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Faust: Swift Spirit, you whose projects have no end, How near akin our natures seem to be!
Spirit: You match the spirit that you comprehend, Not me. (He vanishes.)
Goethe, Faust, Part I
Psychoanalysis aspires to a taxonomy adequate to all possibility, impervious to surprise. This taxonomy, outflanking the polyvocity of both metaphor and metonymy, would provide each of its classified objects with one final, proper, name. Such a taxonomy achieved, the theory's central epistemological problem—both the instrument of knowledge and the object of knowledge each burdened by an unknown excess of meaning (“transference thoughts”)—would be finally surpassed.
To surpass this transferential excess the theory does not quite invent the notion of sublimation, but rather dis-covers it, precisely as an erotic object is dis-covered. As sought object, sublimation offers the theory the idea of satisfaction: the means to a self-sufficient future.
Seeking a vocabulary sufficient unto itself, one beyond the influence of transference, the theory, of course, seeks its own end. Itself seduced by sublimation's implicit myth of thought's self-sufficiency, the theory then, ironically, pursues a knowledge invulnerable to seduction. The theory's history can be read as the residue of that continuous pursuit. So read, psychoanalysis turns into one of its own objects: an uninterrupted locus of wanting.
That wanting has produced a theory which spirals along at least two major strands. On one, the theory seems to mime