Tale-Telling and the Open

Lacan has given us one of the most evocative definitions we have of analysis: “Analysis is not a mere reconstituting of the past, nor does it have pre-established norms, it is neither epos, nor an ethos. If one were to compare it to something, it would be to a tale [un récit], such that the tale itself would be the meeting-place of what the tale is about.” (Lacan, 1959). A tale coinciding with its own coming into being.

Analysis coincides with the creation of a place, of a time-space dictated by an utterance that guides both the task of the analysand and the act of the analyst, the result of an attention suspended between letter and sense.

The symptom always calls into question a certain knowledge; transferential space is marked out from an already existing knowledge that forms actuality, present time. The field of knowledge that emerges between analysand and analyst fills out in tempo with signifying articulation. That fact that “Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it” (Freud, 1941) may also be conceived of as the progressive unfurling of this knowing in the repetition of the signifying chain, the construction in actu of the subject's story. It is precisely in this sense that the past is articulated in forward motion.

What one can expect from an analysis at its outset, at the moment of a demand for analysis, doesn't necessarily correspond with what one finds, doesn't necessarily correspond with the voyage one has thought of undertaking. “Contrary to all expectation and all intention” one may find oneself in Pompei, like Norbert Hanold in Jensen's Gradiva (Freud, 1907), that is, in the place of a knowledge already-there (déjà là) one wasn't aware of having, which prompts a new scenario. The text needed a space in which it could unfurl and be read, where it could be written.

Most of the time the appearance of pre-existing knowledge has the character of surprise. For Norbert Hanold, it involves a fainting spell, it is vertigo on the brink of the abyss. It is the shaking