Responses to commentators

I would like to thank my respondents for their thoughtful consideration of my work and for opening up possible avenues of fruitful dialogue between Lacanian and non-Lacanian approaches to psychoanalysis. Their responses suggest points of convergence as well as of divergence, points that would allow us—assuming we begin from detailed case material—to highlight how we would approach things similarly or differently, and how we would conceptualize what is going on with mutual respect for each other’s thinking, even as we might nevertheless arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions and take different tacks in our analytic practice.

Certain of the responses also bring home to me once again the degree to which “the very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding” (Lacan 1993, 184). In the course of my paper (which was already twice as long as it was supposed to be), certain topics could only be touched upon briefly and the clinical vignettes I provided were necessarily condensed and incomplete. As we shall see, myriad misunderstandings revolve around the Lacanian technique of “scansion,” which leads the analyst to conduct sessions of variable length; here once again, although I spoke very little in my paper about it (having discussed it at great length in print; see, for example, Fink 2007, chapter 4), it received the lion’s share of my commentators’ attention, just as it does when I present Lacan’s work on just about any topic at non-Lacanian institutes around the world.

I will address the responses in the order that seems to me to make the most sense.

Alfred Margulies

Alfred Margulies’ paper warrants considerable commentary.

Margulies seems to have concluded, on the basis of my discussion, that Lacanians simply dismiss out of hand affects that appear in the course of an analysis, whereas the point I tried to make is that we do not take them at face value. We try to discover whether, as Freud (1953) tells us regarding affects in dreams, “their intensity [has been