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The fundamental rule is what characterizes psychoanalysis insofar as it aims for the emergence, or better, for the “realization” of the patient’s unconscious thoughts. With an (evenly) poised attention for the psychoanalyst and a requirement to say everything that “appears” for the patient, the rule calls for this suspension of judgment (Epoché) that allows the enunciations of the unconscious to produce their effects of surprise. With Lacan, the place of the subject supposed to know that the analyst occupies widens the Freudian question from repression to that of the origin of the subject, in other words from the real that is impossible to think to the emergence of language. Outside of any idealism, the issue of the being of the subject can only be said from an in-between, the in-between of signifiers handled within the fundamental rule, and also the in-between beings on the question of origin. In this way the fundamental rule is a psychoanalytic act from which the subject abstains, an act that requires that the analyst as well as the analysand, beyond the significance of the symptom, become “interested” in it as it is.Abstract translated by Mary McLoughlin.