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When do two living systems with the same parentage diverge in such a way that they are no longer cross-fertilizable, becoming distinct, unbridgeable species? Did the decisive Lacanian divergence take place more than a half century ago with his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association, pushing him and his followers onto a psychoanalytic Galapagos? And with the subsequent luxuriant growth of a unique theoretical clinical system, is there nowadays the possibility of a new crossbreeding? Or will we at best have conceptual gene-splicings, piecemeal appropriations, or a kind of grafting of stock transplanted to a new terroir?
With this thought experiment of the International Journal—“what is unique to the Lacanian approach to psychoanalytic practice and its relevance to non-Lacanian analysts?”—we ask a question whose time may have long passed. Certainly, Fink (2007) himself once vehemently thought this way, particularly when he wrote in his influential book Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners: “I hope it is clear from my account in this book that the Lacanian approach to psychoanalytic technique is not likely to converge anytime soon with any of the English schools of which I am aware … ” (278); “The disagreements [are] based … on irremediable differences in theoretical perspective” (278). With his invited paper for this volume, he is more conciliatory to the possibility, though with a measured reservation. I admire his bravery in taking this on. At the start he makes it clear that there is “no single Lacanian approach” (1), that his familiarity with non-Lacanian schools is limited, and so his characterizations are likely to seem reductionistic. What is more, as Fink now ruefully acknowledges at the beginning of his paper, he is in certain regards a man without a country, criticized by some Lacanians as “overly ‘American’”: “overly direct, transparent, and simplistic, leading me to make excessively practi