1. 1
Aphanisis: The Subjectof Language in the Case Method
INTRODUCTION
The term, ‘aphanisis,’ in psychoanalysis literally means to ‘disappear’ or ‘fade’. This
is the ‘discursive anxiety’ that marks the speaking subject’s relationship to the
structure of language and is one of the most important technical terms in the
Lacanian model of the subject (Evans, 1997; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973a). This is
especially the case in discursive situations that are represented in following the
‘fundamental rule’ of psychoanalysis, which is to say whatever appears on the
surface of the mind (i.e. ‘free associate’ on the couch) without any form of self-
censorship by the patient (Rycroft, 1995; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973b). The
prototype of this form of discursive anxiety in clinical analysis and libido theory had
its underpinnings in the fear of the disappearance of sexual desire itself, as the early
Freudians thought, though this is not the Lacanian take on aphanisis (Jones, 1927).
Lacan is more preoccupied with the disappearance of the ‘subject’ within the
differential structure of language rather than with the disappearance of sexual desire
as a libidinal phenomenon within feminine sexuality (Lacan, 1973).
FREE ASSOCIATION
I use the term ‘discursive’ here in its technical sense to mean the opposite of simple
‘linear’ constructions in language where the speaker has a better acquaintance with
his own intentional structure and can recognize the moment when his intention has

2. 2
been expressed satisfactorily in language. Or, to put this in simpler language: the
speaker is successful in saying what he wanted to say. But this is often not the case except
is simple situations where language can be used in an instrumental sense. In more
complex or even existentially demanding situations, the speaker infers his conscious or
unconscious intention after he has said whatever he winds up in fact saying. As Lacan
put it: ‘It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that
conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of
which I speak’ (Lacan, 1966). So, for instance, when asked to free associate, the
subject in analysis hesitates to do so since he is not sure as to what he will wind up
saying, and whether or not that is in conformity with his phantasy of himself, i.e.
with his ideal ego. The emergence of a gap then between the ‘ideal ego’ and the ‘ego
ideal’ is what is at stake in letting go in language. That is why patients do not take to
the invitation to free associate even when assured of sufficient privacy and the
confidentiality necessary to do so. The Lacanian notion of aphanisis then is an
attempt to displace the anxiety at the possibility of the disappearance of the self from
the domain of sexuality to that of language by arguing that the discursive structure
of language itself can be a source of anxiety since the speaking subject is technically
adrift in language. The structure of language itself then - especially in terms of its
existential implications for the sense of self - is a fundamental source of resistance to
both free association in the clinical situation and to the pedagogical demands of the
case method (which does not offer as much freedom obviously as free association,
but which, nonetheless, partakes of the discursive structure of language) when
invited to speak by somebody in the locus of the ‘subject supposed to know’ (Lacan,
1973). Both the linear and discursive elements of language are important in the
context of a case analysis, but the discursive element is much more difficult to
handle since it makes the speaking-subject feel ‘adrift’ in the choppy waters of
language; it is like a vessel that is ‘taking’ to the sea without being dependent on
coastal navigation in an era when navigation technology (to sail by wire) was simply
not available. The Lacanian subject then does not merely use language to make itself
known, but is not only subject to but is constituted of language as such (Ragland-
Sullivan, 1991).

