English

2 Asking Questions

It is often more important to sustain the problem raised than it is to solve it. -Lacan (J 998b, p. 425)

GIVEN THE DEGREE to which repression and transference lead the analysand to truncate and tailor the stories she teIls the analyst, a good deal of the analyst's work consists of asking her questions so that she will fill in missing details, finish sentences that have trailed off, and explain what she means by certain things she says. This is an area in which the analyst's own resistance to the analytic process is likely to manifest itself; it is also an area in which the analyst is likely to say far more than he needs to.

During the preliminary meetings-that is, during the longer or shorter period of face-to-face sessions (lasting up to a year or more) that precede the use of the couch-the analyst can place a question mark after something the analysand has said simply by raising an eyebrow or giving the analysand a quizzical look. Such a question mark is not, however, terribly precise, for the question raised could concern the whole of what the analysand has just said, just the last part, the way it was said, or the fact that the analysand got angry or laughed while saying it-in short, it does not point to anything in particular. In this case, the analysand is free to interpret the raised eyebrow or quizzical look however she likes, whether as a sign of disapproval or criticism, as suggesting that she does not know what she is talking about, or as a request for further elaboration. Hence the importance, especially with analysands prone to thinking that the analyst is critical of everything they say, of more precise questioning. Given, however, the degree to which all speech is potentially ambiguous, the less the analyst says, the more precise his question is likely to be (except, as we shall see further on, when he employs a deliberately open­ ended formulation like "What about that?"). Long, involved questions often lose

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ASKING QUESTIONS 25

or confuse the analysand, and they almost always make what the analysand has just said recede into the background, if not be completely forgotten.

If the analysand says, "I had a great many difficulties in elementary school due to all the moving around my family did," and the analyst wants to know what kind of difficulties, it usually suffices to simply ask "Difficulties?" Should the analyst instead ask, "Can you give me some examples of that," he may be met with examples of the different moves her family made from city to city instead of examples of her difficulties. Less is often more when asking questions, and should the analysand respond to the query "Difficulties?" simply by saying ''Yes, difficulties," the analyst can easily add, "What kind of difficulties?"

Precision is not, of course, always what is most productive; sometimes the analysand hears something in the analyst's question that the analyst had not intended, and her response to the question she heard is often far more inter­ esting than the response (given later) to the question he had intended to raise. This is because she is likely to project (as we all do) things she herself has already been thinking onto what the analyst says. I

Nevertheless, it is often of the utmost importance that the analyst.bring the analysand to discuss particular events-and such unconscious formations as dreams, daydreams, and fantasies-in great detail, and in particular ensure that the details that the analysand is the most inclined to omit get articulated at some point. Once the analyst is attuned to the kinds of rhetorical strategies analysands employ to skirt topics and avoid what they consider to be unsavory or reprehensible details, he must often work quite hard to ensure that those topics do not remain forever skirted and that those details are not indefinitely avoided. Although the analyst must not force the analysand to reveal things she is not yet ready to face, he must not shy away from encouraging her to talk about painful or difficult subjects.

This is where the analyst's own resistance may well come in, for it is much easier for the analyst to sit back and allow the analysand to talk about whatever she feels like talking about than it is to work with her to articulate the trying and traumatic experiences in her past. The analysand may be reluctant to delve into painful matters, but if the analyst responds by backing off and does not show the analysand that he wants her to talk about these things-if not today, then tomorrow (and he must not forget to bring them up tomorrow if she does not do so spontaneously}-he allows the treatment to be directed by his own

' It should not be thought that the analyst's speech (whether in the form of questions or statements) is any less prone to ambiguity than the analysand's, for all speech is potentially polyvalent and can be heard in more than one way. In any event, the meaning of what one says is always determined by other people, Meaning is determined in the place of the Other (see Fink, 2005b, pp. 574-575).

26 Fundomentals of Psychoonalytic Technique

resistance rather than by his desire as an analyst to always pursue the analysis ever further.

Analysands often know at some level that they need to talk about (and often even want to talk about) their trying experiences and disturbing fantasies, yet they find it difficult to discuss them with the analyst (for a wide variety of reasons, including fear of rejection, fear of making real something that heretofore they have only considered to be a will-o'-the-wisp in their minds, and fear of exciting the analyst with their revelations).2 Even after three years of analysis, one of my analysands was ashamed to tell me that, when he was a teenager, he had found a dildo in his mother's closet; he felt it did not fit in with what we were talking about (his anxiety about writing) when it came to his mind in session, and he only reluctantly discussed it when I prompted him to tell me what had occurred to him. His reluctance to discuss the subject was due to the fact that he did not like what it implied about his parents' relationship and how it resonated with some of his own sexual fantasies and practices.

