[From crisis to impasse in the psychoanalytical cure]

The question of impasse in the treatment and strategies utilized and solutions offered by the clinician to resolve them brings us to take an analytical look at factors that constitute critical situations encountered in the clinical setting. What appears crucial is first the necessity to distinguish moments of crisis from moments of impasse. Often, the demand for analysis is based on a moment of crisis in one person's life, a repetitive and prolonged crisis that the person was unable to solve with the usual means of friendly help and awareness or again with other therapeutics available. For others, a situation of impasse presented itself and left the person in a suspended state of his life, in a breakdown of creativity. In this article, in the light of our own psychoanalytical problem, we will distinguish between the crisis of the impasse by situating it in the logic of this particular and decisive stage of a cure of what is castration. We will identify the possibilities of resolution of the crises as well as conditions to envisage and overcome impasse in a constructive way in a psychotic or neurotic subject.