ABSTRACT
Whereas psychotherapies are necessarily governed by epistemology and morally or ideologically regulated relationships, as well as the pragmatics of personal adjustment, there is an important sense in which Freud’s discipline reaches beyond these considerations of the known and the knowable. Psychoanalysis is primarily ontoethical. It is to be located within a subversive lineage of inspiration that runs from the Stoics to such philosophers as Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, and that undercuts the hegemonic tradition of ‘Western’ philosophy (Platonic, Cartesian, Hegelian). Of critical significance in this respect is the notion of psychic energy, desire or libidinality, as a dynamic force that is infused within, but nonidentical in relation to both biological and representational operations. The praxis of ‘falling into’ free-associative speaking and listening mobilizes the subject in an ontoethical trajectory that cannot be captured adequately or sufficiently in the configurations of interpretive thinking. It moves against interpretive enclosures, breaking open an awareness of embodied experience (quite different from formulations about the body). Free-association thus discloses the vicissitudes of desire as our inherent polysexuality, and inspires an awareness not only of the liveliness of life within us, but also of the deathfulness integral to every moment of the transformations of representationality.
