Thirty years after Lacan’s death, the consequences around the cure derived from his teaching on psychosis deserve a review for the period 1981-2011. Today, many Lacanian analysts treat psychotic patients and try to account the effects. Why psychoanalysis appeared to be operative addressing psychotics? Although the effects of the analytical approach are recognized by analysts, their theory leads to paradoxes such as the one which states that there is no desire in the psychoses. Insofar as Lacan has developed an analytical ethic based on the function of the desire of the analyst as the essence of transference, the exclusion of the psychotic desire from the theory is contradicts to the idea of a possible cure. This could turn into a therapeutic treatment. This investigation suggests that the concept of desire should be integrated in the theories concerning the analytic treatment of psychoses. First of all, this hypothesis seems to be necessary to account for changes in the subjective position identified in cases of melancholic patients whose initial mortification had a reversion to persecution. The passage of an abolished desire to a restitution of desire in the Other implies the statement that psychosis is also a matter of desire. The point is not the absence of desire, but the ways that every psychotic subject can implement for support of the desire. The analytical approach demonstrates its effectiveness at this level, but this effectiveness is never guaranteed because it depends always on a meeting of the psychotic with the analyst’sdesire.
