ABSTRACT
Many have claimed that the discipline of psychoanalysis is heir to the Socratic injunction, Know Thyself!This is both true and untrue, for the method of free-associative discourse and the exposition of the human condition that arises from it challenge us to reconsider both what we mean by knowledge and whatever we mean by the subject’s selfhood, the individual’s being-in-the-world. From one standpoint, it was obviously a monumental mistake to imagine that a new mode of science, this radical science of healing, could or should be protected by a Secret Committee, even if such a cabal were constituted by some of the discipline’s most distinguished pioneers. It has been a momentous error in that it has reverberated throughout the history of the discipline, often disastrously (Bergmann, 1997; Limentani, 1996; Loewenberg and Thompson, 2011). From another standpoint, psychoanalysis was, and is, not just another ordinary science, but rather an enigmatic and extraordinary science that warrants special considerations (Kuhn, 1962). To understand the radical heart of psychoanalysis has always required a reconfrontation with fundamental questions about the human condition — the character of its subjectivity, the trajectory of truthfulness, and the systems of meaning within which we conduct our lives, including the cultural and political nexus.
