You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
People think psychoanalysts are smart. Beyond their supposed insight into the mysteries of human behavior, psychoanalysts often seem to have an impressive range of knowledge. It's not hard to think of images of psychoanalytic intelligence: Freud's broad humanistic learning is familiar to all, and Bruce Fink's introductions to the selected and full Écrits close with a note about the impossibility of keeping up with Lacan's myriad references. In our own time, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Juliet Mitchell, Jonathan Lear, and Adam Phillips all spring effortlessly to mind as exemplary psychoanalytic intellectuals, moving with apparent effortlessness from clinical vignette to literary or philosophical discourse to metapsychological reduction. And then there's Žižek….
People think psychoanalysts are stupid, or, if not stupid, then deluded, vain charlatans: Outmoded by innovations in pharmacology, committed to phallogocentric logic if not outright misogyny, superceded by 12-step groups, and just a little too Edwardian for a wired world. And, again, it's not hard to think of examples: Frederick Crews, François Roustang, and Alan Sokal all come quickly to mind in the camp of those who find analysts stupid - not to mention HMOs all across the United States. Psychoanalysts themselves frequently treat each other as both smart and stupid: It's not clear whether it's less edifying to hear someone newly excited by Lacan rail against the IPA, or someone who's never read Lacan declaim against the “short session”. And while it's