ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has drawn on a particular environment for the formulation of its concepts and its techniques, and it needs in some ways a similar environment to provide the conditions for its development. There seem to be at least three elements involved in the construction of such a facilitating environment. The first arises from the nature of psychoanalytic work, and originates in Freud’s concern to find a response to human suffering in traditions that valued listening and speech. The second is allied to this, but focused more directly on questions of technique: it concerns the way in which certain effects of what was initially hypnotic, and later, psychoanalytic, clinical practice display a causation by complexes of words. The third is what in some respects could be seen as the most straightforward: it involves the construction of desiderata for the institutional organization of psychoanalysis.
