
²AME of Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise - EBP.
³Pessoa, F. Ficções do interlúdio. Odes de Ricardo Reis. Obras completas.
To be great, be whole; exclude
Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do
The whole moon gleams in every pool
It rides so high
translated by E. Honig and S. Brown, "Poems of Fernando Pessoa" - The Ecco Press. Available at:
http://www.asseptic.org/letra/00102.
⁴Lacan, J. Do Trieb de Freud e do desejo do psicanalista. Escritos. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar ed. 1998.
⁵Miller, J.-A. Acto e interpretación. Buenos-Aires: Manantial, 1984.
⁶Lacan, J. A direção do tratamento e os princípios de seu poder. Op. cit
.⁷Lacan, J. El seminário, libro 11.
⁸Lacan, J. Nota aos italianos. Outros escritos. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar ed. 2004.
⁹N.T. The initials SSS stand for the French Lacanian expression: suject suppose savoir: subject supposed to know.
¹⁰Miller, J.-A. et alii. El peso de los ideales. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
¹¹Salles, C. "O cisne, um caso feliz". Paper presented in the First American Encounter, Buenos Aires, 2003.
¹²Lacan, J. (2001). Préface à l'édition anglaise du Séminaire XI. In Autre Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
¹³N.T. In French in the original. "When the space of a lapse reaches no more meaning (or interpretation), then one is just sure to be in the unconscious. One knows it oneself".
¹⁴Lacan, J. (1967-1968). Reseñas de enseñanza, El acto psicoanalítico. Editorial hacia el tercer Encuentro del Campo Freudiano.
¹⁵Lacan, J. L'insu que sait une-bévue s'aile à mourre. Ornicar? , 12/13.
¹⁶Miller, J.-A. El pase perfecto. El peso de los ideales. Buenos Aires: Paidós.