Many of us teach at universities, where students enroll in clinical psychology programs with the aim of becoming psychotherapists or, more rarely, psychoanalysts. To those few who express an interest in the latter, I often ask a simple question: Why do you want to be a psychoanalyst? The answers, predictably, take the form of intentions to help, to heal, to understand, to grow. Some speak of mental health, others of a personal journey, a political commitment, or a curiosity about the human condition. Each response is sincere, thoughtful, coherent—and from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, especially in its Lacanian orientation, entirely insufficient.
To be frank, these motives are not only inadequate but structurally misaligned with the position of the analyst. They belong, each of them, to the imaginary coordinates of a fantasy: the fantasy of doing good, of knowing oneself, of understanding others, of changing the world. Fantasy, being of the order of the imaginary, has a captivating function. It mesmerizes; it promises; it shines. But it also imprisons. It renders the subject captive within the frame of its scenario. Like a picture of the good family, any deviation from the fantasy-image becomes a sign of failure. While the signifier allows desire to slide in a perpetual movement, the image arrests it within a closed circuit. This is why a fantasy of psychoanalysis cannot sustain the analytic act. Even if some analysts operate under such a fantasy, the moment their acts are governed by it, they cease to act within the ethics of psychoanalysis. Resolutely, a fantasy cannot hold the place of what Lacan names the desire of the analyst.
Lacan put it this way in the beginning of his teaching: the desire of the analyst is a desire subtracted from its object. It is not directed toward health, nor toward knowledge, nor toward any identifiable Good. Here Lacan follows Freud, who already refused the category of health; a refusal that bears repeating, though it has perhaps already been said. For him, there was no cure in analysis, only a shift in the relation to suffering. At best, one becomes a subject who suffers still but not in the same way, not as loudly, not as dramatically. A subject who can work, love, and endure living in less catastrophic ways. That is the modest ambition of a Freudian outcome.
This is where the Lacanian orientation diverges decisively from Freud. Freud could still speak of the outcome of analysis in terms of achieving ordinary unhappiness. And yes, one might exit analysis at that point. There are analysands for whom this is enough, and rightly so. The neurotic symptom has receded, the suffering dulled into ordinariness. It is possible to end there. To go further would mean to risk what has been achieved, and to open a path toward pain that may not be necessarily mendable. This is a legitimate outcome. But it is not the outcome that produces an analyst. For Freud, things could end there for the analysand and begin there for the analyst. But for Lacan, this is not the end of analysis, meaning, it is not its conclusion nor is it its aim. In Lacan’s words, what is produced by the treatment, what is constituted at its end, if it ends, is the analyst himself. Therefore, in the Lacanian orientation one can go further in analysis than Freud assumed. This does not necessarily mean a longer analysis, but a different one—one that continues beyond its therapeutic effect. The analytic formation proceeds by a passage through analysis that destabilizes not just the symptom, but the subject’s position toward desire itself. The analyst is someone for whom this traversal has yielded not resolution, but a new form of relation to lack, a desire that is unmoored from utility, benevolence, or comprehension. This type of desire arises only within the analytic process, and only as its consequence. One does not possess this desire prior to entering analysis. One cannot will it, simulate it, or aspire to it. It is produced or, rather, it emerges as the byproduct of an experience that radically alters one’s relation to suffering, to speech, and to the body.
How, then, does one know they want to become an analyst? The answer is disarmingly simple and absolutely final: only by going through an analysis. Only by having undergone that experience. And here, I speak of an experience that is grounded in one’s own body: not as insight, not as reflection, but as transformation in the economy of desire and the way it circulates, many times short-circuits, in our very bones. It is only through this type of analytic experience that something like an analytic desire can be produced. Not a desire for knowledge, but an attitude that remains structurally open to what is essentially unknown (unbewüßt).
Freud already knew that knowledge changes nothing. The pervert may learn the origins of his symptom in the maternal gesture (her hands, the particular way she wiped his ass, as Laplanche puts it) and still repeat it endlessly. The symptom is not solved by understanding; it is lodged in the body, outside of the scope of the knowing ego. Understanding is, in fact, the enemy of thought. If you understand too well, you are no longer thinking. To become an analyst is to remain open to the unthought, the unfinished, the indeterminate dimension of desire.
And when that desire arises, when it begins to circulate without object, without aim, then one may choose to become an analyst. But only then. There is no calling prior to this. No vocation. No legitimacy. Only the trace of a desire that analysis alone can produce.
To enter analysis with a fantasy—to become an analyst, to do good, to understand—is not uncommon. But to exit it with a different relation to the symptom, and a newly constituted desire that is neither moral nor epistemic but properly analytic. That is what makes an analyst. Only this. Nothing else.
Leon Brenner 