Žižek, S. (2009) The Cunning of Reason: Lacan as a Reader of Hegel. The Harvard Review of Philosophy. XVI. 104-117.
The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).
The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or rather, keeps silence) through him — that is, in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, the analyst is not just another subject, but occupies the empty place of death.
The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning that is supposed to be contained in the big Other.
The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech. The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand (patient) into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of a consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.
The goal is here no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regards to his own status, his de-subjectivation, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”