I am really happy to have the opportunity this Evening [1] to discuss the end of the analytic treatment and the pass and to hold this conversation with Hugo Freda, [2] whom I wish to thank for his impressive commentary about my testimony.

I believe that an open and permanent discussion about the topic of the Pass and the end of the analytic treatment is necessary. It is necessary if we situate the Pass in relation to the Other who does not exist and in relation to that which we still ignore about the Pass. It is necessary if we consider the Pass itself as an open gap that prompts us to speak.

Such discussion would not be necessary if we already knew everything there is to know about the pass. That would be the end of the pass. What comes out of that gap should not be re-absorbed by knowledge, as that would cloud what the analytic experience unveils and what the end of the analysis must embrace.

The Pass is a testimony that by the end of the analysis, the subject has verified his own essence, unwary of that incurable Real.

In the course El Otro que no existe y sus comités de ética, which we refer to this evening, Jacques-Alain Miller points out that gap when he says that Lacan did not give precise details about the experience. "Had Lacan given much detail, it would certainly have had an effect of suggestion that would be detrimental to the authenticity of the experience." [3]

In my opinion, it is advisable to keep a stance somewhere between the singularity of the subject’s experience and that which is universal; as Jacques-Alain Miller has put it, somewhere between the "things must be like this" of the rule and the "to me, things were like this" of the subjective experience. [4] This is the frame of reference for this evening’s discussion.

The pass, that which is irreversible and that which is incurable.
The pass, as an event, is the experience one has of the Other’s nonexistence. That moment is not necessarily simultaneous –it was not in my case- with the separation of the analyst. I had yet a long way to go until the end of the analysis, to check that what had been achieved thus far would hold up, that its consequences were visible. In regard to this, the condition for the "perfect" Pass -which requires that the clinical pass take place at the same time as the end of the transference- was not fulfilled. [5] The pass was rather imperfect [6] and its imperfections allowed for me to cover a fundamental stretch, a process that would have been halted had the end of the analysis taken place at that time.

I believe one may say that the clinical pass is the irreversible experience in which the Real of the analytical experience is embraced and in which one realizes that the Other, around whom one’s entire life has revolved, is nothing but semblance. This is why Jacques-Alain Miller says that the nonexistence of the Other is the correlative to -rather than antinomic of- the Real. [7]

In my opinion, there is no coming back from that point, so to speak. There may be other returns, but they will not take place without that which such experience affords, that "irreversible hell". I have intentionally selected a statement from Hugo Freda to underscore that irreversible dimension and hence take up with him again today a fertile discussion we had a few months ago in Paris.

I therefore place that which is irreversible, with regard to the Pass, as follows: a piece of the Real is embraced and the experience of the Other’s nonexistence takes place. Between that which is irreversible and that which is incurable, the fate of the repetition will come into play for each individual, independently of the pass and the end of the analysis.

The "disarrangement" that the end of the analysis and the Pass bring about in the statute of the Other and of the jouissance, is a completely new incident. It is true that such disarrangement may be arranged again; every disorder may be ordered again, but the result will not be a repetition of the previous order. Basically because such disarrangement makes history, it inscribes something new; therefore, what comes afterwards –whatever that may be- cannot exist without it. That disarrangement displaces repetition.

In my case, that moment followed the construction and the traversing of the fantasy, after which I was left at the mercy of a brutal counterblow of anxiety and a worsening of symptoms, now devoid of the cover of the fantasy. It is the time of confrontation with the Other as a hole, which is the evidence that remains when the position of the subject that used to hold up its jouissense falls.

Within that hole, the drive circuit –which the fantasy used to conceal and execute at the same time- becomes manifest. Paradoxically, from then on the Other seems to become indispensable and all subject’s responses tend to restore its statute. A new statute for the Other had to be restored during the analysis to open the way that goes from the already traversed fantasy -S ()- to the final reduction of the symptom. The separation of the analyst and the end of the analysis came only later for me, once the actual statute of the transference had been revealed.

The Other and the anticipation of the Pass.
During the analysis, when working from the device of the Pass, one may "historicize" successive moments of destitution of the Other. In such moments, which anticipate the Pass, one may get a glimpse of the nonexistence of the Other. Let me give two examples:

1. The analysis makes it evident that suffering derives from the way in which the castration of the jouissance of the Other has been unceasingly offered and that such offer has been the way to make jouissance exist (since jouissance was obtained from suffering) and also to make the Other exist, as it granted him consistency as the Other who enjoys.

It is a moment in which something precise belonging to the Father is crossed, and as a consequence, the subject is able to "sacrifice his castration", going back to Lacan’s very accurate expression from the Subversion of the subject. According to Lacan, such sacrifice is what the analysand "rejects fiercely until the end of the analysis". [8] This consent enables the subject to acknowledge his mode of jouissance and to sacrifice, in the same movement, the jouissance of his division. This involved abandoning a passion which consisted in clinging to the fantasy of an Other who enjoys and to the jouissance that the castration entails and making it fall.

