ABSTRACT
The process upon which psychoanalysis is based lies at the heart of Sigmund Freud’s discoveries - the return of the repressed. Psychoanalysis treats the relation as one of imbrication, of repetition, of the equivocal and of the quiproquo. In short, the institution is a return of violence within the field of psychoanalysis, but a violence couched in words and repressed on the physical, body-to-body level. When psychoanalysis ‘forgets’ its own historicity, that is, its internal relation to conflicts of power and position, it becomes either a mechanism of drives, a dogmatism of discourse, or a gnosis of symbols. The privileged position accorded to personal history was not so much a desire to reduce psychoanalysis to individual therapy, as it was a reflection of a certain type of society. American psychoanalysis was overdetermined in its early stages by the experience of emigres, particularly Jewish and German, who were fleeing from Nazism.
