Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech.

The two partners are the analyst and the analysand, brought together in the same analytic session.

The analysand speaks of what has brought them to analysis: their suffering, their symptom.

The symptom is articulated with the materiality of the unconscious: it is made up of words that have struck the subject, words that have wounded them, but also of what cannot be put into words and yet continues to insist.

The analyst intervenes by punctuating the analysand’s speech, enabling them to weave the fabric of their own unconscious.

The effects of truth produced through interpretation bear witness to the very power of the unconscious.

What Does the Analysand Consent To?

First and foremost, the analysand consents to entering the analytic dispositif and to the rule of free association: they accept that their speech may unfold beyond what they believe themselves to be saying.

The subject of the unconscious emerges precisely at the point where language marks it with a lack. The subject is an effect of the signifier, divided between what is said and what escapes their saying.

As Lacan states in Seminar XI:

“The subject must consent to what is said in their unconscious.”

To consent, then, means allowing the unconscious to emerge and welcoming its effects.

At the beginning of an analysis, a slip of the tongue may be immediately corrected: “That’s not what I meant to say.”

At another point, however, the same phenomenon may be received differently and — also through the analyst’s intervention — recognised as bearing meaning, linked to an identification that the subject can finally begin to question.

In the psychoanalytic session, even the most firmly established identifications may thus begin to loosen.

The analysand also consents to the fact that the treatment is not governed by a general protocol.

Freud himself, through his clinical cases — Dora, the Rat Man, Little Hans — demonstrated how each experience is irreducible to a standardised technique.

Psychoanalysis places the singularity of each subject at the forefront.

It is not a technique, but a discourse that invites each subject to produce their own exception.

Neither the duration of the treatment nor the unfolding of the sessions can be standardised: Freud’s analyses varied considerably in length, from a single session to several years.

The aim is not to apply a norm, but to enable the subject to find their own way of coming to terms with themselves.

And What Does the Psychoanalyst Consent To?

The psychoanalyst consents, first and foremost, to occupying a particular position: sustaining questioning, openness and enigma in the subject who turns to them.

The analyst does not identify with the roles that the analysand may attribute to them, nor with the ideals of social discourse.

Their position is bound to the question of desire.

Within the transference, the analysand attributes feelings, beliefs and expectations to the analyst and attempts to act upon them.

Yet psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to the deciphering of meaning.

Through speaking, the subject also seeks a partner for their expectations and their fantasy.

Drawing on their own analytic experience, the analyst is aware of their own fantasy and takes care not to act in its name.

Transference implies a place — the “place of the Other”, as Lacan puts it — which does not coincide with a person, but constitutes a space in which the unconscious can manifest itself freely.

It is also the place where the figures of fantasy may unfold in their most complex forms.

For this reason, an analyst is not a label or a fixed identity, but is constituted through the effects of their acts.

It is important to emphasise that psychoanalysis does not aim to adapt the subject to norms or standard criteria of reality.

The Freudian discovery brings to light a structural lack-of-being (manque-à-être), which is what sets desire in motion.

The subject seeks in others, in relationships and in objects something that might compensate for this lack, yet it can never be filled.

There is a constitutive void that no object can saturate.

Each subject invents their own symptoms as a way of dealing with this lack.

Here a line of demarcation emerges: between consenting to castration — that is, acknowledging lack — and refusing it.

In the first case, the subject is situated within the field of neurosis and constructs symptoms that make lack bearable.

In the second, when castration is refused, the subject may find themselves confronted with an overwhelming Real that is difficult to deal with.

For Lacan, to consent means to assume one’s position as a subject of desire: to say yes to the truth of the unconscious and to accept lack as a structural condition of existence.

This is not a matter of social or rational consent, but an ethical act.

The subject who does not consent remains caught in the illusion of completeness and in the pursuit of an absolute jouissance.

The subject who consents, by contrast, assumes lack as their own limit — and, paradoxically, as a condition of freedom.

Their “yes” to lack is also a “no” to totalising jouissance and to a mortifying withdrawal into themselves.