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In this era where all that is solid melts into air, authority has become sought again perhaps at the very moment it disappeared, and the tendency of authoritarianism has become evident to fill the absence of easily available, functional and transient forms of authorities. The distance between authority and authoritarianism has widened, and authoritarianism has tended to transcend psychic and social boundaries. In these times, there is a need to rethink the constitutive and forming functions of different forms of authority in psychic and social life, to question the relationship between the undermining of these functions and authoritarian tendencies, and to turn to a psychoanalytic effort that seeks possible psychic sources of anti-authoritarian potentials that can provide a basis for emancipatory and creative processes.
When considered together with its relationship with hypnosis, we can say that the story of psychoanalysis begins with the analysis of the effects and operations of authority on the psyche, its critical positioning towards these effects and operations, and its confrontation with authoritarianism. Freud used hypnosis but did not fall under its spell; he created psychoanalysis by confronting it. Moreover, even after he left hypnosis and turned to psychoanalysis, his issue/problem with hypnosis did not end, he constantly returned to this tension.
The relation of hypnosis to authority and authoritarianism is clear. Freud deals with the same relation, the relation between authoritarianism and hypnosis, in various works, sometimes explicitly and sometimes in relatively hidden ways.1 For example, in 1890, he writes, ‘Hypnosis endows the physician with an authority such as was probably never possessed by the priest of the miracle man, since it concentrates the subject's whole interest upon the figure of the of the physician…’ (p. 298). The hypnotic relationship model is basically related w