Guiding Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act

At the WAP Congress in Comandatuba in 2004 the Delegate General presented a "Declaration of Principles" to the General Assembly. This Declaration has subsequently been carefully studied in the different Schools. The Councils have communicated the outcomes of their studies, observations and remarks. Subsequent to this work we now present, to the Assembly, this "Guiding principles for any psychoanalytic act" which we ask you to adopt.

First principle

Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech. It involves two partners, the analyst and the analysand, brought together in a single psychoanalytic session. The analysand speaks about what brings him there, his suffering, his symptom. This symptom is hooked into the materiality of the unconscious, made out of things that have been said to the subject, that have hurt him, and things that are impossible to say and cause him suffering. An analyst will punctuate the words of the analysand and enable him to weave the thread of his unconscious. The powers of language and the truth effects that it enables, what is called interpretation, is the actual power of the unconscious. Interpretation is apparent on both sides, analysand and analyst. They do not both have the same relation to the unconscious, however, since one has already carried this experience through to the end whereas the other has not.

Second principle

A psychoanalytic session is the place in which the most stable identifications by which a subject is attached can come undone. A psychoanalyst will authorize this distance from one's customs, norms, and rules to which analysands constrains themselves outside of sessions. He will authorize a radical questioning of the foundations of...