ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis needs to be able to expose the pseudo-revocations of the pseudonymous authors who spend time on our couches. The great therapeutic book, written in the generation before Freud, is Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus. Climacus is a master at exposing the hypocrisy, the false starts, and the illusions of the Christianity of his day. Official Christianity, what Climacus calls Christendom, was not entirely moribund, but it had become too easy. One symptom, for Climacus, was the facility with which philosophically minded authors could pronounce on the spiritual meaning of the age. Thus Climacus meant his revocation as a healthy antidote to any such solemn pronouncement. However incisive the critiques of his society, however intimate the act of revocation, the reader arrives at an uncanny sense that something pathological is also being put on display. We are in a world of compromise formation.