3. 3
ANTICIPATION & RETROACTION
The structural differences between the linear and discursive elements are also
captured well in terms of the following psycholinguistic categories: language,
intention, and desire since all these categories are implicated, according to Lacan, in
the structure of the unconscious. There are also those who will argue that it is
important to put forth a point of view pro-actively in language. This is akin to the
idea that the speaker must express his intention forwards in time. In communication
workshops, the advice that is given is: First be clear as to what you want to say, and then
say it! There are others who will argue that desire is not a matter of psychological
intention, but rather of logical inference. This is best captured in the notion that
intention is often constructed backwards. These opposing points-of-view capture the
two modalities of time in the theory of psychoanalysis: ‘anticipation’ and
‘retroaction’ (Lacan, 1988). They are both important modalities of communication
because the syntactic construction of desire, intention, and even causality, can move
either ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ in time (Forrester, 1990, 1991; Forrester, 1992). In
certain matters, we are clear about our intentions; in certain matters, we are not. The
important thing, then, is to be at least clear on when to invoke a notion of anticipation
and when to invoke a notion of retroaction while making a psychoanalytic
‘interpretation’ (Devereux, 1951; Soler, 1996). The subject of language then must be
open to the insights that can be generated using either of these modalities and must
exercise his discretion in knowing which of these categories applies in any given
context and why (Fink, 1996; Srinivasan, 2010).
OPENING MOVES IN CASE ANALYSES
Here is a simple instance in practice. When a student is asked to open a case in a
business school, even if he is well-prepared, he is afraid that he might wind up
saying something that is the opposite of or other than what he and his study group
decided by way of a recommendation the previous night in their case-study session.
The affects that he feels in his psyche when he opens a case pertain then to the
complex relationship between cognitive intentions and psychic desire that is
captured through the notion of anticipation in the case discussion. The main pre-

4. 4
occupation for the student then is with ‘recollecting’ the case discussion of the
previous night rather than in attempting to directly ‘participate’ in the discussion
that is currently underway, or which is about to start in class, is linked to the anxiety
induced by the possibility of aphanisis. This is precisely why someone with lots of
life-experience may have nothing much to say when asked to ‘free-associate’ on the
couch. This starting trouble can then become a form of resistance since both the
students and the patient may come up with an interesting opening-line, but then
draw a blank after that. This possibility of drawing a blank is not only something
that relates to the beginning of the case, but can also happen later in the discussion,
and is quite routine in public speaking workshops. And, finally, if the same student
who opens a discussion is also asked to summarize the case discussion at the end of
the class, then, he encounters his own ‘opening-move’ as though it was made by
somebody else an hour ago. This feeling of the earlier comments being made by
somebody else pertains to the fact that the retroactive understanding of the opening
comment ‘de-familiarizes’ his subsequent understanding of the case, which is not
reducible anymore to the linear utterances that he may have memorized as an
opening-move in case he should be asked to open the discussion. This problem then
is not merely an empirical observation that I am thinking-through, but a symptom that
is intrinsic to the phenomenology of a case discussion. Insofar then that it has a
phenomenological character; it is not reducible in my estimation to a mere technical
problem.
PARTICIPATION IN CASE ANALYSES
There are then good reasons as to why a case is not meant to be announced too early
in the course. While there is nothing wrong in being prepared for class, there are
some unexpected dangers involved in being too-prepared as well. When students
are too-prepared, we wind up with discussions of a ‘thematic’ sort rather than an
attempt to build in the skill-sets that are envisaged under the rubric of ‘decision-
making.’ While thematic discussions are okay in functional areas, which have to
teach both the theoretical frameworks in the area and its applications, if any, to a
given case, it comes with a cost-factor. Case instructors in functional areas often

5. 5
discover that there is a trade-off between theme-building and skill-building. Most
students, if given an option, will discuss themes rather than risk making a
recommendation during a case analysis. That is because they have a propensity to
draw up a long list of options for any given situation without grounding the decision
within the criteria of evaluation (which they feel is a needless constraint that
prevents the case discussion from soaring to the heights that is otherwise possible).
These students will also ‘over-participate’ in the earlier stages of the discussion
rather than wait for the part where the vexed question of the criteria of evaluation
will make it presence felt in the case discussion. This restricted or selective notion of
a case discussion is particularly common in case analyses that are invoked in the
context of group discussions and inter-collegiate case-presentations for pre-
management students. It is this notion of a case discussion that is invoked with a lot
of enthusiasm when students ‘profess’ an interest in the case method during
interviews for management programs. It can take the better part of a case discussion
or a number of courses deploying the case method before students learn the
importance of being strongly grounded in the criteria of evaluation and understand
the role that the organizational dynamics of a firm can play in determining the
relevant set of criteria that would be applicable in any given instance of decision
making. This is the aspect of the case discussion that students instinctively avoid
because the criteria of evaluation depend upon a robust understanding of the
internal contexts of decision-making in a firm; which, in turn, will be determined by
contingent factors that are not so obvious until they have actually emerged and
complicated the decision-making situation.
DECISION MAKING
The point of the case discussion - up to the emergence of the criteria of evaluation
which sets the stage for writing up a decision report - is usually a breeze for
students, since they are doing something that is akin to problem-solving. It is only
when the criteria have to be discovered or thought-through that students find the
going difficult since they will be encountering certain organizational phenomena
that they were not previously acquainted with. These are problems that are imbued

