The term “psychoanalysis” recalls certain images in the popular imagination, despite its rather unpopular situation in the United States today. Almost everyone has heard of Freud, either in a psychology class or through more colloquial turns of phrase like the “Freudian slip.” Many cartoons depict therapy or counseling with the patient lying on the couch … What is Psychoanalysis? Read More »...

During his interview with Françoise Wolff, when asked, “Doesn’t psychoanalysis contain a repression of freedom?” Lacan responded with a chuckle, saying, “Those words make me laugh. I never talk about freedom.”   This tongue-in-cheek remark raises the question of the equivocal nature of this word “free” in Freud’s fundamental rule of “free association.” For already by … Free Association As Paradoxical Concept Read More »...

Today I’d like to talk about the end of the analysis. Or rather the ends. Or perhaps rather, endings. There’s something about the end that tends towards the romantic and dramatic. There’s an end scene, something that brings about the signification of what came before. Endings are something we can make demands of. People who … The Illusion of a Future: Traversing the Fantasy of the End of Analysis Read More »...