O compromisso e o encontro

Abstract

The essential tension which makes neurosis a time pathology, a mismatch between the desire and the act is expressed in everyday life in the logical time gap between appointment and encounter. The meeting, the appointment has been agreed by the neurotic, but the encounter does not occur, fails, is postponed or the opportunity is missed. This logical time gap between appointment and encounter is also present in the psychoanalytical cure, putting the effectiveness of the treatment to the test. For this reason psychoanalysis is not simply the application of a method which sticks to a routine appointment, nor to a programmed conclusion. To be receptive to desire in a being capable of choice, psychoanalysis must take place in the encounter mode and not in that of the appointment, or in other words, the act not the planned task. The distinction between appointment and encounter may be relevant not only in clinical psychoanalysis but also in the politics of psychoanalysis. It is wiser to call an international conference a “meeting”, “rendezvous”, rather than an “encounter” or “rencontre”, as there is no guarantee that in a meeting there is an encounter and much less that one encounters there what one expects.