6. 6
with ‘jouissance’ since they will reflect the mind-set, and as Manfred Kets de Vries
points out, ‘the neuroses of the dominant-coalition’ in a firm (Kets de Vries and
Miller, 1984a; Kets de Vries and Miller, 1984b). This jouissance takes the form of
unspoken organizational routines that are inferred by decision-makers rather than
openly discussed except when implicit norms are totally misunderstood by new
comers. These elements of decision-making in firms are difficult for even experts to
understand and formalize let alone students who have but a cursory notion of the
contextual constraints in decision-making situations. They are more likely to aspire
for a quasi-mathematical or logical model which will not have to recognize the
distinction between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ factors in decision making. Students are
animated by a model of decision-making where the implicit assumption is this: What
is the correct decision in this situation - no matter who may be in charge? The idea that
there is no objective answer to such a question, except in trivial instances of decision-
making, is something that takes the stuffing out of them until the braver lot with
work-experience makes appropriate comments about agency theory.
OVER-DETERMINATION IN CAUSATION
These are however difficult problems to think-through and work-through in the
classroom since students get deeply upset and experience a fundamental loss of
control in such case discussions. But there is no better way of letting these difficult
questions emerge except in the context of a case discussion because the affective
dimension, if worked-through effectively in class, can produce the power of
conviction that is necessary to understand what is at stake in decision-making
situations in firms. These are moments then that the case method is imbued with the
forms of psychic and semantic ‘over-determination’ that is associated with dramatic
situations in literature (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973c). Such moments make it
possible for the audience to come to terms with those elements of life that they may
not otherwise have been in a position to do so. The term ‘aphanisis’ then is not
without its uses in literature, for instance, since the protagonist often finds himself
cast adrift in situations which are not of his making, but which are imposed on him

7. 7
by an external world that is beyond his ability to either control or even understand
(Durand, 1983).
SYMPTOMS OF APHANISIS
In a case analysis, the manifestations of the symptoms of aphanisis can emerge
through the pedagogical forms of ‘learned-helplessness’ that fundamentally question
the efforts involved in discussing a case (Abramson and Seligman, 1978). So, for
instance, a student might want to know what the point is of pressing on with a case
discussion, in a manner that is analogous to a decision-maker pushing for some
changes that he feels are needed for the survival of the firm but giving up because of
learned-helplessness, since he doesn’t have anything personally at stake in the
situation. So the moment we hear that turn of phrase, ‘but I don’t have anything
personally at stake…’ in the class, we are encountering a turn in the argument where
the case discussant will get defensive any time now anticipating that he is about to
reveal a sense of learned-helplessness, and therefore gives up proactively through a
rationalization of his motives for doing so. This is then followed by a hasty
incorporation of agency theory when the student proclaims that only those with an
agency-based stake will take decisions in such situations anyway, so it is best not to
do anything and hope that the problem will go away sooner or later. These then are
but a few simple symptoms of the thought patterns and behavioral modalities that
emanate from the larger problem of aphanisis. These symptoms represent the fear of
the speaking subject that he will disappear as somebody who can either understand
or work decisively in a complex emerging situation that is not easy to delineate in a
situation analysis (Srinivasan, 2015). These are also the situations when case
discussants fear that they might lose out because they can’t keep the promptings of
their unconscious despair at bay. So the moment they are asked to take
responsibility for what they say during the generation of complex affects, they come
undone. It is therefore necessary to understand the role that the symptoms of aphanisis
can play during a case discussion without succumbing to the negative affects that
are generated. Aphanisis, then, to reiterate, is not the same as learned-helplessness,
which is just a symptom of the subject’s fear of letting go in situations that are

