The Topology of Lacan’s “Direction of Treatment”

“The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power” is Lacan’s most explicit writing on clinical work where he criticizes his contemporaries for reversing Freud’s direction of treatment. For Lacan, remaining true to Freud would be to begin with what Lacan calls the “rectification of the real,” thereby opening the way for transference and, subsequently, a bold interpretation. Lacan accuses his contemporaries of inverting this direction by starting instead with weak interpretations, waiting for a transference to develop, and then slowly liquidating it through encouraging the analysand’s identification with their reality tested, securely attached ego.

Lacan’s polemic is directed specifically against the 1956 collection of articles in La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui. While familiarizing ourselves with this background material, we will more vigorously test Lacan’s claims against our own contemporaries. Following Thomos Svolos’s Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, we will examine a clinical case of Thomas Ogden. Expanding on Svolos’s analysis with the help of Stijn VanHeule, we will consider from a Lacanian perspective the more general treatment recommendations of both Nancy McWilliams and Jonathan Shedler, two key authors of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, as well as the intersubjective psychoanalyst, Pasqual J. Pantone.

To orient ourselves, each class will begin with a brief review of Lacan’s Graph of Desire drawing on topologies from Lacan’s Seminars IX, X and XI. The floor will then be opened for students to present their own clinical material while working through the week’s reading, focusing especially on selected citations from Lacan. Throughout, we will examine the clinical perils of drawing boundaries between Freud’s alleged standard direction of treatment, its acceptable variations, and its unacceptable deviations.