The formation of analysts was always Lacan´s concern, but so was the provision of information to the community of valid testimonies about this formation.

For Freud what was essential to the formation of the psychoanalyst was a certain effect obtained in the subject thanks to the analytical treatment in which he was engaged for didactic ends.

Lacan also wanted to recruit psychoanalysts on the basis of examining their relation to the unconscious and to psychoanalysis, taking their experience as analysands as the point of departure.

This relation is summarized in a word that lies in the heart of the practice: the desire of the analyst. This desire can come to light when the subject discovers – as analysand – what the desire of the analyst is made of.

Lacan proposed that the analysand who in this way becomes an analyst at the end of his analysis, could give testimony in front of his colleagues about this desire, particular to each practitioner, in an original experience which he named "the pass".

In his text The Proposition of October 9, 1967, on the psychoanalyst of the School, Lacan proposes the procedure of the pass and grounds it as follows:

"Our only selection lies in facing the truth or in the ridicule of our knowledge. The shadow that covers the merge I hereby consider, that in which the psychoanalysand turns into a psychoanalyst, is what our school can unveil. I am not ahead of you in this, which can not be done alone, since psychoanalysis gives its access"

In as much as the pass is a device inherent to the very concept of the School and invented by Lacan to investigate what the end of analysis is in correlation with the desire of the analyst, this investigation is conducted on the basis of the testimonies of each analysand who is decided to transmit what is of importance about these two themes of interest to the psychoanalytic community.

Furthermore, the pass is for the analysand a new form of transferential relation, once his analysis is concluded, this time with the School and the psychoanalytic cause.

Eric Laurent explains this in his text The Ends of Psychoanalysis and the Procedure of the Pass:

"Thus, the program of work which Lacan has proposed to us is to construct a psychoanalytic institution which takes into account a horizon of destitution of identification obtained through the process itself, without, for all that, accepting the cynical perspective of a subject who is master of his jouissance thanks to a transference forever returned to zero. Lacan's ambition was to demonstrate to the analytic community, not only to that of his students, that the truth of psychoanalysis allows singularities to hold together, linked not through an ideal, but through a transference to psychoanalysis, a transference to the analytic discourse. This transference is another name for the desire of the analyst"

The procedure of the pass begins when the subject directs his demand to testify to the Secretary of the Pass, who evaluates its relevance. The second step consists in the selection by lot of two passeurs who will listen individually to the testimony given by the passant. The passeur is able to listen to the passant since he, in turn, is at the stage previous to the end of his own analysis.

Once this step is concluded, the Secretary chooses one of the Cartels of the pass before which, the passeurs, in their turn, "pass", retransmitting the testimony heard from the passant.

The Cartel of the pass is a jury whose judgment about what has been heard has the characteristic of being given from a position which – as it is that of not knowing all about the experience of the end of analysis and the desire of the analyst – consists of allowing themselves to be taught by the singularity of each transmission about these two crucial points for psychoanalysis.

If the Cartel of the pass considers that the testimony corresponds to an end of analysis, it grants the passant the nomination AS (Analyst of the School).

Below are some key words to guide the access to some texts where various authors put forward their elaborations on the device of the pass: