ABSTRACT
I experience the world of Jean Genêt's The Blacks as I prepare to respond to Joseph Lichtenberg's essay: most people are preoccupied with the struggle to overthrow the old imperium, but, for me, the real action takes place in the jockeying for power among the inheritors. The era of positivism is over; its psychoanalytic manifestations can hardly find defenders among the active contributors on the current scene. Contemporary epistemology is preoccupied with the role of the observer in determining the nature of his (or her) observations; Lichtenberg admirably defines the shifting perspectives among which psychoanalysts must forever choose one or another in order to formulate their interventions. If Lichtenberg still advocates giving the vantage point he calls “empathic” pride of place among the ones available, we may well look upon his choice as a late salvo in the victorious campaign to free psychoanalysis from the vestiges of the laboratory tradition in which it was born—a farewell to Brücke and Charcot.
