ABSTRACT
What I wish to attend to here is the question of the extensibility of psychoanalysis with respect to the professional remit of psychoanalysis. Just who is it that psychoanalysis is meant for? As patient? As analyst? Who is fit to practice it from either side of the couch? And by implication, whom does it exclude? For me, these questions have an avowedly geo-political slant, and it is possible to address them by looking at the practicalities, the material realities that frame the psychoanalytic interaction, questions of social and cultural capital, access, affordability, and so on, that inevitably restrict the potential field of patients as well as that of would-be analysts. This not quite the direction in which I will venture as of yet. It is important, however, that we continue to bear in mind this notion of “practicality”. I shall be returning to it.