2. The very experience of the analysis may be thought of as an experience of separation and, in that sense, these glimpses of the nonexistence of the Other may be considered with regard to the transference. One may say that, from the perspective of the end, it becomes evident that the analytic transference has been a masquerade ball, a dance with the Other who does not exist. The crossing of the paternal transference, the destitution of the SSS and the extraction of the object from the place in which it is incarnated in the presence of the analyst, were decisive moments in which –in my case at least- the successive fall of the neurotic solutions becomes ordered. This brings about new responses from the subject, from the Real and from the body.

Finally, during the pass one sees that the cause did not lie in the Other but in the subject himself.

It is understandable that the impact these moments of crossing have may drive the desire to turn this into a transmission. However, these moments may precipitate a premature exit from the psychoanalytic bond or promote disorientation with regard to the end of the analysis. Their ordering, from the perspective gained in the end and in the Pass, enables one to see their worth as breaking points and as moments of crossing. But they also expose the ingenuity of the subject, who, dazzled, ignored how much ground had yet to be covered.

On the other hand, it is necessary to define what it is that is crossed and what the statute of the Other -from whom a certain separation is obtained- is.

With regard to the transference, this may be examined following the ordering proposed by Jacques-Alain Miller in his course to exemplify the multiple statute of the Other.

One may think that during the course of the analytic treatment there is a movement that goes from the Other who exists, to the Other who does not exist.

Other -> Barred Other -> S ()

First, the Other, complete; then, the Other, desiring, with deficit, lacking, inconsistent and, finally, what Miller writes as S ().

From this starting point, Miller says: "S () an Other who lacks existence, to the extent to which only his signifier remains. Do you remember Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, which vanishes until only its grin remains? That is what is left when the other disappears." [9]

Such change in the statute of the Other is fundamental in an analysis that becomes ordered according to the horizon of the Pass. What I am trying to say may be summed up by what Hugo Freda called the movement that goes "from the experience of expectancy –which involves the Other- to the experience of the encounter", [10] by stating that there is a hole in the place of the Other. This shows also that not every rupture entails the end of the analysis.

After as many comings and goings as may be necessary, the subject is left facing that hole that is the Other, even when the Cheshire cat’s grin also vanishes.

With regard to this point, it is worth wondering by what means the subject has managed to construct his Other. The reading the subject does of the material offered to him by thelanguage results in a solid narrative with which an Other is constructed tailor-suited to his jouissance, which was always his unconscious choice. These are the artifices that enable each person to extract from the One a bond with the Other. The analysis may then be thought of as the comings and goings that are needed to go through and counter such artifices.

The testimony and the Other who does not exist. [11]
Another aspect of the relationship between the Pass and the nonexistence of the Other may be examined by taking the pass not as a separation or rupture but as a bond, as I emphasized in a paper a presented last year. [12]

The pass is not just an event: the Clinical Pass. It is not just a place: the device in the School. The Pass is not just that, the Pass is also a bond.

The hystorization –the Pass as hystorization- reveals that bias which I underline when I say that the Pass is also a bond. And it is because of that bias that we can think about the relationship between the testimony and the Other who does not exist. It is because of the evidence of such nonexistence that the writing of that edge, on that edge, is mandatory for those who have passed.

Miller clearly states the difference between hysterization and hystorization. The first requires that the subject search for the truth about his desiring self in the analytic experience. The second inscribes, from that encounter onwards, a story that is inevitably situated in the field of semblance and truth.

He points out that when the Pass is considered as hystorization it gives "impetus to the novel (…) however, the pass may be captured in the points in which the novel fails" or it may be captured "there where the subject succeeds in giving testimony of how he disposed of the truth." [13] The relationship between the pass and the testimony hangs on that narrow line.

The passage from hysterization to hystorization, that is to say, the passage from the analysis to the Pass, shows that a pinch of cynicism –just a pinch- is required. [14] Such pinch of cynicism is an indication of the relationship that is left for the subject with the nonexistence of the Other, or, to put it differently, an indication of the relationship with that which remains of the Other, when the Other is reduced to his semblance, his grin, his grimace.

The testimony is a bond with the Other that is supposed to include a certain amount of disillusionment. Such disillusionment pierces the hystory that is told. A certain lack of identification of the subject with regard to the history he tells himself is required, with the history he told during the analysis and in the end and which he will tell during the Pass and to the community. That pinch of cynicism helps and it is perfectly compatible with and necessary for the Pass as hystorization, that is to say, for the Pass as a bond.

Doing the Pass entails choosing a bond. Because that bond is chosen, it becomes necessary for the one who has exited the analysis to tell that hystory. Unlike the clinical Pass, which entails crossing and breaking the bond, doing the Pass means establishing a new bond with an Other that has been transformed already by the evidence of his nonexistence.

And why is the Pass chosen? It goes without saying that if one chooses to do the Pass, one chooses to be let oneself be trapped by the lying-truth and by the semblance, one more time. That is what is meant by hystorycizing oneself and it is inevitable if a testimony is given. If it is chosen, it is only because one only has a pinch of cynicism. If one has a great deal of it, one does not chose the Pass.