Littorical Reading: Lacan, Derrida, and the Analytic Production of Chaff

If an academic degree course in psychoanalytic studies does not give students access to the analytic profession, where can they acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for practicing psychoanalysis? If only psychoanalytic training institutes have the power to recognize and ratify the transition from apprenticeship to mastery, how do their assessment criteria differ from those routinely employed within modern universities? If psychoanalytic training is neither exclusively nor principally predicated upon the assimilation of psychoanalytic knowledge, does this entail that the process devalues traditional techniques of reading and writing? And if the transmission of psychoanalysis, conceived as the organized and controlled production of new clinicians, occurs through speech rather than writing, listening instead of reading, the signifier at the expense of the letter, logos to the detriment of gramme, how can an intrinsically irreplicable utterance contribute to the replication of an utterly transformative activity? If Lacan is right in postulating that “a letter always arrives at its destination” (Lacan, Purloined 53), doesn't this proposition imply that a signifier never arrives at its destination?

Partly culled from the mouths of ambitious graduate students, these questions raise a series of fundamental concerns spanning the entire history of the psychoanalytic movement. Talking cure rather than writing cure, psychoanalysis has elevated the principle of its alleged clinical success to the rank of a central criterion for selecting new recruits. Psychoanalysts are not born through reading and writing, but through speaking and listening. Blindness is perfectly compatible with psychoanalytic insight, yet the deaf-mute analyst (whether physically impaired or artificially deprived through the sensory limitations of a computer system) seems to constitute a contradiction in terms. From this vantage point, the academy could perhaps still try to educate its p