"For psychoanalysis, the symptom is not a "disorder", it is a silenced truth that needs to be heard."

"For psychoanalysis, the symptom is not a "disorder", it is a silenced truth that needs to be heard. The symptom includes the paradoxical satisfaction that leads to suffering ("jouissance"). Treatment is a dialectical procedure, which brings to the surface the weight of jouissance that words carry. Words encircle the truth without the subject being aware of it. Grasping these two faces of the symptom -- language and jouissance -- allows the subject to read his story and to make it his again. Then he can let go of a part of his jouissance and become responsible for its remainder in a life that does not necessarily conform to common morality, but is no less lawful for it. The psychoanalyst, having been analyzed himself, is one who has detached himself from this fantasmatic juouissance. Free of prejudice, he can then enable the patient to invent his own bespoke response, the one that fits him."

― Agnes Aflalo, The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis: The Rise and Fall of Cognitivism