ABSTRACT
The complexity of the psychoanalytic treatment project should make it obvious that any simple approach - perhaps any approach at all - to the question of whether psychoanalysis 'works' is doomed to provoke dissension and controversy. This is not just to do with vested interests or with the fact that psychoanalysts are trained to do only this one thing, so that telling them it does not work would not be welcome news. It also represents a genuine epistemological, psychological and social debate: what is the 'cure' in psychoanalysis? Is it really, as some Lacanian work seems to suggest, the repeated asking of questions, the discovery of a voice in which these questions to no one can be pronounced?
