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In his paper ‘“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’ (Freud, 1910), Freud describes a clinical case with a woman who had sought advice from him after undergoing a consultation with a physician who offered the patient a diagnosis without taking her through the analytic process. In Freud’s paper, the woman’s experience serves as an example of the risks of not institutionalizing psychoanalytic practice, and of the potential for psychoanalysis to become what its greatest critics accused it of: quackery. Freud concludes his examination of the ‘therapeutic alternatives’ offered by ‘this so-called psycho-analyst’ by announcing the creation, the previous spring, of ‘an International Psycho-Analytical Association, to which its members declare their adherence by the publication of their names’ (pp. 225, 227).
As psychoanalysis began to establish itself in the first decades of the twentieth century, it wrestled with its own inbuilt tension between tradition and innovation. To establish a psychoanalytic institute was, as Freud saw, from the beginning, a tricky endeavour. Psychoanalysis should remain suspicious of the fixity of institutions; its freedom derives from questioning the limits of its own knowledge and power. But, as Freud increasingly realized, the risk of operating outside an institution was that psychoanalysis might assume any old form. Certain constraints and practices were therefore deemed necessary to ensure its legitimacy. Psychoanalytic institutions have consequently functioned as a kind of quality control, though also as a battleground for generational authority.
If ‘“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’ was written as a defence of Freud’s own practice - of a psychoanalysis that attends to the irreducible complexity of sexual life and the life of the mind - Shaul Bar-Haim, Elizabeth Sarah Coles and Helen Tyson’s important new edited collection Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life takes up the term to think about psychoanalysis’s own wildness - as it leaves the consu