ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors begin by quoting from a commentary on the state of psychoanalysis today: The patients of the 1990s are quite different from those of earlier days. They mostly present with narcissistic or depressive symptoms and suffer from loneliness, instability and loss of identity. They no longer wish to undergo long courses of treatment, and refuse to see their analyst regularly enough for the treatment to be useful. In effect, what Lacan found enabling with Caillois is the way in which that same epidemic of anomie which Roudinesco reports in the neurotic patient-of-today is made to intersect with the endemic. That is, anomie is re-situated in the intersection of the experiential and the structural. But whilst it is true that Lacan is, like Roudinesco, scathing about this individual's so-called “ego omnipotence”, his attention to the structural means that he does not make of this an alibi for the analyst.
