For a New Gaya Scienza of Psychoanalysis

Is it imperative for psychoanalysis to survive? If so, is it possible to consider the survival of psychoanalysis without a form of transmission, without knowledge being passed on, without someone acquiring psychoanalytic knowledge—in short, without an educational practice involving learners and teachers? And what should this practice entail, then, in terms of the type of knowledge that is being passed on, and in terms of the learning environment that is most suited for safeguarding the transmission?

In April 1971, Jacques Lacan traveled to Japan in order to participate in a series of events in support of the forthcoming Japanese translation of his Écrits. Speaking at the Tokyo-based offices of his Japanese publisher Kobundo, he treated his audience to a panoramic overview of the theoretical and clinical principles underpinning his “return to Freud,” whilst explaining some of his own innovations, such as the axiom that the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan, 2005b). Much like the lectures he had become used to delivering in France to uninitiated audiences after the overnight success of Écrits, Lacan's “Tokyo Discourse” was a largely introductory and expository talk, apart from the final section, in which he expressed himself much more polemically, and which may have left quite a few people baffled. “I really want psychoanalysis to have something to do with the human sciences,” Lacan proclaimed, “on one condition, namely that the human sciences disappear” (2005b, p. 144). Yet as if their disappearance was somehow less of an issue than the decline and fall of psychoanalysis itself, he added (and ended on) an anything but reassuring note: “[P]sychoanalysis needs to survive, it's a big problem. Will it survive after my death?” (p. 144). It is well known that with respect to the survival of psychoanalysis, Lacan did not expect anything from Japan and even considered the Japanese as “un-analyzable,” thus rendering the introduction and maintenance of psychoanal