The work of the School and Lacanian Action

Recently, Jacques-Alain Miller asked the question “What does the school want? First, what kind of school does it want to be?”¹. The context of this question needs to be situated at a moment of struggle of the École de la Cause (ECF) against a policy that attacked specifically and brutally psychoanalysis, which occasionally provoked a fight led by the ECF. Subsequently, other attacks confirmed this open anti-psychoanalytic offensive, particularly related to the treatment of autism.  

What type of school do we want? Would it be a school at the service of Lacanian psychoanalytic orientation, which ensures the conditions of its existence? The question can be understood as an articulation of work of the school with the Lacanian action.

The necessary mobilization, in the heat of the action, can occasionally make us lose sight of the extent to which psychoanalysis is tied to politics. To want to oppose the green tree of the analytic experience to the greyness of warlike action is a mistake.

In “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, Lacan offers a compass to orient us in this matter. At the heart of the experience, Lacan situates politics throughout the analyst’s action. “To put in another way: his action concerning the patient will escape him along with the idea he forms of his action, as long as he does not reconsider its point of departure in terms of what makes his action possible and does not preserve the paradox of its quadripartition, in order to revise at the core the structure by which all action intervenes in reality” (Écrits, p. 493). Here, Lacan connotes that politics is what operates in the aims of analysis and he situates the operative level of the analyst in the effects of his action in relation to the being. Thus, for Lacan, there is no opposition, no antinomy between politics and psychoanalysis. On the contrary, he places politics at the heart of the experience.

It is indeed from this experience, from this completely original social link of the cure that a position is required to preserve the transmission of analytic discourse. It engages analysts in action and certainly not in passive observation of the spectacle of the world. The action remains at the service of analytic discourse, as the school is a device at the service of this discourse: this is what founds its cause. Here, the analytic cause necessarily brings into play a relationship to the ideal. The mobilized signifiers are certainly weighted by their imaginary weight, but can we do without them?

Lacan called himself a realist in the sense of logic. He finds in Hegel the principle of “absolute realism” in which the subject attaches himself to the concrete, practical conditions to achieve what needs to be achieved. We should ask ourselves: in the present context under what conditions the analytic experience is possible. In short, we should draw the consequences of a given context, to study precisely the balance of forces at stake and to judge the action to be taken. If we choose to take part in the democratic movement (and to not extract ourselves from it in the name of the extraterritoriality of the beautiful psychoanalytic soul), and from this place of debate, we should introduce a subversion. Psychoanalysis tends to not idealize the political, consequently its influence is that of contagion by the cause of desire.