ABSTRACT
Forty years ago, it was common sense to state that Freud opened many broad roads and avenues which were left unexplored or unexpanded. Thirty years ago this common sense was debased into a commonplace. As such, it lost its value and was forgotten. Many “new theories” were proposed instead of new directions and ways to progress. Like comets, they had a sparkling life and disappeared after a considerable hullabaloo and fashion-dictated bandwagons advertising them as “the last word in psychoanalysis”. “Freud-bashing” became more common in psychoanalytical publications. As time went by, it became more frequent than expansions of Freud’s work. Finally! After so many partially failed attempts, like those initiated by Jung, Stekel and Adler, revealing hate for the truths entailed and uncovered by psychoanalysis and hardships linked to the need for the analyst to be analysed him- or herself, the “Freud-bashing” done outside the psychoanalytical movement became internal. At the same time, the prestige of psychoanalysis as a useful social practice began to drift, with no end in sight. It may be debated whether and to what extent the so-called state of “one psychoanalysis or many” which led to the so-called “crisis of psychoanalysis” is 92linked to an abandonment of the very ethos of psychoanalysis, here understood as the individual clinical word dedicated to free associations as emanations of the unconscious, of the unconscious itself, the unknown; of Oedipus, sexuality, thinking processes, and narcissistic features of the paranoid-schizoid position. Attempts to prove that Freud “was right” also emerged, but with proofs drawn in a non-psychoanalytic framework, that is, downgrading the empirical, clinical evidence obtained through psychoanalysis proper. In our view, either to prove that he was wrong or to prove that he was right are just two different sides of the same unacknowledged coin—distrust of psychoanalysis. Therefore, not only were many of Freud’s roads forgotten, but some of them were left unexplored.
