The NLS wants to ‘make school’ [faire école]. This desire has already yielded its effects; its results. It is an experience in the strongest sense of the word –it does not follow a predetermined path. It is a construction day by day. By including the pass in its agenda, together with the Knotting Seminars and Supervision for its Question of the School day, the NLS puts the focus on the two modes of recognition of analysts that Lacan always distinguished: recognising an analyst as the product of their analysis (pass) and recognising them on the basis of their practice.
Long before the term supervision was introduced by Freud, his necessity for an interlocutor in order to make sense of his emerging practice was clearly present: “I can barely do without the other – and you are the only other, thealter”. Supervision was born from Freud’s desire, from his own taste: it is an ethical question that took hold of him. By making supervision compulsory, the groups affiliated to the IPA thus produced a “discreet and progressive” deviation from the very first Freudian experience, namely a quaternary structure: Freud, his interlocutor Fliess, the patient being discussed, and the audience (“his public of Freudian discovery”) (his Other) beyond Fliess. A structure, essential to demonstrate that ultimately, it is a question of transmission: psychoanalysis is not transmitted from one subject to another solely through the experience of the treatment, under the threat of being reduced to a practice of initiation, but through the paths of work transference. Lacan subsequently de-standardised supervision, betting on work transference and the desire of young analysts.
The NLS seeks to convey the desire for supervision: its recent Question of the School day, gave an opportunity to hear about the unique, de-standardised experience of supervision.
By making this desire visible, it further guarantees the public the seriousness of the practice and the rigour of the formation. This is why a day such as this one has interested not only the school’s public but also a broader audience. Much can be expected from this.
The youth is always in the spotlight when it comes to supervision, as Lacan emphasised. Young members of the NLS testified to the fact that it is especially through the supervision of their practice that their entry into the School is realised. It is in and through the dispositif of supervision that the formation provided by the School and the analytical practice are articulated. Supervision is the privileged place where questions about one’s practice are kept open, as some have said. It is through supervision that their desire is knotted to the School: not the desire to be or to become an analyst, but the desire for analysis, which is the primary form of the desire of the analyst.
By always approving of young analysts, Lacan was giving priority to the act. In supervision what is verified is how free they can be in their tactics (more than in their strategy), and thus distance themselves from a standardised or an ideal treatment. Hence a demand for constant work and infinite training.
Analysis and supervision as conditions for entry into the School –explicit conditions in the WAP letter to the young ones –are grasped, as many have underlined, not as “pressure”, a “superegoic constraint”, but as a stimulus, an opening. The “precariousness” of “under condition” is transformed by a subjective reversal into a point of support for the practice, since the School is the place where it is experienced that there is no ultimate guarantee, that no one can say what an analyst is.
In summary, let us take note of what our young colleagues say about the feedback effect on their practice, because it is really about taking up the challenge of maintaining the analyst on the edge of being analysand of his or her own experience. Countering the routine or dormant use of practice, reviving the desire of the analyst, even in the most experienced, maintaining the transference to psychoanalysis in order to keep up with today’s civilisation. In short, let’s bet on spreading the salutary effects of the “experience as a rhinoceros”.