If the analyst fails to encourage his analysands to discuss these things, they are likely to come to one or more of several conclusions: that the analyst is not particularly interested in them or committed to their having a successful analysis, that the analyst finds their life and fantasies reprehensible and does not want to hear about them, that the analyst cannot bear to hear about them, or that perhaps they are not so important to talk about after all. Any of these conclusions will defeat the analysis in short order.

In formulating questions to draw analysands out about their trying expe­ riences and painful memories, the analyst does well to use the exact same words and expressions as the analysand, as opposed to formulating things in his own terms. Translation (into one's own terms) is betrayal-betrayal of the letter, and often of the spirit, of the analysand's discourse. When I occasionally, cannot recall the exact term an analysand used to characterize something or someone and put another term in its place, the analysand often lets me know right away that that was not what she said. Once, when I wanted to repeat

2 As Freud ( 1 9 14a11958) reminded us, analysands are often surprisingly ignorant of their own thoughts and fantasies at the beginning of treatment and have to be encouraged to pay attention to them,

The initiation of the treatment in itself brings about a change in the patient's conscious attitude to his illness. He has usually been content with lamenting it, despising it as nonsensical and under-estimating its importance; for the rest, he has extended to its manifestations the ostrich­ like policy of repression which he adopted towards its origins. Thus it can happen that he does not properly know under what conditions his phobia breaks out or does not listen to the precise wording of his obsessional ideas . . . . He must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. (p. 1 52)

It is obviously up to the analyst to inspire in him the courage to do so.

ASKING QUESTIONS 27

something an analysand had said as part of a question and could not remem­ ber the exact phrase, l said, "So you made love after your argument?" and the analysand sharply corrected me: "We had sex." (Clearly, there was no love involved in her view, and she had not used the phrase "made love.") Words are not indifferent or interchangeable: better to stick with the verbatim text. This is true regardless of how extreme the analysand's language is, and even if her language is potentialIy offensive to the analyst's sensibilities (hopefulIy his own analysis will have tempered most of the latter). Shying away from repeating the four-letter words the analysand employs (often with considerable affective charge) suggests that the analyst disapproves of such language-or worse, of the body parts or activities associated with them-or cannot abide the crude reality of the analysand's life or fantasy life. This too will defeat the analysis in short order. 3

In certain circumstances, the analyst must help the analysand articulate experiences by asking a plethora of exploratory questions, without which the analysand feels lost or at sea, overwhelmed by the memories of what may have been a rather inchoate experience. These questions should avoid vague t.erms like abuse, which can mean different things to different people, and should take the smalIest steps possible, allowing the analysand to correct and fill in details. "He touched you with his fingersi' is far preferable to "He molested you?" .

In talking with one of my analysands about his horror at his seemingly sexual reaction to the sight of dead bodies, I needed to ask dozens of questions to circumvent his reluctance to even think about it. He was incapable of freely associating to it because of his sense that it was terribly immoral for him to have sensations in his penis upon seeing a dead body (he had seen dead bodies in films on the Nazis)-to his mind, it proved he was a monster. The guilt he felt seemed somewhat alleviated after it became clear that it was the fact that a dead body did not move in a harmonious, unified fashion but rather like a disconnected collection of fragmented body parts, that led to a kind of shrinking feeling in his penis (in an effort to avoid having it become disconnected like those other body parts, one might surmise). He could deal

3This is not to suggest that the analyst need introduce crude terminology on his own. He should simply follow the analysand's lead and avoid circumlocutions, He should not be afraid to call a spade a spade. This is not to suggest, either, that the analyst must stress every last bit of sexual terminology the analysand uses or obseSSively follow every last sexual association possible. Nevertheless, sexuality isail important part of life and certain contemporary analysts seem to have forgotten that; they would do well to pay more attention to the way sexual terminology and innuendo permeate our language and the way sex goes to the core of the subject's sense of self and colors so many of her relationships.

The analyst should also avoid any temptation to employ vocabulary that goes over the analysand's head (e.g., introduce psychoanalytic jargon with which the analysand may not be familiar).

