Freud and the Desire of the Psychoanalyst
Cottet's classic on the desire of the analyst.
Serge Cottet traces the desire of the analyst through Freud's writings, treating it not as a personal wish to know but as a function that comes into being through analysis itself. Working from Lacan's formulation, he distinguishes the drive that founded psychoanalysis from the operative desire that lets an analyst hold a position in the treatment. He follows this thread across Freud's case work, his ethics, his passion for origins, and the tactics of the cure, arguing that the analyst's desire is what keeps the transference in play and turns the work toward the real rather than truth.
For a clinician, the account clarifies what sustains practice once training and identification fall away. It names the desire of the analyst as a place to occupy rather than a virtue to possess, and shows how that place is inherited from an analysis of one's own. First published in French in 1982 and revised in 1996, the study works as both a close commentary on Freud and a route into Lacanian thought.
About the author
Serge Cottet
Serge Cottet was a French psychoanalyst who worked in the Lacanian tradition. He was a member of the Ecole de la Cause freudienne and of the Association mondiale de psychanalyse, and he taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII. He was known for Freud et le desir du psychanalyste (Navarin, 1982; reissued by Seuil in 1996), which asks what the analyst's desire is by turning that question toward Freud himself. He also wrote L'inconscient de papa et le notre (2012).
Details
- 2012
- 2012
- French
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 222
- 9781855755925