The necessary fiction

There exists a fundamental fiction that sustains the analytic process: the illusion that the analyst knows, that they possess the answers the analysand seeks. It's a mirage that installs itself from the first consultation, when the analysand arrives seeking someone who can decipher their distress, who can read the enigma of their symptoms. The analyst neither denies this supposition nor confirms it. They simply allow it to operate.

This "subject supposed to know" is not a malicious deception, but a necessary artifice for analytic work to unfold. It is the pivot around which transference revolves, the motor that drives analysis. The analysand speaks, associates, remembers, moved by this belief that there is an Other who can understand what escapes them.

The paradox is that this knowledge supposed to be in the analyst is, in reality, the unconscious knowledge of the analysand themselves, who has yet to recognize it as their own. The analyst merely lends their presence, their silence, their listening, so that this truth can emerge. At the end of analysis, this mirage must fall so that the subject can recognize that the knowledge was always within them.