ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis inherited the question, what happened when the doctor's speech became the materia medica?, from hypnotism and provided a novel form of rapprochement between the increasingly dominant ideal of knowledge as power, and the professional ideal of freedom. Psychoanalysis was a response to the crisis of the medical contract as revealed by hypnosis – and aimed at supplying an auto-critique of itself as subject to the general laws of contract. Psychoanalysis was thus always a borderline case, subject to the power relations of the medical contract, but aiming at examining this contractual dimension itself as a fantasy. Psychoanalysis treats money as if it truly were the universal means of exchange, and patients do behave as if they can buy love. The patient's will-power was not simply something that was to be overridden by the superior authority and wisdom of the hypnotist, even though S. Freud recognized that hypnotism was founded on the existence of this authority.
