ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis that is sustained by its allegiance to S. Freud cannot in any circumstances offer itself as a ‘rite of passage’ to some archetypal, or in any sense ineffable, experience: the day when anyone expresses a view of this order that is not simply a dead loss will be the day when all limits have been abolished. Since Freud the unconscious has been a chain of signifiers that somewhere is repeated, and insists on interfering in the breaks offered it by the effective discourse and the cogitation that it informs. Freud’s biologism has nothing to do with the moralistic abjection that wafts up from the psychoanalytic kitchen. The imaginary function is that which Freud formulated to govern the investment of the object as narcissistic object.
