Today I’d like to talk about the end of the analysis. Or rather the ends. Or perhaps rather, endings. There’s something about the end that tends towards the romantic and dramatic. There’s an end scene, something that brings about the signification of what came before. Endings are something we can make demands of. People who go see a film may desire a “good ending,” saying “I don’t want to walk out of the theatre feeling sad.” Fair enough, maybe don’t see a Lars von Trier film. But endings are also something that we fantasize about, precisely because we don’t know them. I recall a story of my parents waiting in line for the Empire Strikes Back, and some punk kid came out of the theater having just seen it and yelled to everyone: “Luke dies in the end.” This was before the time of Twitter spoiler alerts.
I recall when I first began reading testimonies of the various ends of Lacanian analyses, and how it brought up a resistance, one that said: “Don’t tell me the ending!” And as we are accustomed now to rolling with resistance in this Lacanian field, I thought it would be useful to talk more about this resistant desire: “Don’t tell me the ending.” Is this just a passion for ignorance, another unconscious formation of “I don’t want to know about it”? A lot of theory has been generated about how analysis ends, how we know it has ended, and this theory has important consequences for our clinics. As we know, in the Lacanian field, our theory is our wager, whether we’re talking about a hypothesis of a structural diagnosis (hysteric/obsessional/psychotic/etc.) or the hypothesis about what constitutes a finished analysis. One could even call it our fantasy. And there is no other way to encounter the “reality” of our clinic except through the lens of our theoretical fantasy.
I want to spend this evening exploring one particular theoretical conception about the end of a Lacanian analysis, and that is that the concept of the traversal (or crossing) of the fundamental fantasy.
First off, what is the fundamental fantasy?
Lacan first speaks of the fundamental fantasies in Seminar 1 on page 17 as those “which orient and direct the subject, and which conceal the unsettling aspects of reality. Fantasy itself is not something to be removed from the subject, since it is both vital and unavoidable. It is crucial, Freud noted, for psychical reality, and thus to come to grips with so many forms of suffering. While there is much that Lacan works with in terms of fantasy, especially in Seminars 4-6, we really don’t hear about this notion of fundamental fantasy again until Seminar 8.
On page 104, Lacan speaks of the training analyst as one who has “come to know a little more about the dialectic in his unconscious,” that there remain not fantasies but “one fundamental fantasy,” something that has coalesced around the “scar of castration.” It is the “sliding of signifiers” which fantasy brings an end to: instead of an endless succession of “possible objects, a privileged object enhances this process and fixates or arrests the subject (169-170). The algebra of fantasy, $ <> a, preserves in notation an unsayable place, where “the subject as such dissolves, is eclipsed, and disappears (337). It is a place that can never be subjectivized. The object “in relation to the subject” takes on “the essential value that constitutes the fundamental fantasy.” Inasmuch as the subject identifies with the fundamental fantasy, “desire takes on consistency and can be designated” (170). However, the analyst must “enter into the fantasy at the level of $ for the passive subject,” i.e., in the transference, be this for the analysand, and also be the one who “sees little a, the object in fantasy” (269). In other words, the analyst occupies the place of “pure desirousness”: an abstraction “from any supposition of being desireable” (369). This place is referred to as the position of the one who contains agalma, “the fundamental object involved in the subject’s analysis, as linked and conditioned by the subject’s vacillating relationship that I characterize as constituting the fundamental fantasy, inaugurating the locus in which the subject can be fixated as desire” (Sem. 8, 193).
Later, in Seminar 9 on Identification, Lacan tell us that the fundamental fantasy is encountered in the void of the Other’s desire:
“In the normal, neurotic or perverse subject it is always a matter of identifying oneself in accordance with or in opposition to what one thinks is the desire of the Other. As long as this desire can be imagined, phantasized, the subject will find there the necessary reference points in order to define himself, either as the object of the desire of the Other or as an object refusing to be the desire of the Other. In either case he will be able to locate himself, to define himself.