8. 8
beyond the ambit of both his control and understanding. That is why it is difficult to
open and end case discussions effectively: there is often both starting trouble and
ending trouble since these moments help to structure the decision in its entirety. The
reason that case discussants may not be too gung-ho about participating in such
discussions may be related to the fear of aphanisis in which they experience a loss of
subjectivity or the fear of discursivity as such lest the unconscious speak. It is therefore
important to understand what the challenges are of opening and closing case
discussions in order to understand how anticipation and retroaction will help
participants to structure a case discussion.
OPENING & ENDING CASE ANALYSES
There is a wide-spread consensus in the theory and practice of the case method that
it is difficult to open a case effectively. Even the best students in the class are wary of
being called upon to start a case discussion. This is not necessarily because of a lack
of preparation on their part, but because something more than mere intellectual
preparation is necessary to face up to the challenges of a ‘cold call.’ But what is often
overlooked in our preoccupation with starting a case discussion is the fact that it is
even more difficult for the last student who contributes to a case discussion, since he
will not only have to ‘summarize’ the case discussion but time his interpretation
effectively. This is because the last comment will resonate in the minds of the case
discussants even after the case discussion is completed because of the ‘recency’
effect. The learning that is generated therefore between classes when a particular
case is being discussed or when a course is mid-way is usually affected by the final
set of comments that is made by either the case instructor or by the students. If the
final comment is made by a student, rather than the instructor, the other students
invariably look to the instructor to see if he ‘endorses’ that comment or those set of
comments as ‘important’ from the point of view of evaluation. However, despite the
difficulties involved in opening and closing a case discussion in terms of the
phenomenology of the case method the problems inherent in ‘beginning’ a case
discussion has received more attention than closing a case discussion.

9. 9
END OF ANALYSIS
The problem of openings and endings is not specific to the case method per se, but
has been a problem in the context of literature and psychoanalysis as well. Sigmund
Freud turned his mind to this problem when he asked whether an analysis is
‘terminable’ or ‘interminable’ (Evans, 1997b). This was also the point at which the
comments made by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to Rush Rees on the
problem of closure in psychoanalysis are relevant to the structure of Freudian
metapsychology (Rees, 1981). Both Freud and Wittgenstein were invoking a linear
model even though they must have known that the discovery of the transference had
made it necessary to rethink the linear structure that is characterized by a simple
notion of a beginning, middle, and an end that has been the mainstay of
philosophical thought in the theory of genres since Aristotle (Bouveresse, 1995). The
solution to the problem was interestingly thought up by Jacques Lacan who had an
interesting insight into the trajectory of the analytic situation. The point that he made
is not only interesting to the ‘end of analysis’ problem in Freudian meta-psychology,
but is related to the phenomenological puzzle that all case instructors encounter
when they have to struggle to find somebody willing to open a case discussion in
class if they chose to work with a volunteer rather than make a cold call. Jacques
Lacan argued in this context that the basic confusion in Freudian meta-psychology
pertains to the fact that Freud conflated the ‘liquidation of the transference’ with the
‘end of the analysis’ problem. What this basically means is that there are cases when
no matter how much time and effort is put into analysis, the transference cannot be
sufficiently worked-through, and therefore, according to Freud, the analysis cannot
end. It is merely terminated when the patient cannot afford to see the analyst
anymore due to the cost-factors involved in an infinite analysis, even though Freud
tried artificial means such as agreeing to see the patient only for a pre-determined
number of sessions before the analysis began during the preliminary interviews.
THE TRANFERENCE NEUROSIS
The criterion for closure then is pragmatic rather than hermeneutic given that this
trajectory is necessarily transferential. In other words, the patient’s neurosis has been

