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Lacan: The ‘Freudian Thing’ is Desire
Psychoanalysis responds to your suffering by inviting you to speak about your life and listening to what you have to say about it; to what is being spoken in various ways without being recognised, often appearing strange and non-sensical.
At its root, our suffering arises from our way of thinking (our beliefs and discreet assumptions) that is in opposition to our own vitalising sense of life, and so witholds access to coherent representation. Our living desire is going unrecognised, is stopped short, negated, not being given place in present time lived experience. This is a way of indicating where we might find signs of unconscious desire. Freud pointed to dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and bungled actions.
From another point of view, our suffering is a vital signal of this issue; that our way of thinking is ‘out of phase’ with our living being. Suffering is, thereby, faithfully carrying out its task in calling us back to our feeling for life where it meets our access to truth in language. So it cannot just disappear. As we try to erase it or ignore it, without being receptive to the awareness that it brings, the more disruption we experience to our plans of what we think we want. Instead, it bends our life into seemingly disparate symptoms: obsessions; compulsions; anxiety; depression; disorders of speech, eating and movement; repeated loss or overwhelming intensity in relationships; a not knowing quite how to navigate sexuality, or our place in our world; or quiet, chronic experiences of confusion, resentment, rage, despair that are out of place within our present life and sap our vitality.
A psychoanalyst functions in dignifying these raw or disparate expressions of suffering, allowing the threads of your desire entangled there to come to the fore and be recognised. The symptoms intruding in people’s lives are expressions of something intimate and vital, the kernel of which remains impossible to say. In the analytic process, suffering begins to dissipate through incremental shifts of perspective. Such perceptual shifts allow movements from disorientation in lived experience towards clarity, with the attendant increase in your capacity to decide and to act in conformity with your own desire - rather than in reaction to the desire of the Other.
The 'cure' produces creative transformations through finer delineations of the threshold between what needs to be expressed in speech – ie can become construed as a knowledge as such – and what is dynamically beyond the ruts of language. So, the Psychoanalyst invites you to speak about what troubles you with a view to elicit your hearing yourself speaking; your successive realisations about those things that matter to you more than anything; to You as the potential awaiting mate-realisation beyond the forms of your suffering. This offer to pay attention to what you are saying opens the way for you consider What You Really Want and How You Want to Live Your Life.
Psychoanalysts’ Locations
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Psychoanalysts are currently consulting at several locations across London. Analysts are experienced and trained in the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis. Each is engaged in ongoing research and development at the cutting edge of psychoanalytic practice.
Click on the locations below to display contact details for our psychoanalysts. If you are seeking a prompt appointment with the duty analyst contact us.