Most stories about psychoanalysis are about others, how we might interpret what they have made of it. Not in this case. One of the intriguing elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the idea that an analysand may give account of the progress and end of their analysis through the institution of ‘the pass’. In this way, something secret is told and such testimony might, Lacan once hoped, serve to validate and provide more knowledge about the psychoanalytic process. The most important secret, though, is precisely that psychoanalysis is always already public, a public event between two people perhaps, or a secret that is shared between many who may not want to say that they recognise the nature of this secret. Or they may secretly hold to another view of the public account they profess to be the correct one.

I realised that I had reached an end to my analysis, and could account for it, one morning when I was sitting on the toilet. I was expelling something. I had eaten Cheerios for breakfast (and a stupid Lacanian joke about the importance of serial repetition has it that ‘the cereal is serious’). Time to move on. What I had ‘discovered’ is that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work, and the way psychoanalysis has worked for me is precisely to rediscover that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work.