The Body in the Procedure of the Pass

Like a black hole—which cannot be perceived directly, but is known only by the way it warps space-time—the Lacanian object is an object we know solely by its material effects. In his seminar on “The Analytic Act,” Lacan suggests that the subject's act is not something the analyst can know, interpret, or anticipate, but something by which he is “struck” both psychically and in his body, where it leaves its traces or impressions. What “strikes” the analyst in the act— as distinct from the “acting out” that often characterizes the analysand's way of relating to the analyst, for example as an object of love or aggression—is what Lacan calls the object (a), the “object-cause of desire” that acts in and through the subject. Lacan introduced the procedure of the pass in 1967. In the pass, the analysand testifies to her own experience and attempts to transmit something of her relation to the object that causes desire, and thus castration. The testimony of the pass is delivered by the subject herself, and thus by the very body with which that testimony is concerned.

The pass involves the passant, the candidate who addresses his request to the school, and two passeurs, or witnesses, to whom the passant speaks about his analysis. They are in turn responsible for transmitting that testimony to a jury of analysts, who meet as a cartel and formulate a response of either a nomination of the analyst to the school or no nomination. The pass is not primarily concerned with what the passant has managed to say about her analysis, but with something that exceeds the signifier, and that therefore passes through the body. This real object, transmitted by an act of the unconscious, is object a. It is not an object of conscious observation or recording, but instead something that is at once transmitted by a body and received by a body, depositing itself in the bodies of the two passeurs without their knowledge. If there is anything “scientific” about the pass at all, it is that it is not so