a meeting that can end anytime (variable-lenght)
Imagine that you go to a psychotherapist at 12 o'clock, but after fifteen minutes you say something during the session and the therapist goes: "OK, thank you for today, see you in a few days or next week." What would your reaction be?
What I am talking about is the variable-length session stemming from Lacanian psychoanalysis. The technique was invented to counter the usual problem with therapy: when you book a 50-minute slot, for the first 45 minutes, the patient just talks about nonsense that isn't really essential to the core issue.
They talk about things that happened during the week, their minor problems and so on, and the patient / analysand only gets to the actual point in the last five minutes. And then every single time, you run out of time. The session ends, and you just keep going like that for years without actually getting cured, which is kind of the standard.
You see something very similar in business too, like at a coffee or corporate dinner where you talk for 40 minutes about pleasantries and then spend the last 10 minutes actually talking business. Of course in business that’s a bit different because you're building relationships between companies, so pleasantries are important. But it’s a different story when you go to a therapist or psychoanalyst, because there you actually want to get cured.
Jacques Lacan, the inventor of the variable-length psychoanalytic session, came up with it for two main reasons.
The first reason is that it forces the patient to talk about important things throughout the whole session. If they don’t speak about important things, the analyst just ends the session. But the fee for the session is always exactly the same, whether it takes 50 minutes, 15 minutes, or 10 minutes. That naturally motivates the patient / analysand to constantly talk about things that are actually important, instead of hiding what matters inside and talking about nonsense.
The second benefit of the variable-length session is that the session gets ended by the analyst in a crucial moment, when something important has been said by the analysand. If you say something really important, like a real reflection, ending right there in say the twentieth minute doesn't allow those words to get, in quotes, "watered down" over the next 30 minutes while you start saying "oh, maybe I didn't mean that" and completely forget about it.
According to Lacan, if the session ends at that vital moment, your unconscious will automatically keep thinking about it and solving that puzzle for the next week until the next session. If you did sugarcoating and talked for another 30 minutes, you probably wouldn't get those clinical effects.
From my personal life, I can tell you that this completely works on me. I have the comparison from going to therapy for a year and a half where sessions were 50 minutes and we just talked about random stuff. You can pay and go talk gossip like that, but mostly it didn't have much added value compared to much shorter Lacanian sessions, where everything starts right away from what’s important instead of taking 45 minutes to get there.
And you can also translate this into personal life, which is pretty interesting. Say you're on a first or second date. I'll say this from a guy's perspective, but girls can switch it around for themselves. You're on a date and it's going great, but the other person says they're having an amazing time, but they seriously have to run. Automatically, because you're having a great time, this creates a feeling of a lack that you want to fill, so you want to keep meeting them. That’s very different from sitting there for three hours until you get bored and just want to go home, which gives you a totally different impression of the meeting.
It's the exact same with concerts. If a concert lasts two hours, you get tired of the artist playing. But if you don't know how long it will last and it ends suddenly, you're left wanting more. A good example of this is when I was at a concert of a very famous Polish rapper last year, and it ended at a completely unexpected moment. The result was that people talked about it a lot, thought about it, and remembered the ending really well. Which is exactly the goal in psychoanalysis too, to have that vital thought stay in the memory of the analysand instead of being watered down.
Yours,
Mikolaj