ABSTRACT
The history and the potentialities of psychoanalysis are manifestly disrupted, disfigured even, and the claim is that we are engaged in a pernicious self-mutilation. The violence of the new vocabulary is so overwhelming, so insistent, that at times it seems impossible to think psychoanalysis differently. Psychoanalysis and its place as one of the chapters in the history of trance appear to have become subject to a potentially fatal state of hypnotic seizure, a community mesmerized by registration. Psychoanalysis, far from being on its knees, is in the position of the Almighty, in the place of the big other, taking up the situation vacant in our secular age, is in the place of God. Psychoanalysis was always deeply implicated in imperialistic tendencies. The difficulty is that, by turning psychoanalysis into any kind of authority, something of the heart of the project that psychoanalysis is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, gets catastrophically lost.
