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Unit 13: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious—Jacques Lacan: An Introduction

13.4 Clinical Contributions Notes

Variable-length Session
The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations, and
a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute
analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole
murmured in the waiting-room)" was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted
anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to
several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour".
With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question, "Why
make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?" By
allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's-
or, technically, "the analysand's"-former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on
the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"-
and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps
not hard to see why: "psychoanalysis reduced to zero", if no less lucrative.
At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use
of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses"; and in practice it
was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment" which took place,
so that critics wrote that 'everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase "variable
length"... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes'. Irrespective of the theoretical
merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to
'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time".
"Whatever the justification, the practical effects were startling. It does not take a cynic to point out
that Lacan was able to take on many more analysands than anyone using classical Freudian
techniques... [and] as the technique was adopted by his pupils and followers an almost exponential
rate of growth became possible".
Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises", object relations theory
would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in
which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen". Julia Kristeva,
if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic
to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short
sessions)".
13.5 Writings and Writing Style

Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's
work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription
and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be
published". Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his
seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures,
"L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian
Ink.
Lacan claimed that his Écrits were not to be understood rationally, but would rather produce an
effect in the reader similar to the sense of enlightenment one might experience while reading
mystical texts. Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/
Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical
theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often
regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood". Arguably at least, "the imitation
of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic
tradition in Lacanian literature".

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