ABSTRACT
Relational psychoanalysis promises to connect the personal and the political, and so poses a particularly painful challenge to 'Left Lacanians'. One might say that at stake is a choice between common sense and psychoanalysis. It is the stupid relationships that comprise contemporary common sense and the stupid appeal to relationships that Lacanian psychoanalysis throws into question. There is a world of difference between the attempt to fill empty signifiers with content in order that we might define and achieve the 'fullness and universality of society' and to attend, instead, to how those signifiers are sites of conflict, division, and political struggle. According to this argument, which accords with Lacan's argument, the desire of the analyst is to obtain 'absolute difference'. Lacan here sets psychoanalysis as a practice of the symbolic and the real against an ideal of harmonious accord between different viewpoints which reduces the symbolic and the real to the imaginary.
