ABSTRACT
Rectification is a briefly utilized concept in Lacan’s work. There are certainly enough of these, but the curious thing about rectification is that Lacan gives it special privilege in “The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power,” one of his few papers that explicitly deals with issues of psychoanalytic technique. To draw a further logical conclusion: without the precipitation or, perhaps, even the introduction of the Symptom, an analysis will not develop, and a transference will not be established, nor the possibility of interpretation. The Symptom is the Real and necessary condition for analysis to proceed, because without some approach to the Real through the treatment itself, it will only continue to appear in its very disguised forms—the analysis must touch on the Real. Lacan’s own elaboration of these forms is, in fact, based on interesting etymological relationships of them.
