On the Question of the Future of Psychoanalysis: Some Reflections on Jacques Lacan

Abstract

Psychoanalysis seems to have become increasingly concerned with the question of its future. What does it mean to speculate about the future, to be anxious about it, to assess the present on the basis of anticipation of it? Jacques Lacan was someone for whom the future was a critical psychoanalytic concept. Perhaps most famously, his retranslation of Freud’s ‘wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ as ‘Where it was, there shall I become’, gives a sense of Lacan’s desire to effect a certain kind of displacement forward. In this paper I’d like to situate Lacan’s theory of desire in relation to the question of the future of psychoanalysis. Further, Lacan’s critique of the notion of progress is crucial to understanding this anxiety about the future. I will also give a reading of how Freud dealt with these themes, contrasting his 1910 paper, ‘The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy’, and his 1919 paper, ‘Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy’. My hope is that this will provide an opening in an apprehension that, above all else, burdens the next generation of psychoanalysts.

Keywords:

• Feminine Desire Keyword: Feminine Desire
• J. Lacan Keyword: J. Lacan
• progress Keyword: progress
• S. Freud Keyword: S. Freud
• temporality Keyword: temporality

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Rights: Incopyright