ABSTRACT
In the psychoanalytic story people are ambivalent and transgressive, whatever else they are; and these predispositions raise, by implication, the issue of getting away with something, of avoiding what are deemed to be the inevitable consequences of certain actions. From a psychoanalytic point of view—in psychoanalytic language, as it were—analysts have to wonder not whether it would be possible not to feel guilty. But how is it possible, what would it sound like, not to be stifled by guilt? Getting away with it, as a wishful fantasy, is a way of imagining doing something to the super-ego that would make desire seems bearable, that would make pleasure seem pleasurable. The memories of getting away with it, in childhood and adolescence, are, more bluntly enigmatic. Getting away with it, in other words, is an experiment in privacy. It is, one might say, a conscious solitude with an unconscious backdrop.
