On Teaching Psychoanalysis

As you may recall, one of the ways Freud classified psychoanalysis (in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”) was as an “‘impossible’ profession in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” Psychoanalysis was, he wagered, in some way comparable both to education and to government whose status as “impossible” has been known for much longer. Since I have spent a good deal of time over the last few years considering—attempting both to learn and to teach—the theoretical overlap between psychoanalysis and politics, this insight of Freud's is never very far from my thoughts.

If each field taken on its own terms is “impossible,” what are we to understand as the aim in the teaching of psychoanalysis and politics? For surely impossibility is another way of recognizing a certain lack or incompleteness of knowledge inherent to the system of thought itself, and if this is the case, then the question is not simply one of pedagogy but, in fact, reflects directly back onto the theory underpinning Freud's point concerning psychoanalysis' “impossibility.” For Freud what is clearly at stake is not only the transmission of a piece of knowledge but the imparting of an impossible knowledge, the transmission of a system of thought within which the hole or rupture in knowledge can itself come to the fore. It is only in the relation—or more precisely the impasse—between knowledge and “impossible knowledge” that the workings of the unconscious itself come to light. The problem that Freud then faces, and we in our turn, is how to teach a “knowledge” that is, in effect, only in absentia, that is as a lack or impossibility in knowledge.

When approached directly the question of an impossible knowledge becomes itself unreadable, inconceivable, and it is for this reason that we need both supporting institutions (such as the International Psychoanalytic Association) and signature myths (from seduction theory, to Oedipus, to the primal horde) in order to facilitate its tra