Psychoanalysis Eats its Own: Or, the Heretical Saint Roazen

As someone who has written critically about many flaws in a variety of psychoanalytic thinking, it may seem surprising that I am so hopeful about the future of psychoanalysis. But as long as orthodoxy, sectarianism, and fundamentalism can be kept at bay—which is by no means easy—psychoanalysis has immense possibilities for expanding the horizons of laymen, physicians, as well as academics. (Paul Roazen concluding The Trauma of Freud, 2002, p. 287)

Discourse forms subjects, and never more blatantly, if uncannily, than when these subjects pursue in their personal and professional lives the discourses of the subject. For these are the most likely subjects to have recognized, if not their own subjectification, then the conditions that have made their subjectification possible. Yet if discourse forms subjects it also, and necessarily so, deforms them, since subjects are by definition subjectified, are made subject to a particular discourse or discourses. In the extreme, subjects are enslaved by discourse, swallowed whole. And so the subjects find their ‘calling,’ as Weber put it, or they fall in love, as Freud put it. Whether the enthralled subjects are mad subjects, as Freud characterized it, is surely a matter of perspective.

Among the discourses of the subject none is as convoluted and self-involving as psychoanalysis. Freud took as his object his own subjectivity, attempting to tease out of his innermost thoughts the outline of universally verifiable truths. In turn, the subjects of psychoanalysis preserved and enhanced Freud's original discourse, which is to say they objectified it. Of course the collectivity of subjects devoted to psychoanalysis says nothing about the efficacy or truth of psychoanalytic discourse. It merely says, as Lacan once quipped, that psychoanalysis has been good for the making of psychoanalysts. To this succinct formulation I would only add the following: