We are often told that
psychoanalysis is dead. Outdated scientifically, in that the Freudian model of
the mind has been superseded by neurobiology; outdated clinically, where the
talking cure has lost ground to drug treatment or behavioural therapy; outdated
socially, where the idea that we are repressed by the norms of others is no
longer stocked in today’s supermarket of free choices.
But perhaps the moment of
psychoanalysis has only just arrived. At a time when we are bombarded on all
sides by the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, it is a unique space in which we are
released from such pressures. The psychoanalytic encounter allows one person to
feel alive in the mind of another, whatever the consequences. Neither a cure
nor a cure-all, it changes those who experience it, sometimes by helping them
to understand why they cannot change.
Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Grosz
– a dazzling theorist and a renowned practitioner – have urgent stories to tell
us about ourselves and the present state of our wishes: the wish for a
trouble-free existence, and for therapies which can instantly return us to
everyday reality, or unreality; the wish for science to explain our minds, or
explain them away…
Discovering the unconscious at
work in psychic life, Freud showed that the ego is not master in its own house,
that we do not know our own minds. This is a truth with no sell-by date, and
Freud’s insights are alive today more than ever.
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