The Letter, Issue 57, Autumn 2014, Pages 29 - 40
FRAGILITIES OF ANALYSIS[1]
Jean Allouch
The historical attempts of psychoanalysis to remedy its sense of fragility by forging a pseudo-solidity alongside psychiatry, psychology and anthropology have led to a deviation of its aims and an inhibition of its efficiency. Michel Foucault has argued that psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysts outside Lacan, has not had the courage to think of itself and to exercise itself as a form of spiritual exercise - as understood from ancient times, where only a transformation of the subject can permit his access to the truth. Psychoanalysts need to rediscover a sense of fragility which refuses to offer guarantees, renounces psychiatric and even early Lacanian clinical categories, abstains from classifying analysers and in particular from describing their sexual behaviour as perverse. Freud's final arrival in Moses and Monotheism, at Geistigkeit (spirituality) as opposed to psychology and religion is an illuminating guide to what is truly at stake in the Freudian field.
Key words: fragility; Michel Foucault; clinical categories; the diverse; spirituality.