ABSTRACT
In the famous postscript to his essay on lay analysis, Sigmund Freud makes some important clarifications which have been taken up by various authors concerned with identifying certain aspects of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis, beginning with those who express themselves through a certain confusion in terms. The true line of division is between scientific analysis and its applications alike in medical and in non-medical fields. Medical and non-medical applications of psychoanalysis constitute, one of the aspects of this line of division, the other being the register that Freud calls scientific analysis – that of psychoanalytic theory proper. The abandonment of the theory of seduction already meant abandoning the reassuring shores of concrete facts that could be referred to very real acts, with what such a step implies in terms of linear causality. The imperious necessity of abandoning the comfortable shores of certainty, but also the risk inherent in negotiating the turbulence of the plausible, right up to the end.
