Difference between Lacan and Middle School.
First off there seems to be no narrative in Lacan.
Let me think in terms of compassion and understanding. It seems cruel and unnecessary to truncate sessions according to the notion of the appearance of the signifier. Since this would seem particularly arbitrary ---> however this arbitrary nature is in some way subversive of the notion that there is a known and definite exchange that is framed by an hour which itself may seem arbitrary.
Is it more or less cruel to interpret in terms of the ego and resistance? Projection and projective identification? It can lead to difficulties as well, not least in terms of compliance, something, perhaps, that approach is designed to create?
The first approach seems to want to characterise Lacan as a free conversation, almost surreal. No one can prejudge such a conversation, of course.
Middle school is much more constrained, this constraint described as containment ---> which has a relationship to anxiety.
What then of emotion in the Lacanian dialogue?
Personally I can see nothing wrong with an endeavour to express feelings, but it has to be said that not a common conversation, or, possibly, the patient's free conversation any longer? ---> in Lacan there seems to be a strange idealogical objection to this.
This is the strangest part of Lacan for me.
Now we can look again at his characterisation of four discourses.
Before I do so in any detail, what first occurs to me is that this is based on something that looks like a Hegelian method, there is never any true synthesis without first understanding the thesis and antithesis. Which is not absolutely laid bare by being made explicit in Lacanian writing.
This leads into other areas ---> is what is being described an alternative world, if there is the possibility of an alternative world, why just one? What rules, if any, apply here? It would seem very ironic if we found that no particular rules apply, because presuppositions cannot be challenged. A point that Lacan is very clear on. A rule can only be a rule if it possibly could be broken. A fact can only be a fact if it possibly could be refuted or else it is a given substrata of communication, rather than something that is usefully communicated ---> agreed on or otherwise.
There is, then, no reason for the manner in which Lacan expresses himself apart, perhaps, for his introduction of the unconscious into the Analytic discourse. This doesn't tell us if there really are just four discourses, more, fewer? Nor explain the movement (as of love or transference) between them.
Most of all, and certainly, this does not explain the arms length treatment of emotion.
But it does begin to show the way Lacan looks at the society in which we are necessarily entrenched through his focus on language. There seems a tacit acknowledgement that, when talking about language, we are talking about people subject to their own collective norms of communication. This, of course, makes it very interesting for me.