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The authors discuss the problems which the tendency toward a social integration of psychoanalytic therapy creates for psychoanalysis as a whole. The proliferation of its "application," the claim of psychoanalysis to offer a causal therapy, and the competition with other psychotherapeutic schools bring about altered professional political conditions (for instance, health laws) which equate psychoanalysis with other methods of cure. In this way, the essentials of psychoanalytic training are called in question. The establishment of psychoanalysis as a medical specialty will strengthen a trend which Freud and Ferenczi sought to resist as long as fifty years ago with their plea for lay analysis—namely, a trend toward psychoanalysis becoming a mere medical specialty. In distinction to rival therapies, psychoanalysis insists on the primacy of its exploration of the unconscious, that is, on being a causal therapy of neurosis. It does not aim at the repression of symptoms through a strengthening of defense mechanisms, but at a "subversive" and Socratic expansion of consciousness. It protects damaged subjectivity against its mere utilization. As a theory of neurosis and, at the same time, a theory of culture, its competence is transdisciplinary. To what extent the compromises implied by the imminent integration of psychoanalysis will jeopardize its substance is an open question.