Practice

Psychoanalytic Practice
Azeen A. Khan is a licensed psychoanalyst with a private practice in Manhattan, New York City. She works with children (all age groups), adolescents, and adults. You can inquire about analysis or supervision by writing to her at: azeen.khan@gmail.com

​

A Lacanian Psychoanalysis

A Practice of Speech

Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech that was invented by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the nineteenth century and informs, even today, the conceptual armature of almost all forms of contemporary talk-therapy. It maintains, however, its unique position in the psy-field because it privileges the speech of the subject, what an analysand says, over and above any clinical heuristic or diagnostic paradigm.

      At the heart of psychoanalysis is a very simple idea: all of us beings who speak are, sometimes even before we are born, spoken about, spoken to, and spoken at. This speech of others, what has been said to us, impacts our bodies, identifications, thoughts, who we are, and what we become. The analytical process involves identifying and isolating these words, calibrating and working-through the impact they have had on us, and disinvesting from them.

     Psychoanalysis is thus, in a first moment, a treatment of speech by speech: it is a treatment of the impactful words that have been said to us (enigmatic, traumatic, etc.), by an other kind of speech, one that is produced under transference in analytic sessions over a period of time.

 

Symptom

When someone makes a demand for an analysis, it is almost always because something is not working. Often, what does not work has to do with a set of relations: with oneself, with one’s thoughts, with one’s experience of one’s body; with others—friends, family, intimate partners; and with institutional Others—school, community, work, etc. 
       This—what does not work—constitutes the thread of an analysis. Oftentimes, we can identify what does not work because it repeats in the life of the subject. In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, we refer to this as the symptom. Unlike a medical symptom, however, the psychoanalytic symptom is not without a link to the very specific familial and sexual history of the subject, to the words spoken to the subject, and to the subject’s singular way of making sense of the world. Although the symptom causes the subject suffering,      Freud and Lacan both acknowledge that it is also the very knot that holds together many different aspects of a subject’s life. A studied adjustment of the symptom, by producing a knowledge about it and figuring out how to extract a singular use value from it, thus becomes the task of an analysis.  
     Jacques-Alain Miller, in a text titled “Pass bis,” highlights this when he says what constitutes one possible end of an analysis: “There is an end of analysis when there is satisfaction. This doubtless supposes a transformation of the symptom which, from discomfort and pain, delivers the satisfaction that had been inhabiting and animating it from the start. The criterion is to know how to handle one’s symptom so as to draw satisfaction from it.”

 

Lacanian Orientation
Information about the Lacanian Orientation may be accessed through the websites of the New Lacanian School (https://www.amp-nls.org) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (https://www.association-mondiale-psychanalyse.org/en/accueil/)

 

​​

​