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The relationship between psychoanalysis and politics is one of a new kind, and we are far from making sense of it. One way to interpret the title of Gabriel Tupinambá’s book, The Desire of Psychoanalysis, is as the pursuit of trying to make sense of this connection – even though that's not exactly how Tupinambá himself frames it, and also that he might not like that suggestion. He defines the desire of psychoanalysis in several slightly different ways in the book. One of these definitions is: a desire that provokes an interest ‘in the further development of Lacanian psychoanalysis’ (p. 3). Tupinambá thinks there are practical and theoretical obstacles to this development, which are stopping it from happening in existing Lacanian orientations. He thinks they have maintained an unnecessary barrier between analysand and analyst, and that the ‘constitution of clinical space’ (p. 3) needs to be properly theoretically accounted for. The desire of psychoanalysis, he says, ‘takes the historical existence of psychoanalysis itself for its cause’ (p. 3), and it is linked to the ability of the clinic to function. For many reasons, he suggests that psychoanalysis is doomed if we don't have this desire.
The main impetus for Tupinambá to write the book was an intervention made by the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) in French party politics in 2017. The WAP is the Lacanian organisation founded by Jacques-Alain Miller in 1992, which operates through schools in nations around the world.1 In 2017, the WAP denounced both the right and the left in the French presidential election and supported the neoliberal candidate Emmanuel Macron as a strategic attempt to stop Marine Le Pen from winning. This, Tupinambá thinks, revealed some problems with Lacanians that also compromise their clinic. He wants to treat this moment like a Marxist ‘crisis’ – a moment when the fundamental ideological presuppositions of a historical system are revealed, but still carry on operating. One result of