10. 10
transformed into a ‘transference neurosis.’ Contrary to popular belief a neurosis
cannot be directly interpreted since neither the analyst not the patient can look into
the contents of the unconscious or the libidinal economy that props up the psychic
conflict in the neurotic subject. The analyst then must make meta-psychological
inferences from the specific forms of transferential distortions in the discourse of the
patient by ‘interpreting the transference’ rather than by interpreting the neurosis per
se. What does it mean to interpret the transference? Interpreting the transference
means that the syntactic forms in which the patient articulates himself (as opposed
to the over-all semantics of it) must be taken quite seriously as a clue to the forms of
resistance that the patient is trying to overcome in order to free associate in the
analytic situation. This is the notion that Lacan refers to as the ‘practice of the letter,’
a process of ‘syntactic interpretation’ that was subsequently formalized by his
disciple, Serge Leclaire (Leclaire, 1968; Fink, 2004). In other words, for Lacan, the end
of analysis problem is not linked to the semantics of a case but to its pragmatics and
syntax. I am using the terms ‘pragmatics’ and ‘syntax’ in the ‘technical’ sense that is
attributed to these terms in theoretical linguistics, where the former pertains to the
contexts of language use; and the latter, to the formal structure of the sentence. The
Lacanian difference though is to not only to try and understand the transferential
mediation in the use of language as it manifests itself in specific instances of speech,
but to understand the relationship between the locus of the sender and the locus of
the receiver in doing so.
FORMS OF RESISTANCE
If we understand the role played then by the pragmatics and syntax of the inter-
personal dynamics in the analytic situation, we will be able to understand why
students are wary of being called upon to open or close a discussion. The main fear
here is that in such situations the unconscious will have its say; they prefer to let
somebody else initiate the discussion ‘lest the unconscious speak.’ This is precisely
the fear that the patient experiences as well when he is asked to free associate at the
beginning of analysis. The only difference though is that the student has time to
prepare for class but the patient is not supposed to prepare for analysis. The student

11. 11
will resist the case discussion by not preparing for class, but the patient will resist by
preparing for the session. In either case however – even given this specific difference –
the overwhelming fear is that the unconscious will overpower the conscious intent of
the speaker. This will, they feel, lead to a loss of control of ‘intended’ meaning over
‘articulated’ meaning, and that the ‘utterance’ of the patient or the student will
overwhelm the ‘statement.’ The speaker will therefore play it safe, argues Lacan, by
talking about himself or by talking about the listener; this is what students do as well
in class. They will do a quick situation analysis of the case by invoking the personal
pronoun ‘I’ too often by saying things like: ‘What I think is going on here is…’
‘Though I am not sure that this is the correct interpretation, I still feel that the case
is… ‘etc. Alternatively, the student will exclude himself from the discussion and say
things like: ‘As you can see for yourself…’ or ‘As you must know by now, it is not
possible in a case analysis to summarize the entire situation, nonetheless, since you
insist, I will try to…’ In other words, these are the main options to open a case: the
locus of the ‘I’ or the locus of the ‘You.’ Not many students will naturally gravitate to
the third person and say things like, ‘The situation, as described by the case writer,
represents a choice between the following options.’ It takes a certain amount of
practice before students are able to invoke an ‘impersonal’ modality of analysis,
where they keep both the self and the other out of the circuit. In the analytic
situation the patient will reveal himself to be preoccupied with either narcissistic
fantasies and overdo the personal pronoun, ‘I,’ or seek a solution to his problems
‘self-lessly’ from the analyst by deploying the anaclitic fantasy of invoking the ‘You.’
In other words, either the ‘self’ or the ‘other’ is thought to be superior in these
situations and whether the opening move invokes the ‘self’ or the ‘other’ can be an
important clue to the inter-personal or transferential dynamics already in place.
Those patients who wish to avoid the libidinal politics of self and other altogether
will play safe with the impersonal ‘third-person,’ who is imagined to be an impartial
referee that Freud himself was fond of invoking in his meta-psychological work. It
was this third-person to whom Freud addressed his famous book on the problem of
‘lay analysis,’ when a disciple of his was prosecuted for setting up a psychoanalytic
practice without formal training in psychiatry (Freud, 1926).

