Lacanian Psychoanalysis Melbourne 

What is psychoanalysis?

The condition for being an analysand is to have the sense of what places you apart. Jacques-Alain Miller

Psychoanalysis is not a therapy. It doesn't promise to make you better just so you can get back to work. It works with what you already have – your singular symptom to find inventive solutions that are really your own. In a world without measure, it may assist you to find a use for your symptom. That is to say, an orientation. One by one. Singular solutions for collective change.

Dr Robyn Adler

0407 306545

robynadler@lacan.com.au

About Robyn

With a background in the visual arts, philosophy, education and somatic therapies, Robyn's practice is oriented by the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Her analysis and supervision is informed by this orientation. She has written broadly about psychoanalysis and imaging operations and translated several psychoanalytic texts from French to English.

Many people approach me asking for therapy. Psychoanalysis, despite the popularity of the term “psychoanalytic psychotherapy” in the anglophone world, is not a therapy. The various psychotherapies allow a person to express their suffering to someone who listens and this can be very effective in rectifying identifications and may give rapid relief to symptoms. However, psychoanalysis is not a practice that is limited to listening. The analyst interprets and an interpretation is not at all on the side of a suggestion. An interpretation involves resonance and the body. It is structured not by an institution that hands out certificates, but by the structure of session itself, the analyst having obtained her 'know how' not only through theoretical studies, but through her own analysis.

Everything is structure in psychoanalysis, but not all structure is signifying. In this way, psychoanalysis goes through but also ‘beyond’ the Other. It does not seek to find a place for the subject in which it can be recognised by the Other. Through the desire of the analyst, the vector opens to the  Other as barred, as inconsistent, as not being able to answer to desire. More than listening, then, analysis opens an experience that does not pass through speech, but writes in silence. This is the path of the symptom and its discontents.

What does this mean in practice? Psychoanalysis goes beyond therapeutic good intentions of well-being and the rapid repair of symptoms that inevitably reappear, sometimes in more severe forms. Through the slow constructions that occur in analysis through speech and not without interpretation, one finds a way not to get rid of the symptom but to do something with it. There is no hidden meaning nor authentic being to discover, but the symptom is the most singular thing each one has and when it is inscribed in an analysis a kind of accounting – a writing for jouissance – takes place. Here, the symptom can encounter the fantasy and transposed qua sinthome – an invention and a know how achieved through knotting the three registers real, symbolic and imaginary, giving a lasting consistency to the body in a world where it is increasingly difficult to find your feet.