Initiation, or, "To Separate the Analysand from the Herd" (was Re: The death of John L. Simon, Lincoln Brigade)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Ted:
>though it certainly speaks of the 'individual,' as a practice
>it's fundamentally social; and the theory of that practice is
>founded on the dynamics of those relations. that's not to say
>that i'm giving some blanket endorsement to the ways it struc-
>tures social relations at all, but you can't ignore that fact.

The dynamics of analytic relations is hinged upon initiation:

*****   For Lacan, the end (in the two senses of the term) of analysis
consisted of access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge.  "All
knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns
the place that hides the secret of sex," a secret linked with death.  The
analysand must agree to pay such a price, just as the analyst, "in order to
intervene in an action that goes to the heart of being, must pay with what
is essential in his most intimate judgement" and he "also pays with his
person."  When the analysand succeeds in paying such a price, he, in turn,
becomes an analyst.  As the most perfect initiatory ritual,
"psychoanalysis's effect is to separate the analysand from the herd."  The
initiated in turn initiates.  Ultimately, logics and mathemes are also
spiritual exercises, that is, a strict discipline that purifies analysis
from its original sin, that is, to resort to biology, neurology, or
physics, and to take into account the body and instinctual maturation.
(Marcelle Marini, _Jacques Lacan: The French Context_, 84-5)   *****

I take Lacan's claim to be "the most orthodox" of Freudians seriously, and
I think that the above summary of the effect of psychoanalysis -- "to
separate the analysand from the herd" -- is felicitous.

Yoshie