ABSTRACT
Lacan’s return to Freud means a great many things, but perhaps first and foremost a return to the interest in the unconscious as explored through language. Already in Lacan’s time, the relationship between analyst and analysand had begun to take precedence in many clinicians’ minds over the investigation of the unconscious, and that trend has gone so far that certain analysts today declare that “the relationship is everything” and that the content of the analysis is of trivial importance compared to it. To their minds, it doesn’t matter what the analysand says or what the analyst responds, as long as they have a supportive “therapeutic alliance.” This turn away from Freud went hand-in-hand with the conviction that affect was the Holy Grail: that every manifestation of affect in the course of a session was proof that the analysis was headed in the right direction. Freud and Lacan are both justly suspicious of the veracity of affect, for affect may well lie even as it points to jouissance.