28 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

with castration anxiety far more easily than with the sense that his sexual tastes were so petverted as to exclude him from the realm of all human feeling. Nevertheless, his initial self-recriminations-based on his presentiment that such a sensation in his penis must surely consign him to the ranks of an Adolf Hitler or a Gilles de Rais-were so strong that I had to ask question after question to get him to overcome his resistance to talking about it. It seems that no relief from such self-reproaches would have been possible without that.

When working with analysands in a tongue other than their mother tongue, the analyst must keep in mind that the analysand may at times be translating from her native language into the language the analyst understands, and that translation is very often treason: It betrays or, indeed, fails to betray (in the sense of giving away) a certain meaning. The analyst must ask the analysand at times how certain central words or phrases in her discourse, and in her dreams and fantasies in particular, would be expressed in her mother tongue, and get her to pronounce them aloud even though the analyst does not know that language; for it is often only once the analysand hears the words pronounced aloud that she can associate to them on the basis of their sound (words with different meanings are often pronounced more or less identically) or their double or triple meanings.

An analysand whose mother tongue was not English once told me an "un­ pleasant dream" in which he was a salesman selling "stocks," and although he called upon many people, no one seemed to want them and he had to beg them to buy his "stocks." The only associations he had before coming to the session were to a conference he was organizing and to the fact that he felt he had to beg certain big-name speakers to speak at it. It struck me right from the outset that the word stocks as employed by the analysand was ambiguous and a bit odd, given the context, and when I asked him what he meant by it he confirmed my suspicion that he meant something more like what we would typically refer to as "goods" or "merchandise" in American English. I then asked him if there was some word in his mother tongue that he had had in mind. He replied that there was, and I asked him to pronounce it out loud-much to his astonishment, as it was obvious to him that I did not speak his mother tongue. I admit that I was hard-pressed to repeat it back to him very accurately, so that he could hear it pronounced by some other person (we tend to hear "the same thing" differently when it is enunciated by another person; we hear the ambiguities and double entendres in another's speech more easily than in our own because our attention is often focused primarily on our intended meaning when we ourselves speak), but I did my best to reproduce the sound and asked him if it evoked anything for him. When it did not, I asked him if it had any other meanings in his mother tongue. He reflected for a moment and then

ASKING QUESTIONS 29

laughed, saying that it also meant gift and penis.4 This allowed us to begin to talk about another possible meaning of the dream, related to the fact that he felt that neither his wife nor any other woman was sufficiently excited by him and that he had recently resorted to begging them to sleep with him-a topic he had not known how to bring up, since he found it too humiliating to broach. One might say that his dream, in selecting a word that meant goods, gift, and penis, had furl1ished a way to broach it, a way that would have re­ mained untapped had we not explored the meaning of the word in his mother tongue.

A number of complications can arise when an analysand does analysis in a tongue other than her mother tongue (not to mention when the analyst conducts an analysis in a tongue other than his mother tongue), but one the analyst should be particularly attentive to is interlinguistic phenomena, such as when a word or name as pronounced in one of the languages the analysand speaks means something different or refers to someone else in another of the languages she speaks. Such "crossover" words or names are, in my experience conducting analyses with French speakers living in the United States, .often key to deciphering dreams (they constitute particularly felicitous disguises employed by the dreamwork in bilingual and partially bilingual people), and when the analyst works with an analysand whose mother tongue he does not speak he must do his best to keep an eye out for them and encourage his analysand to do so as wel\.s

4 Regarding the kinds of plays on words that are possible in one language and not another, Lacan ( 1 973, p. 47) said the following: "A specific language is nothing but the sum total of the equivocations that its history has allowed to persist in it."

Laughter can play many different roles and mean many different things in analysis, as we shall see in the course of this book; here I would simply like to emphasize the importance of noticing and asking about laughter that follows a comment made by the analysand, as it often indicates that something came to mind that is equally if not more important than the comment the analysand has just made. A male analysand of mine was talking about what he would miss were his mother to die, and the second thing he mentioned was his enjoyment of her smell on the bed sheets when he took naps in her bed after she had gotten up. He laughed after he said this, and I initially thought that he had laughed because he felt silly saying it when he had not napped in her bed in some 20 years. However, when he paused after laughing I decided to ask what had made him laugh. He indicated that he had suddenly remembered that once, after reading some psychoanalytic literature and finding out from his mother that she had never breastfed him, he had openly accused her of being the cause of all his "oral fixations." This was particularly striking in light of the fact that in the previous session he had associated his father with his "oral fixations" and had accused his mother of being against everything associated with his father. It is likely that he would not have put the lIeeting memory that led him to laugh into words had I not prompted him to do so. Laughter is something we must pay very close attention to in psychoanalysisl Slnterpreters of certain literary texts must keep an eye out for them as well. Consider the follOWing

