ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts today have got into the habit of incriminating capitalism. Their grievances deserve to be scrutinised. Both S. Freud and Jacques Lacan exalted analytic action as one of the highest and most subversive forms of action. They speak in these terms: plague, atopia, ex-sistence, other desire, subversion. Capitalism is not only hard, but it fails at another point. It destroys what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital. Symbolic capital cannot be reduced to the stock of transmitted knowledges, those knowledges that are the weapons, the instruments of success. The processes of monopolisation of speech have certainly not disappeared, but the ideology of the right to expression has triumphed so much today that, aside from anecdote, there is perhaps no longer anything to hear but the universal clamour of human misfortune, that is proclaimed or denied. The impetus came to Freud from the enigmas of neurosis, for neither psychosis nor perversion were the muses of the inventor of psychoanalysis.
