ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud certainly does not consider that forming an ideal—which necessarily implies overestimating the object and is always a cause of tension—can possibly serve as a guarantee for the end of analysis. The analyst's "surgical" action serves as a metaphor not for theoretical apathy, and even less for the analyst's "benevolence" but, on the contrary, for the safeguard against therapeutic pride. In "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis", Lacan tries to explain the negative therapeutic reaction by emphasizing the intertwining of the patient's narcissism or "self-esteem" with his desire for death. The patient's attitude of "defiance" nevertheless requires the analyst to take responsibility for this "aggressiveness" in order to disclose its symbolic character. The patient's frustration in analysis thus serves to mimic the real, since the latter prohibits jouissance. An analytic technique could have been promoted in which, by virtue of the signifier and the displacement and detours—or "turning[s] away"—imposed by the lost object, might have led to a certain form of liberalism.