somewhat nonsensical example from James Joyce's Finn,gan$ Wake: 'Who ails tongue coddeau aspace of dumbillsillyt When pronounced aloud it sounds like the French "Ot. es ton cadeau, espece d'imbc!cilet' ("Where is your gift, you idiott). This example is discussed in Lacan (2005b, p. 1 66).

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Such words need not be complete homonyms or spelled in exactly the same manner. In one case, an analysand told me about a dream in which he was sucking a woman's toe. Rather than immediately assuming that the big toe was a phallic symbol (although, of course, I did not rule out that eventuality),6 I asked him how one would say "big toe" in his mother tongue and he pronounced a word that evoked "umbrella" in English. His immediate association was that as a child, he had once been bored and started playing with an umbrella that had a very sharp point; he repeatedly thrust the sharp point into the soft mud near his feet, but then missed and hit his big toe, wounding it so severely that he had to go to the hospital. In describing how badly he had injured his toe, he slipped and instead of saying that the toe was very swollen, he said, making an exaggerated gesture with his hands above his lap to show how big it was, "the umbrella was swollen." The connection between this self-inflicted injury and a kind of self-castration (the big toe as an umbrella-like object that can be extended or retracted, sucked, and so on) hinged on a relationship between parts of words in two different languages. The dream was far more complicated than this one simple connection-relating to his sense that he should have been punished by his father for his overly intimate relationship with his mother-but this simple connection might not have been made so easily had I failed to inquire about his mother tongue. The analyst cannot possibly know all languages, cultures, or customs and thus must continually inquire if he is to ever know what different things, terms, and activities mean to an analysand?

God Is in the Detai ls

Psychoanalysis involves allowing the analysand to elaborate the unconscious knowledge that is in him not in the form of a depth, but in the form of a cancer.

- Lacan ( 1973-1974, June 1 1, 1974)

I am often surprised, when talking with the clinicians I supervise, that they are unable to answer some of the simplest questions I raise about their analysands, such as the names of members of the analysand's family and how old the analysand was when certain events occurred. It would seem that over the past 100 years, analysts have come to think that names and dates are of little

6See Freud's ( 1 905a11953, p. 1 55, footnote 2) comments on feet. 7See, on this pOint, Lacan's ( 1 988a, pp. 196-198) account of his work with a patient from northern

Africa and my comments on it (Fink, 2004, pp. 9-10).

ASKING QUESTIONS 3 1

importancel Yet time and again, important connections can be found between names of family members and names of boyfriends and husbands; time and again, an event an analysand reports as having taken place at one moment in time actually took place somewhat earlier or later than she originally remem­ bered, making it coincide with another event whose importance the analysand has repeatedly downplayed. If the analyst has not bothered to ask about the analysand's age or grade in. school when each event occurred, no connection between the events can be made.

One of my analysands told me that he made a "conscious decision" in junior high school not to pursue what he really wanted, having concluded that no man gets the woman he really wants (he said he saw guys all around him who were pining for their "ideal woman" but who ended up alone and disappointed). Yet he had no recollection, he said in response to a question I asked, of what was going on at the time that he made this conscious decision. I recalled that he had told me, in response to another question of mine a couple of weeks before, that a particular event had occurred when he was 1 4 (coinciding for most people with junior high), an event that had "changed everything': for him. He and his younger sister had, for many years prior, engaged in sexual play, and at age 1 4 he for the first time ejaculated during this play. He did not know what was happening to him when it occurred, and both he and his sister seemed quite shaken by it; his sister was never willing to engage in such sexual play again despite his efforts to "win her back." It seems that his conscious decision not to pursue what he really wanted (his sister, in this case, and his mother as well, as it turned out) might well have been a way of making the best of a bad situation.

