The frame in analysis: On Lacan's perspective.

Abstract

The fundamental rule requiring analysands to say whatever passes through their mind has a crucial counterpart on the side of the analyst in the "evenly suspended attention", where having an ear finely tuned to unconscious processes, as Freud describes it, implies a suspension of any acquired knowledge. Such an attention is orientated to the sequence of the analysand's uttered signifiers, in a listening attuned to what produces effects of sense and non-sense beyond the intention of the discourse. The possibility of sustaining the position of not-knowing is, according to Lacan, what constitutes the very frame of the analytic process. The analyst's rigorous listening brings to the fore its own logic and the temporality associated with it.