the “Talking Cure”

The Curative Efficacy of the “Talking Cure”

Lacan’s emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freud’s intervention promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness.

 The PATIENT  comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations of these behaviors that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. 

As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it. A successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological reality of the body, changing the subject’s bearing towards the world, and dissolving his/her symptoms