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This has been an unusual internet discussion that has pointed up intersting issues. First, there was the paper itself: a provocative and polemical critique of the propensity of philosophers and other ‘academic theorists’ of a post modern bent to appropriate key concepts originating in psychoanalysis and perorate from their university lecterns on them, without due (and suitably reverential?) regard for their origin in the private context of the analytic consulting room. Given its ambitious sweep–from Descartes and Nietszsche through to Heidegger, ‘Kojève's Hegel’, Lacan, Laplanche, to Foucault—the paper could be consisered a tour de force with important things to say about the present situation of psychoanalysis in the academy, in training institutes and in the consulting room. Read from a different angle (the vantage point, as it turned out, of several of the eventual contributors), the paper appeared as an intemperate, bombastic and frequently impenetrable rheotorical rant against some of the author's favourite figures of hate and fear. The subsequent discussion reflected both these readings.
Second, there was the announcement on the website by the Journal editors, on the day on which the paper was posted, that ‘for the next discussion session, we will experiment with having a slightly more moderated discussion’; and the Moderator (I) was briefly introduced. A month later, however, there had been only one brief but brave contribution. The Editor-in-Chief gently wondered on-line why Ahu mada's paper had created ‘such shattering silence’. Several of the subsequent contributors ventured answers to this question, some more tentative than others. They ranged from (1) the novel and possibly intimidating presence of a Moderator, to (2) the subject-matter of the paper, to (3) the rhetorical style of the author. I shall return briefly to this issue towards the end of this review.
The author sets out his stall very clearly in the first two short paragraphs. ‘On the co