Psychoanalysis still

Keep off the idolaters, bright watch-dog … (Paul Valéry, The Graveyard by the Sea)†

1. When Freud had invented it from his own childhood memories, psychoanalysis existed without any other baggage but with the future wide open. Freud dead, the generation of historical psychoanalysts following him also gone, and psychoanalysis’s first tour of the world accomplished, would it not already have had an already long and layered past? As for me, I believe psychoanalysis capable of continuing without psychoanalysts if need be, and I know some psychoanalysts capable of continuing without psychoanalysis if for them it were only inscriptions to be deciphered on tombstones. Between its origins and the current situation, it is in another way that I judge the difference. Yesterday psychoanalysts had to brave the resistance of the world to psychoanalysis. Their task today is the reverse: they have to support the resistance of psychoanalysis to the world. It is to Georges Favez – among others – that I owe this idea of a resistance of psychoanalysis to all that never ceases to weaken or pervert it.†

2. Psychoanalysis has fallen victim to its own success. It happens that its doctrine has become a tasteful dogma, its art a silent routine, treatment a ritual and the curriculum a career. Socrates, it is said, brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. A Socratic task awaits contemporary psychoanalysts: to unhook their practice of the sun in its solstice in which their knowledge “thinks itself and suits itself” and introduce it, according to the poet’s expression, “to my future’s emanation”.† To speak clearly: if it is true that psychoanalysis re-teaches each of us what has been lost in the course of our individual history, it itself has also to re-learn what civilization has lost at each major turning point in collective history. The problem is not to repeat what Freud found when faced with the crisis of the Victorian era. It is to find a psychoanalytic answer to human malaise in our pr