At this point, I want to underscore the quality of a Lacanian imaginary in the reader’s relationship to the text, not as analyst but as object for an attempt at a so-called analytic reading.
Indeed, and at one level at least, we have both a duplication and a reversal of the analytic process. One approaches a text expecting it to provide knowledge much like one approaches an analyst as the subject supposed to know. As the reader reads, the text effects the analytic move of thwarting interpretation and unsettling those demands imposed upon it under the register of the textual imaginary: unity, structure, and meaning. As a body without organs, the text repels its reader’s organisation of words and concepts and forces her or him into a confrontation with and the accountability for the basic tenets of readership.
I would like to suggest that the awareness of a similar reversal as it takes place in the clinical setting is critical: it is not only the analysand who approaches the analyst as subject supposed to know, it is the analyst as well who has already, qua analyst, approached the analysand as the subject in whose depths lies a set of truths that have yet to be consciously known. Lacanians pride themselves on the fact that what distinguishes them from the rest of their analytic counterparts is their refusal to be entrapped in the imaginary logic of the counter-transference. Their wager is that such a refusal affords them a better focus on the analysand’s symbolic underpinnings; in the process, their wager blinds them to the reality of the presence of at least two often equally thwarted imaginary registers in the room.
