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Psychoanalysis is a practice whose theory is shaped by experience. How can a skill or knowledge that is only acquired through the process of being involved in one's own analysis, an experience so unique that it cannot be duplicated, be transmitted to others? By contagion. The story is well known: Jacques Lacan claimed he had personally heard from Carl Gustav Jung's lips a revealing anecdote about Sigmund Freud's expectations concerning the dissemination of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 336). Upon entering the New York Harbor in 1909, during his first and only visit to the United States, Freud turned to Jung and said that their hosts were not aware that they were bringing them the plague. For Freud, psychoanalysis could expand epidemically even if it meant by frightful contagion. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea that psychoanalysis is a highly infectious disease, and that the analyst, rather than curing an illness, is spreading it, appears somewhat ominous.
We know that even with the occasional communication by contact, Freud's feared vast propagation of psychoanalysis was more a wish than a reality. Despite its early moment of popularity that peaked in the 1950s (a popularization realized at the cost of a severe distortion, reducing it to a medicalized sub-specialty), psychoanalysis has remained a fragile endeavor, always under the threat of disappearance. Each analysis remains one of a kind, unique in its idiosyncrasy, untranslatable, and almost uncommunicable. Let me ask again, how can one share the unrepeatable experience of an analysis? Or, furthermore, how can one transmit the specificity of the clinical practice?
A few years ago, I gladly participated in an experiment in the challenges of transmission in psychoanalysis. On January 10, 2015, I was invited to “Without History: An Experimental Case Presentation” organized by Das Unbehagen's Ezra Feinberg, Evan Malater, Olga Poznansky, Jason Royal, Olga Hannah Wallerstein, and Jamieson Webster. With Davi