ABSTRACT

As with other parts of this for-and-against study of psychoanalysis, presenting a conclusion is a precarious process, if I am not to offer too many hostages to fortune. Thinking about it with a friend, he suggested that I had three choices: I could say either 'psychoanalysis is good', or 'psychoanalysis is bad', or something in between. My response is to want to say both of the first two - not to take up a moderate, 'in between' position but to argue for a passionate encounter with psychoanalysis. At this point, having surveyed so many areas (and acknowledging the absence of others which could have been included, such as developmental theory or psychoanalytic literary criticism), it se~ms obvious to me that the arguments 'against' and 'for' psychoanalysis are in a tight balance with one another. The 'againsts' include psychoanalysis' authoritarian training and institutional structures, its confusions over evidence, its poor documentation of clinical material, weak research base, limited outcome and process literature, ethnocentricity and tendency towards normative moralising. The 'fors' are, among other things, its engagement with subjectivity and emotion, concern with agency and intentionality, widening of the scope of rationality, critical awareness of the limits of consciousness, fluid and complex interpersonal focus, appreciation of fantasy and therapeutic integrity. But there is no simple balance sheet here. Rather, what I want to advocate is an intense and, if possible, ambivalent engagement with the psychoanalytic project of mapping the unconscious, of articulating a new rationality which is based on reason (and so is not mystical) but which is also respectful of emotion and irrationality - 'unreason' - and which does not close its eyes in the dark. Psychoanalysis keeps open a route to the underside of experience and this is why, when it betrays its subject, the betrayal feels so

appalling. Having great hopes can lead to great disappointments. On the other hand, if one is not bothered about what psychoanalysis might offer, about the questions it raises and the emotions it probes, then an opportunity to explore some core elements of human subjectivity is missed.