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CLINICAL NOTES

Bruce Fink (2007). ‘Scanding (The Variable–length Session),’ Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company), pp. 47-73.

The most important of the technical innovations made by Jacques Lacan is known as ‘scanding.’

It constitutes an attempt to vary the length of the analytic session by the analyst depending on the need to punctuate what the patient is saying on the couch.

Scanding is a way of telling the patient that he has just said something important.

It is therefore worth the while of the analyst and the patient to reflect on what has been said rather than move on to the next point in the free-association at once.

The best known instance of this type of intervention is recounted by Lacan in the context of a patient who was resisting the analysis by giving him a lecture on the poetics of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

When Lacan attempted to scand the session, the patient began to produce associations around his unconscious fears and fantasy of an anal pregnancy.

Obviously there was no immediate connection between Dostoevsky and the fantasy of an anal pregnancy.

That might well have been the case in the analytic situation if Lacan had not made his high risk intervention in order to scand the session and ‘precipitate’ the subject rather than let the patient use the lecture as a form of obsessional resistance.

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Needless to say, the level of confidence required to scand a session may not be common amongst clinicians, but the pay-off can be huge for an experienced analyst who knows how to pull it off in a timely fashion.

Bruce Fink has a number of examples of scanding in his book on ‘psychoanalytic technique’ that is aimed at practitioners in addition to the chapter that I have summarized in these clinical notes.

These clinical notes should also be of interest to literary theorists who do not have much exposure to the Lacanian clinic.

They may however be interested in knowing what is at stake in a Lacanian intervention and why Lacan uses terms like ‘punctuation, editing, and scanding’ to describe what he does with his patients rather than restrict his activities to ‘interpretation’ like most analysts in the Freudian tradition do.

Lacanians believe that interpretation is not what happens within a session but what happens in between the sessions when the patient reflects on why the analyst chose to scand the previous session in a particular way.

In order to make the patient reflect actively in between the sessions, Lacanian analysts use the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ in their favour.

This is a psychological term which explains that the human mind thinks more about tasks that remain ‘incomplete’ rather than about tasks that have been successfully completed.

It is therefore analogous to what Lacan means by the terms ‘non-realized’ and the ‘unrealized’ to explain the functioning of the unconscious in Seminar XI.

So if the analyst neatly wraps up the session and fulfils the patient’s need for meaning, there will be nothing for the patient to do between the sessions.

Scanding, which invokes the Zeigarnik effect, is a way then of giving the patient some homework to do between the sessions.

The homework however is structured in such a way that the patient cannot use it as resistance in the next session by preparing for it (like many obsessive patients do by writing down their dreams).

A session can be scanded by asking a question, making a remark, or by simply declaring it closed.

The best technique however might be, as Lacan puts it, to ‘return the patient’s message in an inverted form.’

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So while the actual form of scanding will differ from analyst to analyst, all Lacanians use this form of intervention to some extent.

The more experienced the analyst is, the more likely it is that he will be able to intervene effectively.

That is why Bruce Fink has adduced any number of examples of exactly what Lacan has in mind when he uses terms like ‘punctuation, editing, and scanding’ in the context of the Lacanian clinic.

Fink also has a separate chapter on interpretation because the Lacanian approach to interpretation is more formal than substantive. It is therefore important for readers of Lacan to understand these differences clearly.

Lacan’s experiments with these techniques have important implications for Freudian meta-psychology as well since they work on his assumptions of what the unconscious is, and how and when the unconscious opens and closes up on the couch.

Or, to put it simply, Lacan’s experiments in scanding recognize the ‘pulsative function’ of the unconscious; they are also based on the assumption that the unconscious is ‘pre-ontological’ and ‘structured like a language.’

Lacan explains all these terms in great depth in Seminar XI. These terms have also been previously featured in this series of clinical notes.

Lacan is also on the lookout for the ‘upward drive’ or ‘upward flow’ (as Freud puts it) of the unconscious.

Scanding then is a way of taking advantage of these flows to precipitate the disclosures of the neurotic subject.

In the absence of these active techniques of analytic intervention, obsessive patients will resist only too well by using ‘fillers’ and prepared material to drag out a session.

The Lacanian approach is based on the assumption that the prototype of the subject of the unconscious is the hysteric and not the obsessive or the phobic.

All analyses will therefore have to hystericize the neurotic subject: scanding is a technique that is invaluable in this process of doing so.

Lacanian interventions have been compared to the techniques of the Zen Masters.

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So, for instance, Zen practitioners use a kaon to intervene when the disciple asks them a question.

That is akin to the Lacanian fondness for questions.

Instead of answering the patient’s queries, the analyst may prefer to ask him questions in his turn.

A question can be used to ‘return the patient’s message in an inverted form.’

This then constitutes the ‘Lacanian model of asymmetrical communication’ in the analytic situation.

In order to do this effectively, and on an ongoing basis, the analyst must resist the temptation of feeding the patient with conventional interpretations at the level of meaning.

That is why I have argued on a number of occasions that analytic techniques are relevant for case instructors in business schools who are not in the business of giving answers, but in encouraging students to figure out the answers on their own by asking any number of questions during a case analysis or discussion.

In order to use such active techniques in the clinic, however, the analyst must himself have been well-analysed.

Only then will he be able to resist the lure of the imaginary dimension in the patient’s discourse.

If the analyst falls prey to ‘dual-relations’ in the analytic situation, then, the analyst himself becomes a form of resistance in the analysis.

That is why Lacan located resistance mainly in the locus of the analyst rather than the patient in the Lacanian clinic.

Lacan’s point is not that there is no resistance at all on the part of the patient, but rather that the patient can’t help but resist by invoking the imaginary.

A well-trained analyst however should know better than to be overcome by the imaginary.

What should the analyst do to resist the lure of dual relations?

Lacan’s point is that the analyst should be animated by a ‘stronger desire.’

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This he terms the ‘desire of the analyst.’ Lacan put in a lot of effort to explain what exactly that means.

To put it, simply, we can say that the ‘desire of the analyst’ is to obtain a moment of ‘absolute difference’ in the analysis.

What this means is that the analysis is not just a means to identify the ‘differential element’ in analytic theory in the context of a particular patient, but to get him to respond effectively to the treatment.

It is an attempt to find out if there is something in a given case that can’t be explained by the analytic doctrine.

If so, these signifiers constitute what Lacanians like Serge Leclaire term the kernel of ‘non-sense’ that constitutes the real of the patient’s discourse.

The Lacanian model of interpretation then is an attempt to ‘isolate’ these fragments of ‘non-sense’ that hold the neurotic subject in its grip and of which he has no conscious awareness.

This is the exact opposite of the hermeneutic approach to analysis where the patient is supposed to understand everything that he is saying at least before completing the analysis.

That is why, as Jacques Lacan famously put it, ‘an interpretation that the patient understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation.’ Readers who have followed the arguments in these clinical notes will realize why that is the case.

SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN