ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at psychoanalysis from the perspective of witnessing. In this perspective, analysis is an experience where the analyst creates the conditions allowing the analysand’s ability to testify on his own behalf to be restored.
The first witness, the mother, testifies to the discontinuity of human existence by creating a counter-investment in the face of the void. “Primal repression” originates in an opposition, a “no” to the limitless, to extinction. Freud conceived of “primal repression” in order to confer coherence to the concept of the unconscious he was elaborating. This is how he came to grant the child, on principle, the capacity for reflection associated with the inscription of the other in the same. In his haste to establish the foundation of the new field he was delimiting, Freud assumed that the essential question of the creation of the subject had been resolved.
It is this assumption that the author re-examines in this chapter.
