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“…Benedetti asked me abruptly: ‘Why do you think psychoanalysis is losing ground on every front?’ Surprised, I struggled to answer: ‘A zeitgeist - that favours drugs of oblivion.’ ‘Maybe…but also because we're under the awful pressure of an outsized demand for certainty, rooted in a conception of causality fundamental to the natural sciences. Under the pretence of scientific rigour, psychological factors are subsumed under biological considerations and the patient is condemned to solitude’”. (Francoise Davoine, 2014)
“Psychoanalysis is a simple thing that we psychoanalysts, for a long time, have been trying to make as complicated as possible, like the Orphic-Pythagorean mysteries. Psychoanalysis is a process of terrific simplicity: it talks about how we, being together, can metabolise the brutality of reality”. (Antonino Ferro, 2017)
To start with a truism: since the early years of psychoanalysis, the societies and their constitutive social relations in which it has taken root have changed enormously. Nowhere have these changes been greater than in the areas of social, personal and intimate relations. And the changes in these areas have been hugely accelerated by the overwhelming impact, in the last twenty five years, of technological revolutions in the field of digital, electronic connectivity, communication and exchange - revolutions which have radically transformed the practice, understanding and impact of social and intimate relating.
Psychoanalysis is nothing if not a highly focused and concentrated field of intimate, personal and social relating. But in its self-understanding and self-definition, and in its canonical basic techniques, it has often seemed like an island of unchanging and unchangeable forms, impervious to the raging seas of radical upheaval in which it is embedded. Obviously being surrounded by such radical changes can be terrifying, producing a desperate clinging to the old orthodoxies. But it can also be an opportunity for stripping o