But from the moment when the desire [of the Other] becomes something mysterious, undefinable, the subject discovers that it is precisely this desire of the Other which constitutes him as subject; what he will encounter faced with this void is the fundamental phantasy. To be the object of the desire of the Other is only bearable in so far as we can name this desire, can shape it in terms of our own desire. To become the object of a desire we can no longer name, is to become oneself an object without a name, having lost all possible identify: to become an object whose insignia no longer means anything since they have become undecipherable for the Other” (Sem 9 199-200).
So the fundamental fantasy is intimately tied to our identity, as well as our identifications, to the question of what does the Other want with me? Fantasy is a way of addressing lack. Since the big secret of psychoanalysis is that the Other is also barred (“there is no Other of the Other”), this means fantasy not only addressed the lack of the subject, but also the lack in the Other.
And it is this realization of the split subject “as desire’s object a, as what he was to the Other in his erection as a living being, as wanted or unwanted when he came into the world, that he is called to be reborn in order to know if he wants what he desires. This is the kind of truth Freud brought to light with the invention of analysis. It is a field in which the subject has, above all, to do a lot personally to pay the steep ransom for this desire.” (Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation, Ecrits, 571-72). The object a, as function of desire’s exponent in the Other, in the field of the Other, “is what allows it to take on its elective value at the true terminus of analysis, by figuring, in the fundamental fantasy, that before which the subject sees himself being abolished when he realizes himself as desire” (571).
It is not until we get to seminar 11 that we hear about traversing the fundamental fantasy on p. 273.
“It is beyond the function of the a that the curve closes back upon itself, at a point where nothing is ever said as to the outcome of the analysis, that is, after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of the analysis, and has never been approached. Up to now, it has been approachable only at the level of the analyst, in as much as it would be required of him to have specifically traversed the cycle of the analytic experience in its totality.”
Now, it’s here that I want to raise a problem, which has to do with a commonly heard aphorism in Lacanian circles. It is of the order of “don’t give ground on your desire!” which Lacan never even said. It is the notion that Lacan said that the end of analysis = the traversal/crossing of the fundamental fantasy.
Clearly so far we can say that for Lacan there is a connection between the fundamental fantasy and the end of analysis. But the traversal is something that unfortunately brings with it a connotation of completeness, a crossing of one plane to another. This famous quote from Seminar 11 clearly has its focus on the question of how the subject lives the drive. If traversal is simply the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, if we are talking about the logic of the subject’s case as something to be mapped, then perhaps this is what is produced – a mapping of location of the subject with respect to this fantasy. And if the fantasy serves as a support, a screen in relationship to the drive to sustain desire, it’s an important question of how one might live beyond the fantasy in relation to the drive. But what seems to have been misconstrued is traversal as something far more permanent, complete, once and for all. And as Lacanians, I think it’s important to hold with suspicion anything that might be of the order of the complete.
It’s important to note that we do not hear anything about the traversal of the fundamental fantasy again after Seminar 11. This is why I liken it to the aphorism “don’t give ground on your desire” which is attributed to Seminar 7. We don’t hear anything remotely like this elsewhere by Lacan.
Let me be clear in saying I don’t believe in an absolute end of analysis, anymore than I believe in the end times. There’s a strange religiosity that seems to creep in with talk of the end, and with this desire to verify scientifically what analyses have truly ended and which ones have not. This shouldn’t be so surprising, since Lacan himself designates fantasy as being of an axiomatic and revelatory quality. So while we may agree with Lacan in terms of the end of analysis having something to do with mapping out the subject in relation to their fundamental fantasy, but this is not the same as crossing over into the Promised Land, or experiencing the blessed resurrection after years and years of analytic crucifixion.
