The Case Of The 'Falling Man': An Examination Of The Function Of Demand In Analytic Practice

You know that what we are trying to do here, namely in the difficulties, in the impasses, in the contradictions which are the fabric of your-practice- it is the most elementary supposition of our work that you should be aware of it - is to try to bring you back always to the point where these impasses and difficulties can also show themselves to you with their full significance...[1] One is aware here of the terrible temptation that must face the analyst to respond, however little, to demand.[2] Since I have been struck in my own practice with the difficulties of dealing with demand in its various guises, and since this management of demand and its function within the analysis strikes me as being a core element of Lacanian analysis, I wish, in this paper, to go some way toward a technical and clinical exegesis of the difficulties and problems which the concept of demand poses in an analytic treatment.[3] Meriting a mere page of entry in Evans' Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis[4], Evans inscribes the concept of demand as originating from the 1956-7 seminar, and gently orders its progression through Seminar V and the Direction of the Treatment paper culminating in a short gloss on Seminar VIII.…