Knowledge in the between

Modern illusion sells us knowledge as an individual possession, something we can accumulate and store in the confines of our mind, like treasures kept in a private vault. Or it promises us collective knowledge, a sum of shared information that would float above subjectivities. Both fantasies miss the true nature of knowledge that psychoanalysis reveals to us.

The knowledge that matters, that truly touches something of truth, emerges precisely in that intermediate space where the subject meets the Other. It's neither mine nor yours, neither inside nor outside: it dwells in that 'between' produced in the analytic encounter. It's a knowledge that is enjoyed in the very act of its emergence, in that fleeting moment where something of truth is spoken without having been thought.

This is why true analytic knowledge cannot be written in manuals or transmitted as information. It's a knowledge produced in the encounter, enjoyed in the very instant of its appearance, and belonging to that intersubjective space where the unconscious makes its fleeting appearances. It's not knowledge that one has, but knowledge that occurs in the between.

The knowledge that inhabits us

There exists a popular fantasy that imagines the unconscious as a dark basement where we keep our most unconfessable secrets, a kind of mysterious trunk that the analyst must force open to extract its hidden contents. This picturesque vision of analytic work couldn't be further from the truth. The unconscious isn't buried in the depths of a psychic well waiting to be excavated; it's alive, active, operating in every word we pronounce, in every act we perform.

This unconscious knowledge that runs through us doesn't need to be discovered but heard. It's already speaking in our slips, in our dreams, in our symptoms. It doesn't require special extraction techniques or forced interpretations. What it needs is a space where it can be said, where speech can unfold freely, without the constant censorship of our rational explanations.

The task of analysis is not to illuminate dark zones but to allow what is already there to emerge, insisting on being heard. It's not a work of archaeological excavation but of attentive listening to that knowledge that already inhabits us and manifests itself in the folds of discourse, in the silences between words, in those truths we speak without knowing we're speaking them.

The incurable wound

The fantasy of achieving total, definitive knowledge that will finally complete us is perhaps the last illusion that analysis must strip away. There is no mythical moment when all the pieces will fit together, when we will finally understand everything and the division that inhabits us will be sutured. Analysis does not progress toward a final synthesis, but toward the recognition of a more unsettling truth: the division between subject and knowledge is insurmountable.

This fracture is not an accident in our constitution, a defect that could be corrected with enough analysis or understanding. It is the very condition of our subjectivity, the price we pay for being speaking beings. The language that constitutes us as subjects is the same that introduces this irreparable division. There is no return to a mythical completeness, because such completeness never existed.

What analysis offers us is not a happy ending where everything makes sense, but the possibility of a different relationship with this constitutive division. Learning to inhabit it not as a flaw to overcome, but as the very space where our truth can unfold. Incompleteness is not the failure of analysis, but its truest horizon.