ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes between spontaneous deconstructions performed by the patient and active deconstructions performed by the analyst. The chapter explains how deconstruction is almost always a very delicate technical option: it can disturb symbiotic certainties, point out disquieting aspects of objects, and upset basic orientations. Equally schematically and generally speaking, it also distinguish deconstructions through lyses-by way of loosening or dissolving-from deconstructions through crises. Deconstructing, as an abstract idea, can put one in touch with the phantasm of the void, the unknown, where a reversal and a reassembly of the parts becomes unfeasible; it makes one fear a ruinous collapse. The idea of deconstruction also points towards those nineteenth-century cultural themes that relate to the crisis of the unified individual that Lacan and the "philosophers of the death of the subject" have developed, in full attunement with the art and literature of their time.
