People who see a psychoanalyst are prompted to speak in the first place. The analyst, on his part, listens and follows this discourse unfolding, in which he engages in various ways. But while this discourse implies the place of the analyst, it doesn’t determine the place of the speaking subject in the same way.

At the conscious level the person speaking refers to itself by the personal pronoun of «I». Whereas at the level of the unconscious there is nothing which allows the subject to identify as author of its own discourse. Instead — where such self-reference is called upon — the subject grasps at nothing and fades: The subject fades either in the mode of regression or fantasy.

Reading Freud «in psychoanalysis nothing occurs but the interchange of words», Lacan adds, that «something is lacking at the level of the °ther which permits the subject to identify himself there as precisely the subject of this discourse that he is holding» and that «the subject disappears in it as such in so far as this discourse is the discourse of the unconscious.» Therefore, the analyst follows the subject from fading to fading. Spotting this fading in the material of the session becomes crucial in terms of clinical technique.

Alongside clinical vignettes I will refer to the fairy tale «The frog king or Iron Henry» to develop novel ideas on Lacan’s «graph of desire», helping analysts to better orientate themselves in the transferential material.