ABSTRACT

At the beginning, Jacques Lacan takes up the question of the symptom as a message, which means that it follows the laws of the symbolic and is thus interpretable. From the beginning of Lacan’s teaching, the symptom is the clinical compass. Lacan invents a term varite in relation to the symptom. One side of the symptom would involve the revelation of the truth included in it, and another side would be its real, namely what the symptom is reduced to after its deciphering. To position the analyst as symptom means that we need to clarify Lacan’s conception of the symptom, for it is possible to argue that the shifts in his thinking with regard to the symptom belie the claim of continuity from the beginning to the end of his teaching. Lacan’s proposal at the end of his teaching concerns, generally, a new knowing-what-to-do-with their symptom for every subject who has gone through the experience of an analysis.