Desire Of The Analyst

what I am designating before this appeal of the patient’s most profound being at the moment that he comes to ask for our aid and our help, that which in order to be rigorous, correct, impartial, in order also to be as open as is indicated by the nature of the question which is posed to us: what the desire of the analyst should be.

Lacan frames the desire of the analyst as the central, unavoidable question posed by the transference, demanding rigor and impartiality rather than evasion.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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it is enough that the analyst, without knowing it, for an instant, places his own partial object, his agalma in the patient with whom he is dealing, it is here indeed that one can speak about a contra-indication. But as you see, nothing less than localizable, nothing less than localizable in the whole measure that the situation of the desire of the analyst is not specified.

Lacan argues that the unspecified desire of the analyst — particularly the unconscious projection of his own agalma onto the patient — constitutes the fundamental danger that renders analysis a contra-indication.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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if the analyst realises, as the popular image or also as the deontological image conceives of it, this apathy, it is precisely in the measure that he is possessed by a desire stronger than the one that is in question, namely to get to the heart of the matter with his patient

Lacan redefines analytic apathy not as the absence of desire but as its sublimation into a stronger, more directed desire oriented toward the subject’s truth.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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The question that I am posing is not that of countertransference. What has been put under the rubric of countertransference is a kind of vast lumber-room of experiences which involves or seems to involve pretty well everything that we are capable of experiencing in our trade.

Lacan explicitly distinguishes the desire of the analyst from countertransference, arguing that conflating the two renders the concept analytically unusable.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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this desire of the Other essentially separated from us by this mark of the signifier, do you not now understand what Alcibiades, having perceived that there is in Socrates the secret of desire, demands, in an almost impulsive fashion

Lacan reads the Alcibiades episode as the paradigm case of the patient’s demand to see the analyst’s desire produced as a sign, which the analyst — like Socrates — must refuse as a short-circuit.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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If he himself has an infantile type of desire of which he is still unconscious, he will never be able to open his patient’s eyes to this danger. It is an open secret that all through the analysis intelligent patients are looking beyond it into the soul of the analyst

Jung establishes that the analyst’s own unconscious desire directly limits the therapeutic scope of analysis, since the patient instinctively reads the analyst’s soul for confirmation or refutation of the work.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902thesis

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until my daimon has caught fire, I remain stuck in my transference and have legitimate need for the spark of another’s eros for my self-development. The less the other can reveal his eros, the more I will demand it

Hillman repositions the analyst’s desire as eros — a necessary igniting force for the patient’s individuation — and warns that its concealment intensifies rather than neutralizes transference demands.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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If castration is what must be accepted at the final term of analysis, what ought to be the role of his scar to castration in the eros of the analyst? These are questions of which I would say it is easier to pose them than to resolve them.

Lacan raises the question of the analyst’s relationship to castration as constitutive of analytic eros, acknowledging that these questions remain methodologically unresolved.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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even poses the question of what this truth shows what should be the case in the future. Namely whether, at the end and after the analysis of the transference, the analyst should be elsewhere, but where? This is what has never been said.

Lacan identifies the unresolved terminus of the desire of the analyst: after transference is fully analyzed, the position the analyst should occupy has never been adequately articulated.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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the analyst must help the subject to find out what is in his partner’s hand. And to conduct this game of ‘the loser wins’ at bridge the analyst, for his part, does not require, should not in principle complicate his life with a partner.

Through the bridge game metaphor, Lacan articulates the analyst’s desire as structurally self-effacing, oriented toward revealing the subject’s hand rather than pursuing the analyst’s own gain.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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It is Bion’s eschewing of memory and desire so that the analyst ‘increases his ability to exercise acts of faith.’ This involves what I describe as the ‘self of the analyst.’

Wiener situates Bion’s disciplined evacuation of memory and desire within a broader conception of the analytic self, linking it to faith and receptive availability rather than technical neutrality.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting

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Socrates replying to Alcibiades seems to fall under the accusations of Polycrates because Socrates himself, learned in the matters of love, designates to him where his desire is and does much more than designating it because he is in a way going to play the game of this desire by procuration

Lacan examines Socrates as the prototype of the analyst who, while appearing to redirect desire, risks playing desire by proxy — illustrating the structural difficulty of maintaining analytic position.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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Sexual desire often crops up in patients and analysts… it seems to me far more important to comprehend the sexual desires and fantasies of patients and analysts as physical expressions of relationship.

Guggenbuhl-Craig reframes the analyst’s desire — specifically its sexual dimension — not as transference artifact but as genuine relational expression requiring conscious engagement rather than symbolic deflection.

Guggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971supporting

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To be desiring, is something different. It rather seems that this leaves the I well in suspense, it leaves it so well stuck in any case in phantasy that I would defy you, to find this I of desire elsewhere than where M. Genet highlights it in Le balcon.

Lacan distinguishes desire from oceanic love, locating the desiring subject in a condition of suspended, phantasy-bound subjectivity that marks desire’s structural difference from sentiment.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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in so far as it is a question of a relationship to desire, that the signal is not exhausted in the metaphor of the danger of the enemy of the herd, and precisely in this which distinguishes the human herd from the animal herd, that for each subject, as everyone knows, the enemy of the herd is himself.

In mapping anxiety as signal, Lacan touches on the structural role of the analyst as Other in the subject’s relationship to desire, gesturing toward the analyst’s positioning within the anxiety economy.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015aside

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By giving precedence to the analyst’s own eros and psyche, we seem to have come a long way from Freud’s notion of the analyst as reflector. Rather than being in danger of becoming a cold mirror, we are in the new danger of becoming image-maker

Hillman identifies the shadow of privileging the analyst’s eros: the Pygmalion risk of the analyst who, animated by his own desire for the work, cannot separate from his creations.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

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