Foreword

For more than a hundred years, since its inception, there have been serious and critical misunderstandings concerning the nature of psychoanalysis – some of them created and promoted by psychoanalysts themselves. Freud, in a letter to Fliess, declared: ‘… I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but […] an adventurer […] with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort’ (February 1, 1900). If only things were so simple.

Freud wanted his creation to be accepted by the culture; he was the first to be responsible for the misplaced ideals of scientism that have contaminated this discipline to this day. But there is no room for scientism in Rosine Perelberg’s psychoanalytic writings. For her, the specificity of psychoanalysis and the goals and intellectual ambition of psychoanalysts, whether practising as clinicians or dealing with matters of theory, clearly belong not to the realm of science but somewhere else. The real strength of Freudian psychoanalysis, as demonstrated in this book, resides in its commitment to the curious coherence of its own unusual discourse. Although this is precisely the origin of many of the criticisms, it remains the central tenet of this extra-ordinary discipline.

Cornelius Castoriadis remarked that human beings are not characterized by logic and rationality but by a radical, “unbridled imagination” which exercises a central role in our psyche, distinguishing us from the rest of the animal world (1991). In other words, primates may be able to suck their thumbs, but so far they have been unable to create language, music, literature and art. Psychoanalysis

owes its existence to and continues to be developed by this uninhibited imagination in a world of its own creation, the other scene of an unconscious that no other discipline has managed to identify, to recognize or to study.

Psychoanalytic theory oversteps the limits of moderat