Fundamentals Of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach For Practitioners

Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners BRUCE FINK Norton & Company New York • London W. W. Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Fink All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 1 0 1 1 0 Production Manager: Leeann Graham Manufacturing by Quebecor World Fairfield Graphics Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fink, Bruce, 1956Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique: a Lacanian approach for practitioners / Bruce Fink. - 1st ed. p.; cm. I ncludes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-70508-9 (hardcover) ISBN- 10: 0-393-70508-0 (hardcover) 1 . Psychoanalysis. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1 90 1 - 1 98 1 . I. lltle. [DNLM: 1 . Lacan, Jacques, 1 90 1 - 1 98 1 . 2. Psychoanalytic Therapy-methods. WM 460.6 F499f 2007) RC506.F4245 2007 6 1 6.89' 1 7-dc22 2006 102242 W. W. Norton & W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells St., London WIT 3QT Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 1 0110 www.wwnorton.com 1 3 5 7 9 0 8 6 4 2 To my analysands and supervisees, past and present. Contents Preface ix 1 . Listening and Hearing 2. Asking Questions 24 3. Punctuating 36 4. Scanding (The Variable-length Session) 47 5. Interpreting 74 6. Working with Dreams, Daydreams, and Fantasies 101 7 . Handling Transference and Countertransference 1 26 8. "Phone Analysis" (Variations on the Psychoanalytic Situation) 1 89 9. Non-normalizing Analysis 206 10. Treating Psychosis 231 Afterword 273 Bibliography 279 I ndex 29 1 vii Preface It isfrom my analysands that I lea rn everything, that I lea rn what psychoanalysis is. -LAcan (1976, p. 34) It always seemed to me that analysis was not so much a matter of technique but of the kind of work the analyst inspires the analysand to do in' the course of analysis. My presumption was that different analysts could potentialIy use rather different techniques to encourage more or less the same kind of work. But the more I have spoken with different psychoanalytic groups around the United States, the more I have become convinced that the kind of technique bei ng taught in soci eties and institutes today does not m ere\y fail to foster what I understand to be analytic work, it precludes it. Contemporary approaches to psychoanalytic treatment seem to me to have lost sight of many of the fundamental insights achieved by Freud, Lacan, and other analytic pioneers and to have adopted views stemming from psychology, particularly devel­ opmental psychology, that contradict basic tenets of psychoanalysis-tenets as fundamental as the unconscious, repression, repetition compulsion, and so on. I have thus taken the somewhat brazen step of preparing a primer of tech­ nique that seeks to keep those basic tenets solidly in its sights. My focus here is on what strikes me as elementary technique (though it seems not to be nearly as elementary to