Ever since the scientistic, objectivistic aspects of Freud's theories and recommendations for treatment were discredited, analysts have had to confront the problem of relativism. If the natural science model applied to psychoanalysis inevitably leads to objectivism, that is, to reification and thus dehumanization of patients and analysts, then the question arises: what sort of discipline is psychoanalysis? If analytical theoretical and clinical work is not protected, so to speak, from relativism, that is, from meaninglessness, by an unequivocally defined methodology correlated with an unequivocally defined object of investigation (“objective” reality), then what can protect it, what can yield disciplinary integrity?

Refracted through consciousness of the rapidly approaching 21st millennium, this long-standing dilemma regarding the status of psychoanalysis begins to take on an aura of fin de siècle obsolescence. Are there any signs or portents of a millennium breakthrough, grounds for hope that psychoanalysis will at last be enabled