In his text The Direction of the Treatment, Lacan formulates three fundamental dimensions of the analytic work: the politics of lack, the strategy of transference, and the tactics of interpretation. These three dimensions concern the direction of the treatment as a whole—not merely the individual patient.
The persistent and often forceful recommendations made to clinicians in the therapeutic setting—such as being neutral, listening, remaining silent, avoiding judgment, and so on—can, when detached from a broader and more nuanced consideration of how each clinician exists and encounters the treatment across these three dimensions, turn the therapist into a technician, an operator, or even a robot within the therapeutic encounter. The sessions may then gradually become a repetitive and impoverished loop, accompanied by aggressive or violent impulses. At the same time, the therapist’s creativity and capacity for initiative are effectively eliminated.
It is important here to distinguish technique from theory. Theory constitutes the clinician’s orientation, whereas technique is the instrument through which that orientation is put to work.
The question of the non-conformity of theory to the patient is equally important. In order to better understand and advance the treatment, these same three principles can also be applied to the Lacanian clinician’s own theoretical orientation. One might begin with the question:
What does a Lacanian clinician’s approach lack, or what does it not know?
This question itself can serve as the starting point of the politics of the treatment. It orients the clinician’s work by opening a space for what is missing, unknown, or not yet articulated within the clinician’s own approach.
In this sense, the three Lacanian dimensions—politics, strategy, and tactics—should not be reduced to a fixed set of technical instructions. They can instead function as principles for questioning and orienting the treatment itself, including the position and theoretical assumptions of the clinician.
The point, then, is not to mechanically apply Lacanian theory to the patient, but to allow the treatment to interrogate the theory and the clinician’s position as well. The question of lack must therefore be directed not only toward the patient, but also toward the clinician and toward the theoretical framework through which the clinician listens.
–Hamid Moghadam
