L'entre-deux

“The unconscious is structured like a language,” says Lacan in 1955. This proposition orients our entire practice: what causes you to suffer speaks — provided it finds an ear capable of hearing. Lacanian psychoanalysis does not aim to erase the symptom, nor to adjust you to what is expected of you. It opens a space for your speech to unfold, so that what is at work in you without your knowing — desires, contradictions, attachments — may come to be said.

The symptom is not a malfunction to be removed. It is a formation of the unconscious, an attempted solution to a conflict that consciousness cannot work through alone. Rather than silencing it, we work to understand what it says about your history and your desire — not to explain it away, but to allow something to shift.

Psychoanalysis is not a short-term therapy. It calls for a sustained commitment, often several sessions per week, sometimes over several years. This frequency is not an administrative preference: it is constitutive of the work itself. It is what allows the unconscious to deploy from one session to the next, and what gives the analysis its transformative reach.

In the symptom, in the dream, in the slip of the tongue — wherever something returns unbidden — a subject that consciousness does not command makes itself heard. Psychoanalysis takes this speech as the very material of its work. The analyst listens, punctuates, interprets: offering your speech an ear capable of responding. It is in this back-and-forth that what had not yet found its formulation can be said. “All speech calls for a response,” Lacan wrote as early as 1953; the entire analysis rests on this response.