Although this analysand at times emphasized how upset he felt about this change in his relationship with his sister, at other times he downplayed its importance; when I asked if the conscious decision was not in fact made around the time of this change, he assured me that the change had occurred a couple of years before that. "At least I certainly hope so," he continued, "otherwise I wouldn't have been just a kid [when I was playing around with my sister]." It would seem that in the later session he felt a need to change the date of the turning point in his relationship with his sister from 1 4 to 1 2 so that he would not feel so responsible, not feel that he was almost an adult at that point who "should have known better." If I had not kept track of th� date, I would have allowed the analysand's defense (against the idea of being an almost-adult "corrupter of youth") to prevail rather than establish a connection between his loss of this close contact with his sister and his giving up on his own desire. Note that the analysand had not forgotten either the event that "changed everything" in his relationship with his sister or the "conscious decision" he

32 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

made; what was unconscious-that is, what had been repressed-was the link between them. And indeed, repression often works by making a link between two different events or thoughts disappear.s

At the very next session he wondered if it was not precisely because he thought of his sister as the ideal woman for him that he was led to introduce another man into his sexual fantasies: To directly imagine being with his sister would be too taboo and would put a stop to the fantasy (a certain amount of disguise being necessary in most fantasies). Instead, he eroticized the relation­ ship between her and another man in his fantasies, just as he did in his later teens when he introduced his sister to his best friends. He had been perplexed by the role of the male go-between in his sexual fantasies for a long time; the age- 1 4 connection allowed him to find a first interpretation of it and eventually allowed his fantasies to find other avenues and permutations.

Getti ng What We Ask For

Swear to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, the whole truth, and that is precisely what will not be said. If the subject has the slightest idea of it, that is precisely what he will not say.

- Lacan ( 1 976, p. 35)

It is well known that the answers we receive depend in large part on the questions we ask. If we ask voters to rate a preestablished list of issues in terms of their importance to them, we may not be any the wiser regarding what issues are of the most importance to them, for we may not have included the right issues on the list. If we do not leave a few blanks on the page that the voters can fill in themselves with their own issues, we are likely to remain in the dark as to what is of most concern to them.

Similarly, our best bet in analytic work is to ask very open-ended questions rather than asking, "Did that make you laugh or cry?" (a common response

8 1mportant links can also exist, of course, between thoughts, fantasies, and events that were not contemporaneous or even close together in time or space due to what Freud referred to as "deferred action" (Nachfriiglichkeit); see Fink ( 1 995, pp. 26, 64).

An analysand told me one day that his sister once performed oral sex on him when he was around eight; a few weeks later he told me that the first time a girl ever performed fellatio on him was when he was around 16 and that he could not stand it. When I said, "But it happened before," he replied, "Oh, you're right-you know me better than I dOl" He had obViously never made the connection between the two events; in this sense, we might say that the connection or link between them had been broken through the action of repression. Nevertheless, his reaction to the second event was no doubt colored by his experience of the first and by what the first had come to mean in the intervening years as he learned about sexuality.

ASKING QUESTIONS 33

being "Neither, it made me sick to my stomach!"). Rather than propose an A or B, or even an A, B, or C, to choose from, we generally do best to avoid putting words in the analysand's mouth. Rather than trying to guess at the analysand's likely reaction to a situation, it often makes far more sense to simply say, "And?" or 'What was that like?" or "How did you react?" (1 mentioned exceptions to this rule of thumb earlier, in which far more precise questions are called for.) This makes it easier for the. analysand to respond however she likes.

The way we formulate questions determines in part the response that we get: If we say, "Was that painful for you?" we are likely to get a response that includes the term "painful," whereas the analysand may have emphasized something completely different had we simply asked, "What about that?" I find open-ended questions particularly useful in working with dreams and fantasies. One day an analysand of mine told me that he was only able to remember a tiny snippet of a dream, something about his father and a raincoat. He expressed his conviction that there was too little there to work With, but, in my typical fashion, I asked, 'What about a raincoat?" "Nothing," he replied. "Nothing?" I queried after a pause of ten or more seconds. In the interim an image' of a particular raincoat had. come to him, and he soon recognized it as the one his father had been wearing one day in a store when the analysand, as a young boy, had accidentally latched onto the wrong raincoat and in short order found himself out in the store's parking lot standing with a stranger. Prior to this moment he had never remembered how the story ended, but suddenly he recalled seeing his father not too far away in the parking lot and running over to him. His father picked him up in his arms and hugged him, "kind of like he wanted me . . . . Maybe he did want kids after all." The analysand's mother had devoted considerable effort to convincing him that his father had never wanted children and this had affected his relationship with his father quite negatively.

