The New Procedure

Abstract

Psychoanalysis as a new procedure uses something old, namely speech, but by relying on free association it produces something new and opens a new field. Lacan persists in claiming that every word spoken in the frame of this procedure is an experience of a leap into the unknown as something unknown to itself and is a surprise for the patient as well as for the analyst. In order to address the question which animates the subject, including his/her theoretical interest in finding its answer and its true orientation, the subject has to undergo the procedure. The knowledge that there is castration does not serve anything if it is now bitterly imprinted on one’s own skin, as Lacan says in his seminar Encore, to which one could add: our skin does not then feel softer or younger, but it definitively does not feel the same – perhaps it is more sensitive to eventual life experiences.