The analysand's gambit

This is Lacan in "Kant with Sade" (from Bruce Fink's translation of Lacan's Écrits):

I can introduce its status here only by reminding you what I teach about desire, which must be formulated as the other's desire [désir de l'Autre] since it is originally desire for what the Other desires [désir de son désir]. This is what makes the harmony of desires conceivable, but not devoid of danger. For when desires line up in a chain, the resembles te procession of Breughel's blind men, each one, no doubt, has his hand in the hand of the one in front of him, but no one knows where they are all going.

This is very important, and one of the things that Lacan said which is compatible with Freud and basically the whole rest of psychoanalysis, although only Lacan says it with such clarity and force, and develops it so well into the mesh of his own clinical theory. There are some who say "fine" to this sort of thing but dismiss it as "philosophy". That would be a grave mistake, since this pertains what we do clinically speaking, in fact it pervades everything we do and must take strongly into consideration for effectively intervening on the analysand's own working through.

This is Bion ("On Arrogance"):

[T]he sphynx, who asks a riddle and destroy's herself when it is answered, the blind Teiresias, who possesses knowledge and deplores the resolve of the king to search for it, the oracle that provokes the search which the prophet deplores, and again the king who, his search concluded, suffers blindness and exile. This is the stroy of which the elements are discernible amongst the ruins of the psyche, to which the scattered references to curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity have pointed the way.

Today's fashion is to dismiss the Oedipal subject completely, in favor of the pre-Oedipal, even in adult patients, patients who are not psychotic. This is a mistake, since the analytic encounter, we hope at least, has at least one neurotic: the analysand. They must deal with the riddle of the sphynx, the patient's oracular encitement of the analyst's unraveling of the analysand's own self-restraining gambit, ardently guarded. If the clinician can effectively bring about the resurgence of the truth, the gambit is not destroyed, only checked and changed towards a greater level of health.