How does Lacan understand the relationship between interpretation and the analysts non-interpretive intervention?
A key concept that Lacan introduces into analytic practice is that of scansion. To “scan” the analytic work (like “scanning” a poem into its metrical units) is to reconfigure the flow of its significations by strategically inserting a space, rupture, or obstacle into the discourse of the unconscious and its interpretive productions, as a kind of punctuation mark that reinflects and redirects the analytic work.[21] To scan a session by abruptly breaking it off or by breaking into the silence of the analytic listening with a sound, comment, or interpretation is both to reinflect its signification and to rearrange the elements of the fantasy that underlies it. In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1956), Lacan characterizes the analyst as a kind of “scribe” who, by listening to the analysand’s discourse, guarantees its value for the Other; the analyst must, however, transcend the role of a secretary receiving unconscious dictation by actively intervening in
