ABSTRACT
The question of the analyst's being lay at the heart of the impassioned controversies that took place when the first schism in psychoanalysis occurred in France, in 1953. A figure of maternal omnipotence becomes more and more salient in Lacan's writings which, by satisfying need, prevents any access to desire: Furthermore, the satisfaction of need appears here only as a lure in which the demand for love is crushed, throwing the subject back into a kind of sleep in which he haunts the limbo realm of being, letting it speak in him. Major influence on Lacan—one that, as far as I am aware, is not often mentioned in reviews of Lacan's work—was his somewhat complex friendship with Georges Bataille, whose impressive work is like a black sun, the negative mysticism of an anti-theology. Behind that way of dealing with the situation, there is, so it seems, a kind of anorexic theory of psychoanalysis—a kind of disavowal of the body.
