The Aims of Analysis

Book excerpt: In his "Écrits," Jacques Lacan evokes the figure of St. John the Baptist with a raised finger that points, though we do not know to where it compels us: "What silence must the analyst now impose upon himself if he is to make out, rising from this bog, the raised finger of Leonardo's 'St. John the Baptist, ' if interpretation is to find anew the forsaken horizon of being in which its elusive virtue must be deployed." This is a clinical inquiry that psychoanalysis still pursues today: what is the direction of an interpretation, what is its aim, as we already recognize the impasses of the endless generation of meaning that can stagnate psychoanalysis? The "Aims of Analysis" explores the use of the "aim" to approach the clinical implications of the later work of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Through a close reading of key concepts from the later Seminars of Lacan, the work of Jacques-Alain Miller, and other contemporary psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation, Thomas Svolos demonstrates how psychoanalysis today is practiced beyond the normative conventions of the Oedipus Complex. Svolos writes about his own experience in analysis and the experiences of "Analysts of the School" who have given "testimonies of the Pass." In the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, Analysts of the School are those analysands who have given testimony to the end of their own analysis. It is a specific dispositif developed by Lacan aimed directly at how knowledge in psychoanalysis may be transmitted. Svolos originally delivered this Seminar in Miami in October 2019 for the Lacanian Compass, a group of the New Lacanian School dedicated to the development and promotion of the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis in the United States. The text-published by Midden Press, the publishing house of Lacanian Compass-is intended for clinicians, psychoanalysts, and readers of psychoanalytic theory of all backgrounds. Visit https: //www.lacaniancompass.com/midden-press for more information.