Some names have been changed in the interest of client confidentiality.
*
“There’s something I want to bring up with you,” I say. “But I’m kind of afraid to say it out loud. Which makes me feel even more certain that I should just get it out there, even though I really don’t want to.”
“Mhmm,” is all she replies. I am supine on the couch, staring at the roof.
“You know how I write that column?” I ask.
“Mhmm,” she repeats. I have told her all about this column and the minor dramas it causes in my life.
“So, yeah, I’m thinking about writing my next one on what we do in here,” I say.
I wait for a reaction but all I can hear is her pen scratching away behind me, where she sits on a chair out of sight.
“As in, I’m not really going to be writing about what happens in this room specifically, but more generally about the Lacanians of Melbourne,” I say. “I want to find out why everyone in this city has a Lacanian analyst.”
“And this is your question for me?” she says.
“I guess,” I say.
“Well, what I would suggest is that I think your premise is wrong,” she says. “I think you’ll find that not everyone has a Lacanian analyst.”
Of course not everyone has a Lacanian analyst, I concede. But I keep going to parties and overhearing conversations where people compare their Lacanian analysts as if they were Hinge dates. (“Oh my god, yours sounds so cute. Mine is really mean.”) I know a handful of people who have recently given up good careers to train as Lacanian psychoanalysts, and they are all training at different Lacanian schools in Melbourne—schools that are apparently locked in some interminable conflict. How many Lacanian schools does one medium-sized city need? And for that matter, why the most controversial and divisive psychoanalyst since Freud, Jacques Lacan—an aristocratic Parisian whose theories are so notoriously obscurant that someone once compared studying them to being “trapped in a cave whose entrance is blocked by a huge rock”?
“Mhmm,” my analyst responds when I’m done. This is not unusual. She often only provides non-committal vocal gestures so as not to get in the way of my free associative rambling. This “mhmm” sounds a little different though. I might be projecting, but I can detect a hint of frustration in it. Does she want me to shut up about the so-called Lacanians of Melbourne and get back to our usual subjects, like the time I lied to my parents about winning a primary school debating competition?
“Anyway, I just thought I should bring it up because there is a part of me that feels like if I write about our sessions I’ll be in some way betraying you,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“Which is strange, because we don’t really have a normal relationship. It’s not like we’re friends. I don’t really owe you anything besides the fee for the session. You can’t really betray someone you have an artificial relationship with, right?”
Again, no answer.
*
My quest for answers leads me to Justin Clemens. Justin is not an analyst. He is an academic who has written and edited several books on Lacanian theory. Justin is also the central star around which a certain intellectual scene in Melbourne revolves. If you attend enough conferences, book launches, and reading groups in the inner north, you will inevitably see Justin as a recurring character, along with half a dozen or so aspiring young intellectuals orbiting him like bespectacled Rings of Saturn. Part of Justin’s gravitational pull is a conversational style that somehow combines Hegelian dialectics, Larry David-like self-depreciation, and spicy gossip. He looks more like an endurance athlete than a university professor. He is slim, wiry, and perpetually wearing a baseball cap, which lends him an ageless aura. Today, Justin is in a black Lacoste cap. We are sitting at a cafe, and he is sipping a banana smoothie.
Unlike my analyst, Justin immediately confirms my hypothesis. There are many Lacanians in Melbourne. “Like, a preponderance of them,” he says. In numerical terms, there are far fewer than in the great Lacanian cites of Paris, Berlin, or Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the Melbourne scene is, Justin assures me, a vibrant one, discussed in the central nodes in Europe and Latin America. (No centralised database exists, though I managed to make a list of just over 100 analysts.)
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