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Rozmarin introduces his rich and difficult paper on freedom in psychoanalysis with these questions: ‘How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free?’ (p. 320). Throughout the paper Rozmarin explores the relationship between freedom, guilt, memory and responsibility, raising crucial ethical questions: What is freedom when a subject is not self-sufficient but is embedded in an historical world of collective social forces? Given that the subject is constituted by and through the other, what is the subject's responsibility to the trauma of the other? How do we bear the guilt of living our singular lives in the face of the other's trauma? How can we forget the trauma of the other in order ‘to be free to be ourselves’ when such forgetting is experienced as the betrayal of those we love? Rozmarin builds his discussion using both philosophy and a clinical narrative in five richly layered parts.
The paper's depth comes from the interplay between Rozmarin's use of philosophy to critique psychoanalytic concepts of freedom and subjectivity and then applying lived clinical experience to these same philosophical concepts in an ongoing dialectic. He posits that when the analytic relationship is conceived as an active critical engagement between two subjectivities, then it can act as a ‘privileged kind of laboratory, a place where something new appears: that which transpires through the examined living together of the thought, ideology and history in which each singular subjectivity, each intersubjective relation and each collectivity are constituted’ (p. 323).
Rozmarin explains that the ‘something new’ that emerges from this examined living together is no less than ‘new general thought’ and new ‘subjective possibilities’ - in other words, he has identified the psychoanalytic process as a privileged site of cultural transformation. ‘There is no other discipline constituted on the pri