As is usual in Latin America, my five years of training, were all Freud and all Klein. Jacques Lacan was not present in the horizon. At that time, beyond Klein, it was Bion the analyst to pursue, for a deeper understanding of the mind functioning. Then suddenly, here comes Jacques Lacan, as a thunder and as a challenge.

First approximation to his teaching is usually bothersome and disgusting. His difficult style in writing produces anxiety in the reader and a tendency to reject the text. From a normal topographic model of thinking, we should move to a more complex topological model of thinking. This comes as a surprise, and it is not easy. This is the reason for the need to read his texts in small groups, and not alone. His teaching demands a personal tolerance for not understanding.

But slowly we begin to unravel and to understand the enormous practical significance of his contribution. First, he offers a new mental model. An evolution from the classic structural model: the three orders and the Desire graph. The mind can oscillate between an imaginary and symbolic way of functioning without sickness. This breakthrough was something different. It was something beyond the concept of progression and regression. His complex theory is very useful in the daily analytical practice. My IPA tradition safeguards me from changing the classic fifty minutes hour setting. Even today we have serious debates about this issue.

The difference in the clinical practice between the ego and the subject, between the object and the other, begins to be very relevant. The previous diagnostic tolls of anxiety type, object relation theory and defense mechanism, began to be substituted by the logic of the phallus, the use of metaphor and metonymy in the speech, and the revelation of transference. The <here and now> interpretation style of the sixties, always in transference, began to be questioned.

Clarification on the concepts of <Position and Place> of the analyst helps in the analytical act proper. The new concept of Object(a) opens a Pandora box. So the concept of Passion, transference and hate, are then clarified. This new object (a) opens the way for the concept of the sexual Phantom, that will change radically the way we work the perverse sexual fantasies of our neurotics analysands.

The benefits of using the concept of <suplencia> the advent of the <sinthome> is enormous in preventing psychotic collapse in previously stabilized analysands.

Similarly the benefits of the new concept of <Jouissance> will serve us and prevent us as analyst to insist in peace and happiness for our analysands.
And so on…