The risk of analysis

Abstract

This article deals with the risk of analysis, referring in its introduction to Anne Dufourmantelle's In Praise of Risk, in which the psychoanalyst some time ago theorized the loss in our contemporary society of a useful and favorable meaning of risk. Risk structurally concerns the acts of analysis, from the very first psychoanalytic act of moving from the task of the analysand to the position of analyst. This contribution attempts to illustrate the structure of this act, drawing on Lacan's comparison in Seminar XV between the revolutionary act and the psychoanalytic act, and focusing on analysis as a reactivation of the singular temporality of re-birth to life.