What do we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis?

In his 1918 paper “Lines of advance in psychoanalytic therapy,” Freud suggested that psychoanalysis should reach out to the masses on a larger scale. “We need to alloy the pure gold of analysis with the copper of direct suggestion,” he noted. Time has proven this assertion to be true. As Freud had anticipated, the psychoanalytic technique has left doctors’ offices to enter a number of different areas: from hospital and state mental health centers to clinics, social work organizations, and nongovernmental health institutions. Moreover, some authors, following the paths established by Freud, have conceptually enriched psychoanalytic theory and eventually achieved a voice of their own. Hence, one might wonder whether today, in the early twenty-first century, “pure gold” psychoanalysis exists, whether there is a psychoanalyst who, with uncontaminated theories, is conceptually pure gold, the owner of the truth. This paper tries to find the common denominator of current theories of psychoanalysis through the analysis of the different meanings of psychoanalysis today. To do this, it has taken as a model the metaphor of a short story written by Raymond Carver entitled “What we talk about when we talk about love.” In that story, the partners in two marriages talk about the different meanings of the word “love.” Some years later, Gordon Lish, Carver's editor, admitted that he had retouched Carver’s original text to help its publication. This controversy allows us to consider unorthodox practices carried out by Freud that sometimes have been silenced in the pursuit of maintaining “the pure gold of psychoanalytic practice.”