Brief Note On Becoming

The being of the analyst is a becoming. A psychoanalyst is a process, a movement. A verb, not a noun; an unfolding, never a completed work or a point of arrival. The living art of becoming the analyst is the perpetual remaking, the uprooting of the a priori, the emptying of the seat marked knowledge, or power, or by whatever name that represents the expectation of closure. The place of the analyst reveals itself to be a relentless opening, a resistance to totality. What is the desire of the analyst if not for the infinite? How does one embody the analytic function if not by becoming emptiness, becoming the hole, opening infinitely?

We are always on the way to and in the neighborhood of. In transit. The knowledge which the analyst helps produce is itself a becoming. Defying closure, ever in flight, shaping itself as it becomes spoken: the becoming-known. To proffer instead a dead knowledge, the already-known, is to be seduced by the seat of power, to credulously reify the transferential supposition of knowledge, to utterly forget the object of the game. However, even such lapses into totality can invite new openings: what am I trying to close by imposing my dead knowledge? Inside this transferential space, what has stirred that I want to stifle? What subtle violence am I perpetrating at my borders?

Hollowing out a presence <-> presenting an absence, being a becoming and forever relinquishing dogmas and desiccated truths. The analyst knows how to not know, and how to dignify the enigma with a method. The heart of the analytic operation is the question; even the punctuation, even the emphatic declaration, even silence is carried out under the auspices of the question. It need not be with the force or intensity of interrogation (though on rare occasions this may be the form it takes); more often, the question hovers, seeps into the cracks, quietly insists. The analyst: dutiful custodian of the question in all its subversive potential.