You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Adieu Lacan, a film by Richard Ledes, offers much to the psychoanalytic viewer. The movie, a fictionalized version of a treatment conducted by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s, relies on two accounts by Betty Milan, the patient in the treatment. Milan, herself a psychiatrist and Lacanian analyst, wrote the play Goodbye Doctor (2008), and a novel, Lacan's Parrot (1997), both of which use her treatment and later collaboration with Lacan as source material. I will review the movie from my perspective as an analyst trained primarily in the Freudian ego psychology tradition, and offer some thoughts related to technique, pathogenesis, development, and culture.
The movie is set almost entirely in the consulting room. We see an analysis represented by fragments of fourteen sessions over three years. But we are also privy to the thoughts of both main characters. For clarity, I will refer to this cinematic version of Lacan as “the Doctor,” as Milan does in her play.
Soon after “Seriema” begins treatment, she tells the Doctor about her immigrant family and how they were disappointed that she was a girl. This is followed by information about her two miscarriages, which prompted her husband to leave her. After the first miscarriage, she was told she had a medical problem but did not pursue treatment, a decision that led to the second miscarriage. The Doctor is surprised and underlines her choice to not seek treatment. He is starting to interest Seriema in the power of her unconscious. Then he abruptly ends the session.
This is the first of several such endings in the movie. It shows Lacan's technique of the variable length session. According to Bruce Fink (2019), these unexpected endings are intended to highlight something important that has just happened, and to promote the patient's reflection on this new information.
Cutting sessions is part of a larger technical approach in which the analyst aims to frustrate and puzzle the patient, and stimulate the patient's curiosity. Lacan said th