ABSTRACT
Performance and psychoanalysis are offspring of the same ancestor: the placebo effect. Despite transgressive signs to the contrary, both in their own ways seek to please, to be acceptable, and both are characterised by their psychological rather than their physiological effects. The relationship between the two was first consummated on a fine evening in 1889 when Sigmund Freud took a night off from the ‘Congress in Hypnotism’ he was attending in Paris to see a performance artist. Since that fateful evening the two have been artificially sundered to protect the scientific legitimacy of psychoanalysis in its flight from its origins in hypnotic performance. Seeking medical authority and the status of treatment, psychoanalysis might be reminded of its debt to a performance tradition. If, since Chaucer, to ‘play at the school of Placebo’ has meant to flatter with servility, the task here is to contest the intellectual sycophancy shown to psychoanalysis by practices in search of a spurious theoretical rigour, to reassert a prior place for performance in the psychoanalytic turn.1
