Psychoanalysis at the End of the Third Millennium

It was then that I began my Thirty Years War against the professors, the routine years and the deaf.

It is appropriate at this time, having come to the end of the third millennium, to review at our annual Academy of Psychoanalysis meeting on this memorable day in May, 3000, the year opening the 31st century, what has happened to psychoanalysis. To do that I will have to first digress and summarize some historical trends that might be useful in explaining the vicissitudes of our recently reborn discipline. The outstanding thinkers in the first half of the 20th century (1900-1950) when psychoanalysis came into significant prominence, devoted their intellectual and artistic efforts to seeing behind things, an interest which died out in the second half of that century, the so-called age of brain research. Intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century, stimulated by those pioneering thinkers living at the end of the 19th century, attempted to explore and unmask the roots of consciousness. They were led by Freud, Nietzsche, and other psychologists and philosophers who demolished the myth that consciousness was all there was to human mentation, or by such artists as Joyce, who attempted to portray the phenomenology of the stream of consciousness, or by such variegated thinkers as Marx or Proust, who attempted to recapture and understand the formative elements of consciousness.

For Foucault (1973a, 1973b; Chessick, 1992b), who wrote presciently at that time, the human sciences are always unstable, derived, epistemologically complex, precarious, and full of disagreement. This