A path
From L’étourdit (1972), ‘A Bilingual Presentation of the First Turn’ Summer 2009, via Lacan in Ireland.
One can discourse in a thousand ways about the analyst. Rightly or
wrongly. And if it is wrongly (which never fails to be the case), it is better
to traverse its impasses and its impossibilities to discover a path.
When I read this, what stood out to me first was the word "fails." I read that and I thought about how the symptom is something that fails, perhaps not right away, all symptoms start out as solutions and many of them are a form of success for a bit. However, symptoms don't remain solutions/successes. Given enough time, the solution the symptom offers breaks down, and it starts to fail.
Despite the failure of a symptom, one continues to try (and fails to) make use of it. The failure of the symptom is inevitable. This is the way it is.
And yet the symptom persists. This is also the way it is.
What psychoanalysis offers to some is the other term that stood out to me: "a path." A path could also be called a traversal.
I think the path could be a new path into a symptomatic way of being, a path that does not get rid of the symptom but does lead the subject to a new form of the symptom. What is traversed via this new path is unnecessary misery and suffering.