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§5 Therapy, Theory, and the Role of Time in Lacan Near the end of 1963, the barely decade-old organization Société Fran- çaise de Psychanalyse—founded after the 1953 departures of Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto, and others from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris—received the conditions for its admission and recognition as a training program in the International Psychoanalytic Association. One stipulation stands out with particular prominence: Jacques Lacan must be struck from the list of training analysts. After a prolonged investigation by a special committee assembled specifically for that purpose—this investigation involved interviews with many of Lacan’s students and analysands —the IPA declared that the one non-negotiable requirement for the SFP’s membership was its voluntary acceptance of a ban on Lacan’s training activities.1 In the opening session of his 1964 seminar, Lacan, comparing himself to Spinoza, calls this his “excommunication.”2 Why did this happen? The central controversy surrounding Lacan at this time was his practice of variable-length sessions—often called “short sessions,” although this is misleading since Lacan would either shorten or lengthen the time of the analytic session, depending on the patient.3 On several occasions, Lacan told the members of the SFP that he would bring his practice into conformity with the IPA’s rule requiring fifty-minute sessions. To put it bluntly, he lied. Lacan justifies his variance of session length as a means of combating neurosis. Neurotics, especially obsessionals, take advantage of fixedlength sessions; they pre-script monologues so as to “kill time” and avoid The Temporal Logic of Jacques Lacan 23 2 the work of free association. In this way, the rhythm of the sessions can be pressed into the service of resistances. By truncating the sessions at his discretion (Lacan speaks of this as “punctuating” the sessions4 ) Lacan not only thwarts the recitation of nonassociative “filler material,” but creates a sense of urgency for the analysand.5 They must associate in order to be cured, in order to offer the analyst genuine hints of the unconscious that the analyst is “supposed to know.” Although his motives for engaging in this type of practice are tinged by suspicions—in shortening the length of sessions for trainees, Lacan was able to produce more practicing analysts than any other training analyst in his school, thus securing a greater amount of financial wealth and institutional influence6 —Lacan nonetheless decisively demonstrates the importance of time in the psychoanalytic clinic, a demonstration that continues to cry out for careful consideration by clinicians. His approach to analysis, both as a theory and as a therapy, is deeply marked by his appreciation of the absolutely central role played by temporality in psychical life. Just as an irony exists in the discrepancy between Freud’s neglect of time as an explicit thematic and his system’s striking consequences for rethinking the human rapport with time, so does an oddity reside in Lacan’s handling of this same topic. Obviously, the Lacanian clinic is given its unique character in large part by the variability of session length. But, in his theoretical elaborations, Lacan consistently marginalizes the significance of time/temporality. As John Forrester notes, “even Lacanian analysts , far more imbued with the teachings and concepts of Lacan than I, admit that the theory of time was never sufficiently elaborated” (Forrester 1990, 169). The word “temporality” makes a fair number of appearances in Lacan’s oeuvre, but this frequency is deceptive. Insofar as he is a Freudian , Lacan generally gives the upper hand to a synchronic structure of the unconscious over any diachronic unfolding of its constitutive elements. Three cross sections of Lacan’s thought, each dating from a distinct period of his theoretical evolution, reveal an underlying consistency in his alleged marginalization of time: “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” (1946), the “Tuché and Automaton” material from the eleventh seminar (1964), and the twenty-sixth seminar on Topology and Time (1978–1979). Analyzing these pieces not only uncovers a certain conceptual unity beneath the shifting surfaces of Lacan’s extended intellectual career—his subsequent reexaminations of the 1946 theory of “logical time” are themselves quite revelatory of fundamental metapsychological commitments—but also emphasizes the strange prominence of the very topic that is being marginalized (as is apparent, in two of the three texts considered here, the word “time” appears in the title). Overall, one could convincingly argue that time itself, for Lacan, is 24 T I M...

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