The end of the analysis is beyond the pleasure principle
Another significant bit from the 1986 article Lacan and the Ethics by John Rajchman, where he makes a very astute observation about the "end of analysis" (i.e., the analytic cure in so far as such a thing exists).
The aim or "end" of analysis is thus not defined by learning to match our needs with "reality." It is a confrontation with what is "real" in our lives: what in our past, or in our desire, we can never fully represent, what divides us from ourselves and each other and opens us to singular interpretation [...] psychoanalysis refers us to something in our lives we cannot make into a "pleasure principle." It is the ethical theory of what is beyond the pleasure principle (p. 43).
What is beyond pleasure is not reality but "the real," what we cannot represent about ourselves or our lives, what does not "speak" or cannot be represented in language, what is beyond the ego as a directed, centered, "cathected" object, what is linked therefore to death or loss of self. [...] We can formulate no [pleasure or reality] principle for our desire [i.e., our singular mode of jouisance] ; it will always satisfy itself in ways we cannot regulate (p. 44).
What is meant by going "beyond the pleasure principle?"
We might take [Lacan] to mean that psychoanalysis frees us from the domination of the pleasure principles that order our lives, and, more generally, from the philosophical attempts to formulate a principle to tell us how best to live.
What is "beyond the pleasure principle" is beyond the principles that bind
us together in common interest or common identification, for the unconscious is strictly singular; it knows no common code (p. 44).
The therapeutic effects of analysis do work with the pleasure principle. Things that are presenting the subject from getting pleasure do fall away as the analysand "makes sense" of their experiences by telling them to the analyst or by having the analyst's interpretations re-order what is chaotic and disordered in the experience.
But taking analysis to its conclusion means going beyond reestablishing the pleasure principle. The end of the analysis involves discovering what Freud called the death drive and what Lacanians might call jouissance or the real. It is an experience of something that seeks satisfaction that goes beyond pleasure.
When we encounter this, we encounter something we desire even though pursuing it goes against what would be "in our best interests," and what would be socially appropriate.