ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the question of who owns psychoanalysis by seeking to understand the nature of ownership from a psychoanalytic point of view. It presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Owning and using psychoanalytic ideas is not like owning and using physical objects, though in our current consumer culture there is a pressure to reduce “intellectual knowledge” to the status and nature of a physical possession. The possession of ideas is better understood in terms of identification, about which psychoanalysis has a lot to say. The book explores the ownership and belonging of representations and ideas as a matter of identification. It's starting point is Freud’s “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego”. The futility of legalizing ownership of ideas is apparent from the investigation conducted here.
