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Alfredo Eidelsztein is an Argentine psychoanalyst who has taught postgraduate courses in psychoanalysis for over 30 years at the University of Buenos Aires and is the founder and former director of APOLa International (Asociación Psicoanalítica para Otro Lacan [Psychoanalytic Association for Another Lacan]). He is the
author of numerous books dedicated to revisiting the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice based on the teachings of Jacques Lacan. Some of the titles include: Schemes, Models, and Graphs in Lacan's Teaching; The Graph of Desire (translated into English); Clinical Structures in Lacan (two volumes); Topology in Psychoanalytic Practice, Another Lacan: Essay on the Foundations of Lacanian Psychoanalysis; There Is No Bodily Substance; and Elements for Psychoanalysis. His book, published in Spanish in 2018 and recently translated into English, The Origin of the Subject in Psychoanalysis: Rethinking the Foundations of Lacanian Theory and Clinic, is the focus of this review.
Eidelsztein's distinctive theoretical position holds that there is an ineliminable contradiction between Freud's and Lacan's ideas of psychoanalysis. He shows the distinction by articulating their fundamental concepts and theoretical developments to the key disciplines Freud and Lacan used to build their theoretical edifices. Central to Eidelsztein's project is the integration of disciplines from various epistemic fields into what he calls “the psychoanalysis to come” (el psicoanálisis por venir). By this move he rejects what Jean-Marie Vaysse termed the “myth of self-foundation” in psychoanalysis—the tendency to proclaim that psychoanalysis created itself out of itself. Eidelsztein advocates for an open psychoanalysis that embraces a research program that leads it into the future and the unknown, thereby promoting the development of new arguments capable of better addressing both theoretical and clinical challenges. In order to succeed, a systematic criticism of pa