Teaching and Psychoanalysis: A Necessary Impossibility

The strange behaviour of patients, in being able to combine a conscious knowing with not knowing, remains inexplicable by what is called normal psychology.

However different the Freud biographies may be, they are unanimous on one point: Freud wanted to know. From the outset, we see an ambitious man at work whose goal is to reach a Master position through knowledge. When he takes his first steps toward psychoanalysis—he is at that stage middle-aged—his goal is still the same, and this colors both his initial theory and his practice. The analytic cure is a search for lost knowledge, lost as a result of its becoming unconscious; the aim of the treatment is the re-inscription of this unconscious knowledge into Consciousness. The implicit expectation is that the therapeutic effects will follow automatically. In this respect, Freud reveals himself as an inheritor of the Enlightenment, in his belief that the mere transmission of knowledge is enough to induce change. Nevertheless, beyond this Enlightenment, we meet Socrates with his insistent questions: what is knowledge, and how can it be passed on or taught? These are the two questions I want to address in this paper.

With respect to the first question, I have to specify that the knowledge concerned is rather particular: it is the knowledge that is searched for by every subject right from the start. The Dora case study illustrates the insistence and gives us the gist of this search: through her symptoms and dreams, Dora continually asks what it means to be a woman and a daughter in relation to the desire of a man (SE 7).

This particular illustration receives a general characterization when Freud begins to study childhood and thus discovers the generality of what he calls the infantile sexual researches—i. e., the original quest for knowledge. Just like the hysterical patient, the child wants to know the answer to three related questions. The first concerns the difference between boys and girls, the second q