ABSTRACT
"What we employed you to find out is why people take him [Freud] so seriously" (see Figure 1). What the detective finds is that the language, concepts, and categories of psychoanalysis are not just attributes of our everyday contemporary cultural experience but are internal to such experience itself. That is to say, in the words of the savvy detective, buying into the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis does not require an explicit affirmation of principles but is instead inextricably bound up with our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of things in the world ("frankly I don't give a damn, but facts are facts and ids are unconscious"). It is not just that psychoanalysis has become part of our culture (an anthropological claim that one might make about any number of things that we spend a significant amount of time talking about). Instead, Freud's redescription of the subject and its relation to a set of social or historical formations should be conceived as having achieved a kind of formal systematic coherence that has both set up completely new laws for the production of statements in the human sciences and become an indispensable cultural form.
