“I indicated that the anxiety-provoking function of the desire of the Other was linked to the fact that I do not know what object ‘a’ I am for this desire.” LACAN. Anxiety.

The increasingly reductive renditions of the phenomenon of anxiety given within the current psychiatric and psychological milieu has allowed us to lose sight of the centrality of an experience which will not have escaped anyone touched by psychoanalysis: that anxiety is the truth of sexuality. Anxiety is encountered at that point of attempted union between the subject and an other in what Lacan situated as “that which does not deceive.” In that particular engagement which characterises the analytic encounter, he contends that the truth given by anxiety still ought to find an important place in the preoccupations of analysts.

The place of anxiety as the scene of non-deception is therefore that to which the analyst is summoned. In separating it from its colonisation in the name of the deceptive comforts of the varieties of psychopathology, anxiety appears in reference to the question of its function. It is precisely to the “function of anxiety” that Lacan attaches the “role of the analyst.”

In 2024, the Freudian School of Melbourne: School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis will give Lacan’s Seminar of 1962-1963: Anxiety a central place in its curriculum of study and present the fruit of this work at the annual Homage to Lacan in September.

“I have often questioned you about what the desire of the analyst should be in order that, there where we are trying to push things beyond the limit of anxiety, work is possible.” LACAN Anxiety.