I don’t have time to get into this in detail, but there are historical reasons for why a theory of the end of analysis as a crossing/traversal might fill in the gap of this desire for verification. This is all historically spelled out nicely by Ricardo Goldenberg, who turned me on to Jean Allouch and his book “An Erotology of Passage.” He shows historically and through much documentation that the rumor of Lacan producing a theory of the end of analysis as the traversal of the fundamental fantasy was actually an invention by Jacques Alain Miller after Lacan’s death, begun at the Caracas Congress in 1980 and published in Delenda, then immediately picked up by the likes of Safouan, Pommier, Calligaris, and others.
But at the end of his life, Lacan’s primary concern with the end of analysis had to do with the subject supposed to know, that analysis ends when the SSS is deposed, liquidated, the end of transference. There is no mention of the traversal of the fundamental fantasy then, nor was there any mention of it in 1967 when he proposed his School.
A few remarks about why this minimal proposal for the end of analysis has merits: first off, it allows analysis to continue according to its interminable status. Whether or not a subject becomes a professional analyst or not, they authorize themselves, in an ethic of absolute difference, to be the analyst of their own case. The unconscious doesn’t stop, nor does one fully map it out. Sure, one may map enough out in an analysis to know what how to do with one’s fundamental fantasy, just as much as one’s symptom. But the idea that this would be complete is ludicrous to me. After all, since Freud tells us that the transference is resistance, the liquidation of transference is the liquidation of resistance via this cover provided by the Subject Supposed to Know.
As regards fundamental fantasy, I wonder if it would be possible to question Lacan as to why he reduced it to the one, primordial fantasy. This is reminiscent of the sort of Oedipal reductions that Lacan chastised Freud for. Many times Lacan will leverage a presumed collective “analytic experience” to the audience saying that “we all know this to be true from experience.” Maybe Lacan did, but he’s dead. Do we have this experience? This is a question I pose to you – what role does a theory of the fundamental fantasy play in your clinic? Since we now know that hypotheses come before phenomenon, and influences what we hear, is there something being lost in this use of the one fundamental fantasy? Why not fundamental fantasies?
And instead of traversal/crossing, with its connotation of permanence, could we not follow Freud’s path, which followed up Analysis Terminable and Interminable with Constructions in Analysis? What about constructions of fantasies? A new fantasy made up of the S1, the unary trait?
Finally let me also just say parenthetically that we need to be careful about pronouncing as analysts who we think is done and who isn’t. If anything, the analyst should give a reason as to why they think an analysand has not yet finished, which may very well have to do with not having mapped out enough a particular fantasy that leaves them continually alienated and suffering.
We should be careful about caring too much about the end of analysis. If I end my analysis because the transference is liquidated and I authorize myself to analyze my own case, but later find that I desire to start analysis anew because something else comes up years later, then there should be no shame in this. But if I’m too invested in an ideal ending that I think I had, then restarting could destroy the fantasy of my ending. Well, it’s never over anyway, so who cares if you speak to an analyst or not?
And I want to say this especially after having been so moved hearing a fellow analyst recently give an excellent series of talks last fall, where he shared how his analysis ended. The key is not to get caught up in the how, the phenomena, which is very easy to do, to look for a formula for how it’s going to end. In the story, he calls his analyst, but his analyst is clearly caught up in something home-related, maybe a kid needing to be fed. So his analyst says to him: “can you hold on for a minute?” And without thinking, he responds saying “no, I won’t hold on.” And after thank you’s and goodbyes, this analysis ends.
Even if we could read this story of the end as having a logic whereby his fundamental fantasy entailed holding on for the Other, and being this sort of desired object, it’s simply not the case that this dramatic story is what brings about the end due to this particular saying. A logical ending, one that ends via the logic of its own movement, is not one that needs to be delivered dramatically, least of all to the analyst. It might not be said to an analyst at all. It might be said elsewhere. But when it’s over, it’s over. If Lacan teaches us anything, it’s that nothing is more generative and creative than the act of dissolution, especially when it doesn’t leave a formulaic solution in its wake. What should not keep us in analysis is waiting for the ideal ending. If it be so, that’s a fantasy worth mapping out.
by Chris Nelson