The frame in analysis: On Lacan’s perspective

The fundamental rule requiring analysands to say whatever passes through their mind has a crucial counterpart on the side of the analyst in the "evenly suspended attention", where having an ear finely tuned to unconscious processes, as Freud describes it, implies a suspension of any acquired knowledge. Such an attention is orientated to the sequence of the analysand's uttered signifiers, in a listening attuned to what produces effects of sense and non-sense beyond the intention of the discourse. The possibility of sustaining the position of not-knowing is, according to Lacan, what constitutes the very <i>frame</i> of the analytic process. The analyst's rigorous listening brings to the fore its own logic and the temporality associated with it.