2025 Fall Semester Begins: The Peril of Structure – From Talking to Writing Cure
Saturday Oct. 4, 10:00am PST (participation only by Zoom for the Fall semester)
Seminarist: Scully-Robert Groome
- Introduction to the Fall 2025 Semester
Most people are familiar with the phrase “talking cure,” which originated from Anna O., who used it to describe her treatment with Josef Breuer in the early 1880s. Freud and Breuer recorded this expression in Studies on Hysteria (1895), but Freud himself never used it to describe his invention of psychoanalysis. In fact, when Freud developed psychoanalysis in the following decades, it stood in sharp contrast to Breuer’s cathartic method, which the phrase “talking cure” originally named.
What is less well known is that the only attested record we have of Freud’s analytic practice is not based on a talking cure at all, but on a writing cure. Across forty years, Freud wrote more than twenty-three volumes—an immense body of work where he not only interpreted his theory with regard to patients but to himself. In these texts, he developed constructions through writing, showing how deeply psychoanalysis depends not simply on an exchange of words, but on traits and letters. This raises a pressing question:
- Why is writing monopolized by the analyst for theory and research, while barring its use on the side of the patient and the practice of analysis itself?
An initial response: by keeping writing on the side of the analyst and theory, the other can be put into a passive position as a patient, while writing is reserved for those with the expertise and a secret knowledge. No doubt, the monetization of analytic practice into a therapy, where words are bought and sold in a talking cure, is soon to follow.
Yet, a more decisive response goes to the heart of the question. As many have shown (The Freud Files, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen), the effectiveness of the talking cure may be possible, but can not be confirmed historically or epistemologically, whereas any psychoanalysis, beginning with that of Freud himself, only becomes necessary to the degree it founds its cure in a reflexive moment of reading and writing. (see quotes [1] and [2] above). The trajectory of the Fall 2025 semester aims to show why this is the case in making the distinction between the Minor and the Major Clinic: respectively, the talking and writing cure.
If this reflexive moment of writing is necessary to the cure, the question becomes, is it sufficient? For example, in a standard medical clinic, where a symptom is merely an index – or natural sign – of a disease, the fact that someone confirms their own cure is never sufficient, since a person may exhibit no symptoms and claim they are cured, but not be disease-free.
But suppose the symptom is not merely the index of an underlying illness or disease, but has its own causality which can only be attested to by the investigation of who or what suffers its effects. In this case, a different paradigm of the clinic follows:
- What is a clinic of effects, where a symptom is not reduced to the index of an underlying condition of illness or disorder – physical or mental – but a causality intrinsic to the symptom itself?
For example, whenever Freud interprets a symptom or dream, just as he does not simply speak, narrate, or represent things, he does not attempt to directly trace them back to a physical or environmental condition, instead, he refers to a reading of the dream or symptom as a hieroglyph or heraldic symbol, which he then transliterates into a more linear writing in the German language.
- In this sense, the practice of analysis consists in pushing speech to its limits, just until the point of transfer: that is to say, the point where speech stops and what cannot be said or understood can, however, be written and read.
This movement corresponds to Freud’s second and final definition of the psychoanalytic cure: it is not a matter of lifting repression through an interpretation that reveals the content – or cause – of a symptom (dream, lapsus, etc.), but of constructing the repressing element itself. Another way to say the same thing:
- One is not cured because one can remember and/or interpret an event; instead, one can remember and/or interpret an event because there is a cure.
By the time of Lacan, the repressing element was no longer a psychic force (or reality) in the Freudian sense of the term, but the letter. Reformulated in this manner, the problem of the symptom’s causality has been literalized into a practice of the cure as such: as a problem of reading and writing whose logic of implication we have been presenting throughout our seminars. One example among many of a conversion symptom: (p =>q) ≠> (q =>p) ⇔ (p<≠q). We will argue throughout the Fall 2025 semester that without such a literalization, even a born psychoanalyst cannot assume responsibility for the causality of the cure.
Seminarist
Scully-Robert Groome