Hoping for the unlikely, that is, for what is real

A new concept of immediacy for psychoanalysis

Abstract

Is it right to conceive the analytical experience as an experience characterized by immediacy? The hesitation with which we try to answer this question pushes us to put into play a new concept of immediacy that leaves behind spontaneity, continuity, proximity, and coincidence with the object, in favor of a relationship without bond, nourished by fracture and by distance. The hypothesis that we formulate in this paper, drawing from the intuitions of Maurice Blanchot, puts into play a concept of immediacy which, instead of claiming presence against distance, the self-evidence of feeling against construction, underlines the absolute distance from the object of feeling. Something can touch us because it is infinitely distant from us. In order to be perceived as such, the object appears as what is most unlikely.