Michael T. Murphy – Phantasy and The Psychoanalytic Act – Freud, Klein and Lacan – What is Involved in The Psychoanalytic Act
 
THE LETTER 18 (Spring 2000) pages 55-69
 
Introduction 
 
The opening words of Lacan’s Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act presuppose a link with the Seminar he gave the previous year on The Logic of Phantasy. He says “… those who heard me speaking … may feel themselves in some way already introduced to this dimension that the psychoanalytic act represents’1 which is why I have entitled this paper Phantasy and the Psychoanalytic Act – Freud, Klein and Lacan. I subtitled the paper What is involved in the psychoanalytic act … because of the movement between the two registers it plays upon: the che vuoi question redolent of phantasy: ‘What is involved in the psychoanalytic act?’ and then, the response of what is meant, the state-meant of ‘what is involved in the psychoanalytic act …’. The question is in the minor key of reluctantly having to accept your fate as a human being, while the statement is in the major one of choosing to subjectify that fate, and make it your own. These two are inseparable: the one implies the other through its presence, through its absence …