The Topology of Lacan’s “Direction of Treatment”​

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“The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power” is Lacan’s most explicit writing on clinical work where he criticizes his contemporaries for reversing Freud’s direction of treatment.  For Lacan, remaining true to Freud would be to begin with what Lacan calls the “rectification of the real,” thereby opening the way for transference and, subsequently, a bold interpretation.  Lacan accuses his contemporaries of inverting this direction by starting instead with weak interpretations, waiting for a transference to develop, and then slowly liquidating this transference through encouraging the analysand’s identification with their reality tested, securely attached ego.  

 

Lacan’s polemic is directed specifically against the 1956 collection of articles in La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui.  While familiarizing ourselves with this background material, we will more vigorously test Lacan’s claims against our own contemporaries.  Following Thomos Svolos’s Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, we will examine a clinical case of Thomas Ogden.  Expanding on Svolos’s analysis with the help of Stijn VanHeule, we will consider from a Lacanian perspective the more general treatment recommendations of Nancy McWilliams and Jonathan Shedler, two key authors of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual.  

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To orient ourselves, each class will begin with a brief review of Lacan’s Graph of Desire drawing on topologies from Lacan’s Seminars IX, X and XI.  The floor will then be opened for students to present their own clinical material while working through the week’s reading, focusing especially on selected citations from Lacan.

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Throughout, we will examine the clinical perils of drawing boundaries between Freud’s alleged standard direction of treatment, its acceptable variations, and its unacceptable deviations.​

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Primary Reading

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Lacan, J.  “The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Powers,” Écrits, (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton (pp. 489-542).

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Secondary Readings

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McWilliams, N and Shedler, J. “Personality Styles and Disorders – P Axis,” (2026).  In Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual: (PDM-3), USA: Guilford Press, (pp. 651-708).

 

Ogden, T. “The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts,” Subjects of Analysis, (1994), USA: Jason Aronson Inc. (pp. 61-95). 

 

Shedler, J.  “Integrating clinical and empirical approaches to personality: The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP),” (2022). In R.E. Feinstein (Ed.), Personality Disorders. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp. 87-108).

 

Svolos, T.  “Introducing the Symptom,” “Introducing the new symptoms,” and “Countertransference is the symptom of the analyst,” Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, (2018). New York: Routledge (pp. 71-81, 113-125, 207-220).

VanHeule, S. “In between the signifier and the Real: On depressive experiences,” in Lacan on Depression and Melancholia, (2023), Eds. Derek Hook and Stijn VanHeule.  New York: Routledge, (pp. 29-40).

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Faculty: Dr. Gardner Fair
Dates and Times: the 2nd Saturday of each month, 9 am - 11 am Pacific Time beginning September 12th 2026, skipping October, running through May 2026
Contact: gardnerfair@yahoo.com 

Fee: $200 or School Tuition

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Gardner Fair received his Doctor of Philosophy specializing in critical theory from the New School of Social Research.  He received his M.A. clinical degree from the New College of California and has been licensed as an MFT since 2007.  For the first decade of his career, he provided free psychodynamic psychotherapy in the San Francisco jails with the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics while occasionally teaching and providing supervision in the graduate psychology programs of the New College and C.I.I.S.  More recently, he has returned to the Lacan School of Psychoanalysis to finish up his analytic training and otherwise engage with this collective while in private practice in Berkeley, CA.