I will take the position of the professor-master here and tell you the question to ask. The question is not how, but where are we doing psychoanalysis in psychotherapy? I get a lot of questions of how to use Zizek in psychotherapy, but the proper question is where is Zizek in psychotherapy? Simply, we can make a sublime object out of the Other.
Through the Other, one can work on what is the posited therapeutic subject. Lacanians are correct when they posit that the subject or the position of the analyst can not be guaranteed and is doomed to fail in many respects, but then also must not the negative form of this posit also be correct? The non-subject also can never be guaranteed.
The form is psychotherapy, but there is a psychoanalytic principle at work in the world as described by the subject. What is presented by a subject is a self, and counter to the self is an other which comes through speech as described as non-self. The disavowal of the self from the world-as-out-there is never guaranteed to be correct when one tries to get a hold or create an Absolute which is out-there (in the world) rather than in-here (the self-subject).
I would like to take a moment to address the cover of my book which I chose for a very specific reason. If you’re here, I assume you’ve seen it, or how else would you be here? It is a chess board, a mirror ball, and a void. The analysis happens on the mirror ball, in the form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is the mirror, the register. If a form is designed to fail, is it a failing form? No, but it makes psychotherapy the ideological form. Here we can register psychoanalytic principles given by the client (that is to say the proper term for the therapeutic subject in American circles, they are a “client,” and their agency is imagined to be the given thing, the individuality which is so expertly hidden that they can not use it at all of course).
In a sense, the Zizekian object, and Lacanian aspect, liberates the client in that they are given logic and cognition to talk about the Other and through this, talk about the non-subjectivity that is themselves. In sort of contemporary terms, this is the “algorithm,” the fact that in psychotherapy guided by a Zizekian psychotherapist, one can tune the client’s algorithmic approach to the Other, which is in fact the most important location of the therapeutic subject. Ultimately things are driven back when they are talking about their own perception into the thing itself, the client itself, but this is the less relevant part in my experience.
The relationship to the Other, the sublime object of the Other, that is the chilled Coca-Cola, that is the “it,” the real thing.
Mad Black Freud 