The Analyst Without Knowledge: Ethics And Ideals In Lacanian Practice

Keywords: Lacanian psychoanalysis, symptom, analysand, ethics, desire, unconscious

In times where psychology increasingly offers tools aimed at emotional well-being, adaptation, and self-fulfilment, psychoanalysis, especially that which follows the orientation of Jacques Lacan, persists as a practice that resists. It resists the morality of happiness, the standards of mental health, and above all, the idea that someone knows what is best for someone else. The psychoanalyst does not teach how to live or guide according to an ideal. They neither advise nor interpret from a position of knowledge about the subject. Our practice is not a technique, but an operation on discourse.

From this perspective, psychoanalysis distances itself from psychotherapies not only in its objectives but in its ethics, its relationship to knowledge, and its conception of the subject. This article aims to introduce the reader to the work of the Lacanian analyst, its foundations, and its radical difference from other forms of clinical intervention.

Why “analysand” and not “patient”?

The term "patient” implies passivity: it refers to someone who suffers, who awaits a cure, who delegates to another, the professional, the knowledge and power to resolve their suffering. In contrast, psychoanalysis introduces the notion of analysand: a subject who, far from being at the mercy of another’s knowledge, engages in a situation where they themselves construct their own path, based on what they say and what escapes them in their saying. The analyst listens, but does not respond from established knowledge; instead, they guide speech so that a truth may emerge that is not of the order of knowledge.

As Lacan puts it: “the unconscious is structured like a language”. This key phrase indicates that the unconscious is not a repressed content waiting to be revealed by a specialist, but a structure of signifiers that manifests in slips, parapraxes, repetitions and symptoms. The analyst does not translate or decode from an external body of knowledge: they listen to what is said beyond what is being said, guided by the logic of the signifier.

The Analyst Does Not Know: Truth Is Produced in the Saying

In the Lacanian clinic, the analyst does not occupy the position of the one who knows. Unlike the psychologist who may intervene from a technical knowledge of behaviour or the psyche, the analyst refrains from knowing on behalf of the other. This is not a posture of humility, but a structural function in the direction of the cure: “psychoanalysis is a practice of discourse, an operation on knowledge that aims at a truth that was not known”.

In this sense, the knowledge that matters is not the theoretical knowledge of the professional but the unconscious knowledge of the subject, which unfolds in their discourse. The analyst operates to provoke a hole, a dislocation, a wavering of meaning that allows the analysand to articulate something previously unspeakable. This is why Lacan insists that the analyst must be “in the place of the object a,” that is, in a position that causes the subject’s desire, not one that directs it.

The knowledge that arises in analysis is not explanatory or interpretative, but performative: it is not about understanding the symptom, but about producing a saying in which something of the unconscious truth emerges. And that truth, as Lacan points out, “has the structure of a fiction”: that is, it is not the objective truth of facts, but the truth of the subject in their relation to language.

A Clinic Without Morality or Ideals

In this orientation, analytic practice radically differs from many psychotherapies that are guided by ideals of health, happiness, or functionality. For this psychoanalysis, these social ideals, no matter how well-intentioned, can function as adaptation imperatives that reinforce suffering rather than treat it. “Be happy,” “manage your emotions,” “be productive,” “don’t suffer for love”: all these mandates, so common in contemporary discourse, carry an implicit morality that this psychoanalysis refuses to uphold.

The analyst does not seek to normalise, adjust, or correct. They do not say what is right or wrong. They do not interpret from a presumed good for the subject. Their ethics rest on a position of listening that does not judge, does not educate, does not moralise. As Lacan states in “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, it is about “not giving up on one's desire”, which means maintaining the direction of the cure even when social discourse pushes toward more comfortable or marketable goals.

The Function of the Symptom and the End of Analysis

Rather than eliminate the symptom, psychoanalysis interrogates it. The symptom, far from being an error or a deficit, is a singular solution the subject has constructed in response to a conflict. Therefore, instead of suppressing it, analysis allows it to speak. In this sense, there is no “cure” in the traditional sense, but a transformation in the subject’s relationship to their symptom. This does not mean, however, that the symptom becomes a kind of friendly companion to be embraced indefinitely. On the contrary, as the analysand puts the symptom to work, through speech and through the analytic process, it begins to lose its grip, and its power starts to wane. The linguistic logic that upholds it starts to tremble, and what once returned insistently as suffering may gradually shift, dissolve, or be reinscribed in a different relation to desire. As Alfredo Eidelsztein points out, the symptom is supported by a structure of signifiers, and it is through the analytic operation, which intervenes in that structure, that the real effect of the symptom can be modified: “The analytic operation impacts the logic of the symptom, making its traversal possible, not its correction.”

The end of an analysis is not mental health or happiness, but the possibility that the subject assumes a new position in relation to their desire, having unravelled something of the unconscious repetition that caused them suffering. Analysis does not conclude with normalisation, but with invention: a singular way of managing the real.

A Few Last Turns

The work of the psychoanalyst, according to Jacques Lacan’s teaching, is founded on an ethics of desire, a listening without morality, and an operation on discourse. The analyst does not know on behalf of the other, does not guide toward an ideal, and does not promise well-being. Instead, they offer a space where one can speak what one did not know one knew, what speaks in the symptom, and what the subject, as analysand, may come to construct as their truth.

In a world saturated with expert knowledge, techniques of self-control, and discourses that tell us how to live, psychoanalysis persists as a subversive act: the act of not knowing on behalf of the other and, nonetheless, sustaining the possibility that something new may be said.

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