Editing Jacques Lacan (section)

==Clinical contributions==

===Variable-length session===<!-- "Variable-length session" redirects here -->
The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations,<ref>John Forrester, 'Dead on Time: Lacan's Theory of Temporality' in: Forrester, ''The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida'' Cambridge: C.U.P., pp. 169–218, 352–370</ref> and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a [[Delphic Oracle|Delphic]] seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular ''parole'' murmured in the waiting-room)"<ref>Janet Malcolm, ''Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession'' (London 1988) p. 4</ref> 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.{{Citation needed|date=December 2010}} This practice replaced the classical [[Sigmund Freud|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?"<ref>Jacques Lacan, ''Écrits: A Selection'' (London 1996) p. 99</ref> By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch.<ref name="Fink 1996">Bruce Fink, ''A Clinical Introduction to Lacananian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique'' (Newhaven: Harvard, 1996)</ref>{{rp|18}} When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"<ref name="Fink 1996" />{{rp|17}}<ref>{{cite web |title=La scission de la Société Psychanalytique de Paris en 1953, quelques notes pour un rappel historique |last=de Mijolla |first=Alain |publisher=Société Psychanalytique de Paris |url=http://www.spp.asso.fr/Main/HistoirePsy/Articles/Items/1.htm |access-date=8 April 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081216163350/http://www.spp.asso.fr/main/HistoirePsy/Articles/Items/1.htm |archive-date=16 December 2008 }}</ref>—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 was "reduced to zero",{{r|n=Roudinesco 1997|p=397}}, though the treatments were 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";<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lacan |first=Jacques |date=4 July 1953|title=Letter to Rudolph Loewenstein |journal=[[October (journal)|October]] |volume=40 |page=65 |isbn=978-0-262-75188-9}}</ref> and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment"<ref>Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, ''Lacan: The Absolute Master'' (1991) p. 120</ref> 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".<ref>Cornélius Castoriadis, in Roudinesco (1997) p. 386</ref> 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".<ref>[[Sherry Turkle]], ''Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution'' (London 1978) p. 204</ref> Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.<ref>David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'' (London 1994) p. xiv and xxxv</ref>

Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises",<ref>R. Horacio Etchegoyen, ''The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique'' (London 2005) p. 677</ref> [[object relations theory]] would nonetheless 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".<ref>Michael Parsons, ''The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes'' (London 2000) pp. 16–17</ref> [[Julia Kristeva]] 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)".<ref>Julia Kristeva, ''Intimate Revolt'' (New York 2002) p. 42</ref>