The more open-ended the question, the more unexpected, unpredictable, and often more productive the answer.

"I Don't Know Why"

I don't discover the truth-I invent it. -LAcan (1 973-1974, February 19, 1 974)

If, in the early stages of an analysis, the analyst asks many questions, it is at least in part to get the analysand to start asking herself questions. For it is only once the analysand has begun to raise her own questions and begun to wonder

34 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

about the why and wherefore of her own experiences that she has truly entered analysis. Prior to tha t time she may well be there because her spouse demanded that she go or because her boss strongly recommended that she seek help; as cooperative as she may be in diligently striving to answer the questions the analyst poses to her, she is still not really there for herself, for her own reasons, for her own motives, to figure something out for herself.

As Lacan (2006, p. 25 1 ) put it, the subject is a question, and we can only be sure that the analysand has a subjective stake in the analysis when she formu­ lates a question (or more than one question) of her own. It is her investment in this question-whether it be why she is so angry all the time, why she devel­ oped the sexual orientation she developed, why she has been unable to pursue the field that interests her the most or pursue anything she wants at all-that will motivate her search for some answer via dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and the whole range of her life events. It is this question that makes her continue the analysis even when it becomes difficult or painful.

This question is thus an important motor force of the analysis, yet there is no clear-cut or surefire way for the analyst to bring about the formulation by the analysand of such a question.9 Each analysand'is different: Some have formulated a question long before they ever arrive at the analyst's office, some seem to never formulate a question at all (apart from questions like "What's the matter with my spouse?" or "What are we doing here anyway?"), and some can be incited to formulate a question after a longer or shorter series of prelim­ inary meetings. IO The latter such analysands, after the analyst has explicitly or implicitly raised the question "Why?" (Why do you think you view a man 20 years your junior as a father figure? Why do you think you keep getting into competitive arguments with him? Why did you feel you had to tell your mother about your alcoholism the day you first went into detoxification?) re­ peatedly, take that questioning approach as their own. Specific questions the analyst raises during sessions are increasingly pondered in the interval between sessions and eventually the analysand seems to adopt a questioning stance of her own. I I When she recalls an incident from her past in association with a

9 Freud postulated that the motor force of the analysis was the patient's will to get better, but we very often find that the patient above all simply Wishes to have things go back to the way they were before, not truly to get better (see Fink, 1997, Chapter I ) , IOThis wide variability among analysands means that the opening moves by which the analyst attempts to intrigue the analysand and get her "hooked" on the adventure that is psychoanalysis are infinitely varied, unlike chess in which the opening moves are quite limited in number. I I Analysts from other psychoanalytic perspectives would be likely to characterize this in other ways­ for example, as identification with or intrOjection of the analyst by the analysand or as the fostering in the analysand of an "observing ego." For reasons that will become obvious in Chapters 5 and 7, I am

ASKING QUESTIONS 35

dream, she thinks "I don't know why I acted that way at that time" and asks herself why she did.

It would seem that the analyst by repeatedly asking "why?" becomes associ· ated, in certain cases, with a desire to know why. Lacan ( 1 998a, p. 1 ) suggested that our general attitude in life is a will not to know: not to know what ails us, not to know why we do what we do, not to know what we secretly seem to enjoy, not to know why we enjoy what we enjoy, and so on. A strong motive, a considerable investment, 'is required for us to overcome that will not to know, and one of the trickiest tasks for the analyst is to find a way to inspire in his analysands such an investment. Perhaps it is at least in part the analyst's will to know, as demonstrated in his continual questions, that inspires a desire to know in his analysands; it is his persistent asking of questions that allows him to become the cause of the analysand's wondering, the cause of the analysand's desire to know why. 12

more inclined here to refer to Lacan's (2006, p. 628) well-known statement, "Man's desire is the Other's desire." 12 As I have indicated elsewhere (Fink, 1 997, pp. 1 1-14), it is the point at which the analysand formulates broad questions of her own about the why and wherefore of her direction in life that marks the end of the preliminary face-to-face meetings; in other words, this is the point at which the analyst should consider moving the analysand to the couch.

The analyst must, of course, be careful not to ask so many questions as to begin to direct what can and cannot be talked about in sessions. The general topics addressed and direction of sessions should be left up to the analysand, except when she is obViously avoiding important work.