790 PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1 966)
Joughin, J. J., & Malpas, S. (eds.) (2003). The New
Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Pechter, E. (2003). What’s wrong with literature?
Textual Practice, 17, 505–526.
Psychoanalysis (since
1966)
GERALD MOORE
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) developed
psychoanalysis around a predominantly bi-
ological model of the drives of the human
organism, and his desire to see it recognized
as a medical science saw him steer clear of
philosophical discourse. Psychoanalysis also
made its mark primarily as a science of
“family romance,” the Oedipus complex
of incestuous desire, and as such, arguably,
had little to do with the public sphere of
politics. A number of events occurring in
and around the 1960s meant that this the-
oretical framework began to change. Critics
internal and external to the psychoanalytic
movement began to cast aspersions on both
the scientific bases of psychoanalysis and on
what Michel Foucault has called the
“Victorian,” or conventional and conserva-
tive, nature of Freudian sexual morality.
Assailed, on the one hand, by the emergent
fields of the cognitive and social sciences
and, on the other, by attempts to wed it to
the sexual, political, and philosophical revo-
lutions of the age, the orthodox Freudian-
ism of the International Psychoanalytical
Association (IPA) became increasingly side-
lined, riven by internal politics. Having
survived the onslaughts of both Nazism
and fascism, with their respective accusa-
tions of its being a “Jewish” and a
“bourgeois” science, psychoanalysis has,
ironically, gone on to suffer from the sci-
entific and social sexual awakenings it
helped to bring about.
What the analyst Erich Fromm described
in 1971 as “the crisis of psychoanalysis” has
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
been compounded by the growing impres-
sion that the would-be science of the un-
conscious is itself “Oedipal,” more depen-
dent on charismatic father figures like
Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan than
on any independently verifiable scientific
ground or body of evidence. Doubts over
the legitimacy of Freud’s scientific method
reflect both clinical concerns over the ther-
apeutic success of the famous “talking cure”
and evidence that he may have falsified the
case reports from which the treatment was
developed. As a result, particularly in the
United States, this has led to the develop-
ment of alternative psychological approa-
ches, including cognitive behavioral therapy
(CBT), which aspire to ground the treatment
of mental illnesses in an understanding of the
brain (rather than the unconscious or psy-
che) as a physico-chemical system with sci-
entifically ascertainable malfunctions. The
added factor of increasingly popular phar-
maceutical options has led to calls, exempli-
fied by Dufresne (2003) and Mayer et al.
(2005), for psychoanalysis to be forcibly
consigned to the past.
At the other end of the spectrum, more
closely associated with literary and herme-
neutical approaches to the unconscious,
psychoanalytical theorists have sought to
make a virtue of necessity. Emphasizing
that the unconscious is not an entity that
can be scientifically measured, but more an
incoherent text whose depth exceeds rigid
diagnoses, they argue that psychoanalysis’s
perceived structural weakness is precisely
what makes it preferable. For example,
prominent analysts like the Lacanian Elisa-
beth Roudinesco (2002) have criticized the
current vogue for treating symptoms uni-
laterally as signs of depression, which serves
reductively to group a whole range of symp-
toms under a vague and totalizing catch-all
notion of illness. Often attributed, on the
one hand, to the growing costs of health
provision, which has deprioritized

