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analyst want from me? Does the analyst love me? And so on. Finally, the analysis transforms this focus on the analyst’s desire into questions that concern the analysand’s own desires and fantasies; work that will make up a series of important encounters with the conditions of desiring that are unique and singular to each patient. When the patient can let the analyst fall from the special place he/she occupied in the transference, the analysis can end. In essence, the analyst becomes the loved and lost object (cause of desire), allowing the patient to separate and individuate. Lacan’s position on the ending of the analysis thus comes close to classical notions of ‘identification’ with the ‘analytic function’ or the ‘analyzing instrument’, mourning, working-through, and the capacity for self- analysis after termination (Isakower, 1992; Blum 1982; Greenson 1967). V. B. Lacan in the USA Although there is no coherent group of USA Lacanians, his influence is especially present in academia where some have observed that a “psychoanalytic approach” is synonymous with the application of Lacanian thinking. But there is also a small and increasingly influential group of practicing and theorizing Lacanian psychoanalysts. Some among these represent a more ‘pure’ Lacanian position (Lichtenstein, 2023; Fink 2011) while others who have had both ‘classical’ and Lacanian training (Webster, 2023) engage in dialogue with the other North American perspectives. As translations of Lacan’s work have been made available to Anglophone analysts, it has become more apparent that the divide may not be as wide as is often depicted by Lacan himself. Lacan pays special attention to affects in the transference, especially anxiety. Some of his dialectical and inter-subjective notions of treatment comes close to the classical lines of transference analysis and, differently, to its intersubjective and relational modifications. V. C. Jean Laplanche With the theory of enigmatic signifier, Jean Laplanche introduces a new point of view about the transference. The intrusive impact of the Other and the impossible translation by the infant of the adult’s messages ‘compromised’ by interference of sexual fantasies is, for Laplanche, the frame of the fundamental anthropological situation and the basis of the ‘general theory of seduction’ (Laplanche , 1987, 2011). It is this situation, which is repeated in the transferential situation. Therefore, the transference is not limited to a simple repetition of the relationship to the infantile objects. This aspect only corresponds to what Laplanche names ‘ filled-in transference’ – i.e the ‘positive’ content which the analyst and the analysand can refer to as infantile imagos. The other aspect, named ‘ hollowed-out transference’ by Laplanche, is the reiteration of the relationship to the other as bearer of enigmatic messages (Laplanche, 1992). It is ‘provoked’ by the analyst insofar he/she confronts the analysand with his/her enigma and ‘refusal to know’ – this position actualizing the relationship to enigmas of the patient’s infancy. In the very heart of this transferential situation, a progressive process of ‘ de-
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