12. 12
CONCLUSION
These three positions then were the loci that Freud struggled with in his clinical
work. Freud then got bogged down both at the level of interpretation and the level
of the transference. The analysis became interminable because the notion of
‘construction’ in analysis that Freud invoked was a hermeneutic model; which, by
definition, can be refined infinitely. The analysis also became interminable because
the notion of transference could be worked-through endlessly. The Lacanian solution
to these problems was to move the locus of interpretation from semantics to syntax,
and the locus of closure to neither the self nor the other, but from the self to the
other. What does this mean? It basically means that interpretation is not about the
endless play of the signifier, but about traversing the fundamental fantasy that
insists ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’ In order to do this, Lacan focused not on
what made ‘sense,’ but on what did ‘not’ make sense in the analysis, which he
termed the ‘kernel of non-sense’ which resists signification though it is not ‘nonsense’
in the everyday sense of the term. This is the difference between a hermeneutic
model of interpretation that is influenced by literature and a structural model of
interpretation that is modeled on linguistics (i.e. pragmatics and syntax instead of
semantics if we had to choose within formal linguistics itself). Secondly, Lacan found
a solution to the conflict between the narcissistic and anaclitic loci within which the
patient struggled to understand the relationship between the self and the other.
The Lacanian solution was to point out that this struggle is based on an imaginary
‘see-saw’ in which the patient and the analyst, if they are not careful, will begin to
compete with each other for ‘recognition’ in a Hegelian ‘struggle to death.’ If this
happens, the analysis has failed because it has got enmeshed in the imaginary. The
task of a mature analyst is to come to terms with the counter-transferential impulses
that might trigger off such forms of immature struggles that lead invariably to an
abrupt termination of the analysis by the patient. The onus on ‘punctuation,’ as
opposed to ‘constructions in analysis,’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is to prevent such
a struggle for hermeneutic supremacy between the patient and the analyst (Fink,
2007; Srinivasan 2009). This would be as ridiculous as the case instructor arguing

13. 13
loudly in class that only he understands the case. Even if that were the case, the cost-
factor in making such an assertion will vitiate the transferential space of analysis
beyond any possibility of hermeneutic recuperation in subsequent case discussions.
It might be more tactful for the case instructor who is pushed into a corner to lose
the battle rather than lose the war of interpretation that might break out in such
situations since his task is to ‘contain’ not only wild-analyses, but also transferential
and counter-transferetial outbreaks without getting carried away by the desire to
make ‘incisive’ or ‘devastating’ points in the context of the case discussions. Hence
the Lacanian contention that when the analysis starts, the patient will talk about
‘himself’ or the ‘analyst,’ but the moment that he can talk ‘to’ the analyst, the
analysis is over (Evans, 1997c). This is a formal marker that is not only of use in case
analysis in the clinical situation, but a clue to the difficulties involved in opening and
closing case discussions in the context of aphanisis as well. The patient seeks
recourse to talking about himself or about the analyst rather than attempt to talk to
the analyst precisely because of the discursive anxiety that Lacan termed aphanisis.
These symptoms of aphanisis then are what the case instructor should be on the
look-out for as well if he wants to understand the forms of resistance to the case
method and the quanta of anxiety that usually accompanies it amongst the
participants in a case discussion.
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14. 14
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