ABSTRACT
We now turn to the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Lacanian psychoanalysis has powerful therapeutic effects, but this rather indirect link raises a crucial question for practitioners about the claims they make for psychoanalysis as a form of therapy as such. Psychotherapy is, among other things, a practice of self-understanding and selfdevelopment that is congruent with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, an ideological representation of subjectivity that reinterprets and distorts psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject. I locate the rise of psychotherapeutic practice inside and outside the clinic in contemporary society in the rebellion against capitalism by Marxism and the dire effects of the capture and caricature of Marxist politics by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The argument here is that ostensibly `postmodern' ¯uid forms of subjectivity that psychotherapy values are a manifestation of particular political-economic conditions and of an ideological reaction against what an alternative to capitalism could be.
