ABSTRACT
When psychoanalysis becomes an institution, when it is applied to so-called "normal subjects", it utterly ceases to be a conception that can be justified or discussed on the basis of cases: it no longer cures, it persuades; it shapes for itself subjects who conform to its own interpretation of man. There is no psychoanalytic neutrality be the patient upright or horizontal, be the therapist garrulous, or silent as the grave. Inscrutability, rigid unforgiving time and money arrangements are all three strongly characteristic of the psychoanalytic setting. In the psychoanalytic process there is an essential force for change that does not depend alone on the truth of the professed content, the metapsychology of the therapist. One may have a metapsychology that holds that the patient has been mystified by family experience. The goal of therapy becomes to lift the mystification, to let the patient see that he has learned not to "know what he knows he knows".
