Psychoanalysis is a bat question

Lacan's connection between the figure of the bat and La Fontaine's fable Le chauve-souris, le buisson et le canard offers new paths for thinking about psychoanalysis in alegorical, questioning and critical ways.

This reference is not just illustrative, but guides the ethical and epistemic position of psychoanalysis. In La Fontaine's fable, the character “bat” alternates its position throughout the narrative - it is sometimes narrated as a gnawing animal, sometimes as a flying one - escaping the fixation of the image. The animal evades a stable/rigid/frozen definition and changes according to the interlocutor. It is, in itself, ambiguous - just like psychoanalysis and the analyst. 

The relationship between the bat in the fable and the analyst is that the analyst is not where the analysand places him, and does not respond from that place. From precisely this position, the analyst's response is actually an unknown capable of producing movement in the analyzer's discourse. Besides, the analyst, like a bat, is not guided by sight, by the image, but by what he hears.

In Lacan's words:

In other words, all recognition of psychoanalysis, as a profession and as a science, is proposed on the base of an extraterritoriality principle which it is impossible for the psychoanalyst to renounce, even if he denies it, placing all validation of his problems under the sign of the double belonging which makes them as unattainable as the bat in the fable

(1955, our translation).

The fable also acts as an allegory for the position of psychoanalysis in the field of knowledge: psychoanalysis is not fixed in a closed institutional position, but is constituted by the intersection between discourses from different fields, navigating between them and guided by an ethic that refuses totalizing knowledge.

Lacan's reference to La Fontaine's fable in Seminar 11 is a way of giving substance to the question “what is psychoanalysis?”, without finally defining it. This allows psychoanalysis to continue questioning itself and moving its knowledge forward. 

LACAN, Jacques, 1960. Seminário 11.

LACAN, Jacques, 1955. Variantes de la cure-type.