The death of Jacques Lacan in 1981 marked the end of a kind of epoch, and the moment has come to recall what the goal of psychoanalysis is. We tend to forget the goal of psychoanalysis, because we are aware of the weakness of its means; namely, that it is a long and arduous method, necessarily available to only a small number of people. More than that, we must acknowledge that the work of psychoanalysts has hardly any impact beyond a limited circle of the initiated and so one can all too often suspect it of being more sensitive to the winds of fashion than to the obligation to persevere that is indispensable to any discipline. Among these initiates, psychoanalysts take refuge in the relative comfort of small groups that have the look of coteries, where dogmatic pronouncement too often takes the place of necessary controversy.

Some take advantage of this dogmatism to sell psychoanalysis in the cultural marketplace, despite clear caution from masters