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Psychoanalysis is for challenging—disrupting—our most passionately held beliefs and unconsciously taken positions for the purposes of greater freedom to think, choose, and converse with ourselves and others. As analysts we intervene in ways we hope further these aims. We traffic in the most human of domains—our private worlds of desire, aspiration, and fantasy, of trauma, pain, and regret. We are especially alert to moments of impasse—resistance—in ourselves and in those with whom we work as we strive for something closer to truth—the unthought or the unthinkable. We know that once thinkable and perhaps thought, our bulwark of resistance has yielded ever so slightly. New engagements become possible, and what we once struggled to see we can now confront with less fear and greater clarity.
Another way to answer the question “What is psychoanalysis for?” is: to make a difference. The difference we wish to make is at the level of being, at the level of the very existence of the human person. Every once in a while a former patient will say “Analysis saved my life.” It happens; of this there is no question. Through psychoanalysis it is possible to make a difference at the level of being.
Psychoanalytic writing ought to make a difference in this same sense—that is, intervene in a productively disruptive way, and thereby possibly change lives. Those of us who read the literature and contribute to it know that much of the time analytic writing does not have these effects. Often analytic writing, including that found in JAPA, adds a little something to our understanding of this or that theoretical or clinical issue, in the fashion of normal science in the Kuhnian sense. This kind of writing is familiar and reassuring, as it essentially reinforces the status quo ante, common opinion, doxa. Further, it reinforces our collective identity as psychoanalysts, in that we recognize ourselves in at least some of what we read.
Yet we know that the reinforcing of identity—the strengthening