The Direction of the Cure: Ethics of the Symptom and Politics of Desire in Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, far from being a therapy in the usual sense of the term, does not renounce the possibility of cure. However, this possibility is strictly conditioned by the position adopted by the analyst in the conduct of the analytic experience. As Lacan repeatedly emphasized, cure is not a goal achieved through the application of a standardized method, but a possible, contingent effect of a work oriented by the analyst's desire.

Abstract:

This article interrogates the possibility of cure in psychoanalysis based on the work of Jacques Lacan, emphasizing that such a possibility is not grounded in therapeutic will or sanitary ideals, but in the ethical orientation of a practice founded on the discourse of the unconscious. It analyzes the analyst's position in relation to the furor sanandi (the frenzy to cure), and examines the function of the symptom as a response to the political economy of desire. The discussion also addresses the incompatibility between the subject of the unconscious and certain notions of responsibility promoted by some contemporary psychoanalytic institutions. The article proposes that only a direction of the cure that admits the inmixion of the Other—and with it, the collapse of ideals such as autonomy, freedom, and immunity—can allow access to a real subjective transformation: one that enables a singular invention in relation to jouissance.

Keywords:

Psychoanalysis, Lacan, cure, symptom, direction of the cure, unconscious, furor sanandi, frenzy to cure, ethics of desire, responsibility, libidinal economy.

Cure as Effect, Not Goal

Cure—when it occurs—is neither imposed nor programmed. It arises as an effect of discourse, as a non-direct consequence of a practice that is not governed by the ideal of well-being, but by the deciphering of the unconscious. As Lacan formulated in his text The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power (1958), "the cure is addressed to the subject insofar as it is in the discourse," and not to the individual as a bearer of a symptom to be suppressed. Thus, to assert that psychoanalysis "cures" implies recognizing that this cure is not an end in itself, but the product of an operation that paradoxically can only reach it if it does not pursue it as such.

The Frenzy to Cure as Obstacle

In this sense, when the analyst is dominated by a drive to cure—by a furor sanandi, that is, the frenzy to cure, as Lacan put it, borrowing an expression that designates the medical compulsion to heal at all costs—what is actually produced is an obstacle to the analysis. This frenzy, which may appear as an ethical commitment, is in fact a form of therapeutic violence that reduces the subject to an object of intervention. On the contrary, the analyst must sustain an ethics that does not confuse itself with the moral discourse of health, an ethics that does not impose itself in the name of any ideal of the good.

Neither Renunciation nor Cynicism

Nor should we fall into the opposite extreme: that of a clinical cynicism that, disenchanted, completely renounces the possibility of cure. Abandoning all wager on cure, under the pretext that psychoanalysis promises nothing, also sterilizes the practice. As Lacan clearly states, each case authorizes a chance, a possibility that must be read, interpreted, and sustained. The analyst must neither force nor foreclose that possibility, but accompany it, listen to it, give it space.

The "Inmixion" of the Other

For such an experience to take place, both the analysand and the analyst—insofar as the latter also becomes through the experience—must consent to a renunciation that is not minor: to abandon the idea that they can preserve themselves as autonomous, immune, self-referential individuals. Entry into analysis requires a subjective disposition that admits the intrusion, the inmixion of the Other (Inmixión: In psychoanalysis, especially in Lacanian theory, it refers to the interrelation or interpenetration of the subject with the Other). This Other is not simply the fellow being, but the very place where the unconscious is articulated as discourse. To admit the presence of the unconscious is, in effect, to admit that something is at stake that is neither intimate nor personal. As Lacan emphasized on many occasions, the unconscious ex-sists: it does not dwell inside the subject as a psychological content, but appears as a radical exterior that traverses, divides, and determines it.

Challenging Modern Ideals

This opening to the Other of language and desire necessarily implies a subversion of certain deeply rooted modern ideals: the autonomy of the ego, freedom as self-affirmation, and the subject's immunity from all alterity. Unsurprisingly, one of the most tenacious resistances in the clinic is often located here: that of the analyst himself. For if analysis is conceived as a device to promote individual responsibility, reinforcing ideals of self-mastery and moral awareness, it falls into an insurmountable contradiction with the logic of the unconscious.

Responsibility and the Superego

Framed in these terms, the notion of responsibility—understood in its common version, as assuming the consequences of one's acts in terms of conscious choice—becomes incompatible with the logic of the subject of the unconscious. When the direction of the cure aims to make the patient "take responsibility" for their symptoms in such terms, what is actually fostered is an internalization of the superego's demands. And as we know, the superego is not a pacifying instance: it enjoys commanding, demands beyond what is possible, and in this demand exacerbates guilt and suffering.

The Risk of Neuroticizing

Analysts who orient themselves along this path, even with good intentions, end up further neuroticizing those who consult them, by reinforcing the imperatives of performance, adaptation, or self-realization that the symptom itself had, in some way, come to question. Lacan was very clear on this point: psychoanalysis is not a pedagogy of the ego, nor an emotional re-education. If the analytic practice does not subvert the moral ideals under which the subject becomes alienated, then it does not substantially differ from any technique of subjective domestication.

The Symptom as Political Formation

As for the symptom, it can be understood as an excess of suffering that arises when the true act of desire for someone—that act which touches the most intimate of their being—has been chronically renounced and replaced by a false act, a substitute that better fits the coordinates of the social bond. This operation of substitution does not respond solely to individual reasons, but is inscribed within an economy, in the sense of an organization of exchanges, values, and balances within the field of the Other.

The Jouissance of the Other

Lacan formulates this sharply in Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis): "There is no symptom that is not the jouissance of the Other." That is to say, the symptom does not merely belong to the subject in their intimacy, but is deeply woven into their relations, into the configurations of bonds that constitute them. This economy that structures the formation of the symptom is a political economy, insofar as it is organized around the values, ideals, and modes of jouissance circulating within the groups and communities to which the subject belongs: the couple, the workplace, friendships, even—and especially—the analytic community, when it is part of their world.

The Mark of the Family

All this is mediated by the mark of what the family was and continues to be for that subject. Because the primordial Other, the one who inaugurates the first investments and the first renunciations, is the familial Other. The position each person occupies in the family scene—as child, sibling, heir, substitute, object of desire or rejection—leaves traces that continue to operate in the ways in which desire is inhabited in the social bond. Thus, the symptom can be understood as a solution that, from the group's perspective, appears as the most "economical," the least conflictual, even if it entails a high cost of suffering for the subject.

The Inter-Subjective Dimension of the Symptom

The dimension of the symptom, then, is always inter. It is not reducible to a psychological interior or an intrapsychic conflict. The symptom is the place where the subject's jouissance is linked to the imperatives of the Other, where the relation between one's own desire and collective expectations is negotiated—often symptomatically. At this point, the analytic cure does not consist in normalizing the subject or adapting them better to their environment, but in allowing them to reinvent their relation to that symptom, to find another relation to their jouissance, potentially arriving at a savoir-faire with it.

Traversing the Symptom

As Lacan states in his later teaching, the symptom is not eliminated but traversed. And traversing the symptom does not imply its eradication, but a change in the subjective position towards it. Cure, then, is not a restoration of a previous state of health, but the invention of a new mode of inhabiting desire, of sustaining a freer relation to one's act. What psychoanalysis can offer—when the practice is rigorous and does not succumb to the frenzy to cure—is the possibility that the subject, in the place of the symptom, may bring forth something else: not the silence of suffering abolished, but a singular word born of the work with the unconscious.