expensive psychoanalysis, and, on the other,
to the increasing role of pharmaceutical
corporations in the funding of scientific
research, these new therapies, psychoana-
lysts argue, fail to treat the singularity of
individual patients’ problems. Such con-
cerns have ensured that psychoanalysis
retains some support. On account of the
prominent role of theoretical psychoanaly-
sis in popular “French theory,” whose repre-
sentatives have proffered a number of
generally friendly criticisms of Freud and
his legacy, psychoanalysis has even under-
gone something of a theoretical revival in
US departments of comparative literature.
As a clinical practice, however, it is, with
some exceptions, now in seemingly irrevers-
ible decline.
In the US and Northern Europe, the path
of this decline was already established by the
mid-1960s, with Freudian psychoanalysis
rapidly falling out of favor amidst the pro-
liferation of alternative methodologies.
Foremost amongst these, the cognitive
and behavioral psychology pioneered by
Albert Ellis and A. T. Beck were defined
by their commitment to empirically verifi-
able scientific analysis and experimentation,
which would avoid the risk of becoming
wedded to founding figures of paternal au-
thority. Rejecting the psychoanalytic treat-
ment of the “talking cure,” which they saw
as overly reliant on the purely intellectual
dissolution of symptoms through the anal-
ysis of patients’ (analysands’) speech, pro-
ponents of CBT use empirical and statistical
observation as a basis for encouraging
patients to exert more active control over
their emotional responses. Distancing
themselves from the seemingly all-powerful
agency of the unconscious in Freud and,
later, Lacan, they also prefer the less mys-
terious, less intimidating concept of a
“subconscious” to define the stratum of
nonconscious activity that we do not expe-
rience clearly.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1966 ) 791
Similar emphases on the limits of analysis
meantthateven those who stayed closertothe
basic ideas of Freud ended up diverging
irreparably. The Viennese-born Chicagoan
analyst, Heinz Kohut, sought to reorientate
Freudianism to account for the apparently
increasing prevalence of narcissism, the path-
ological attachment to (material) objects he
saw as symptomatic of the low self-esteem
brought on by a post-Fordist, consumerist
society. Kohut’s theory of self-psychology
emphasized people’s abilityrationallytotrain
and developtheirown“senseofself.” He went
on to call for the dissolution of traditional
psychoanalysis, before being expelled from
the IPA in the 1970s.
While America moved away from psy-
choanalysis, in France, by contrast, and
most notably in and around the events of
May 1968, a cooptation of the unconscious
by radical Marxism and philosophy led to an
unprecedented wave of activity and creativ-
ity on the borders of the psychoanalytic
movement. Under the influence of Jacques
Lacan, as well as theorists like Jacques Der-
rida, Felix Guattari, and Julia Kristeva, the
evolution of psychoanalysis became bound
up with those of structuralism and, subse-
quently, poststructuralism. The vast scope
of these broad intellectual movements
affirmed room and even the need for both
scientific and literary, or hermeneutical,
approaches to the study of the unconscious.

JACQUES LACAN, ECRITS,
AND 1966
The stakes of a changing society, the internal
politics of charisma, and the scientific bases
of analysis all come together in the exem-
plary case of Jacques Lacan, the Parisian
psychiatrist whose self-declared “return to
Freud” became a constant thorn in the side
of the psychoanalytic establishment. Be-
tween the late 1940s and 1970s, armed
792 PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1 966)
with the latest structuralist theories of lan-
guage, Lacan embarked upon a revolution-
ary shifting of emphasis away from biology
and biological drives toward the idea of an
essentially social unconscious, created
through networks of signification and lin-
guistic exchange. This move away from the
private sphere of the (Oedipal) family to-
ward an understanding of the unconscious
as a product of language saw psychoanalysis
become more of a social science in the
process. The effect was to open up a gap
between orthodox psychoanalytic theory
and a discourse of the unconscious increas-
ingly at odds with its orthodox clinical
practice.
Lacan secured his reputation on the basis
of intermittent conference papers and a
yearly seminar series, held in Paris from
1951, publishing almost nothing until the
collection of articles and papers brought
together in Ecrits in 1966. By this time,
however, he had already created several
ruptures within the international psycho-
analytic community, particularly over ques-
tions of psychoanalytic practice and the
training of new analysts. The result was
his enforced departure from the IPA, the
global governing body set up by Freud, and
his foundation in 1963 of a new institution,

the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. If Lacan was
decisive, it is thus not so much because of his
impact on the analytic community. Except
in France and, later, in South America,
where its technical complexity enabled his
work to escape heavy state censorship, this
community quickly disowned and largely
ignored him. Lacan was decisive, rather,
because his theoretical (as opposed to prac-
tical) analysis transformed the rest of the
human and social sciences, including
philosophy.
Heavily influenced by the structuralist
anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, who
analyzed the myths of archaic societies as the
symptoms of a social or “symbolic”
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
unconscious (1987[1950]), Lacan diverged
from Freud’s vision of the unconscious as a
repository of incompatible sexual urges in-
ternal to the individual. Following Levi-
Strauss’s idea that society is organized
around unconscious structures of symbolic
exchange, Lacan argued that both subjec-
tivity (the ego) and the unconscious are
produced through language, with which
we are determined not by intrinsic proper-
ties of consciousness, but by the way our
speech is returned to us from what he calls
the big Other (Autre) of the unconscious
symbolic order. Freud’s talking cure suc-
ceeds because the unconscious is structured
in the same way as language, with its symp-
toms therefore resolvable in language. This
concept of symbolic exchange was also cen-
tral to the most hotly disputed element of
Lacan’s analytic practice, namely his insis-
tence on variable-length sessions with the
patient, often lasting as little as five minutes,
which was the ultimate cause of Lacan’s
expulsion from the IPA. In direct opposi-
tion to US self-psychologists and what
would later become CBT, Lacan argued
that the task of psychoanalysis should be
to disabuse the individual of the notion that
identity is in any way prior to our interac-
tions with others. Bringing an unexpected
end to sessions would theoretically achieve
this by “punctuating” the patient’s speech,
reminding them that the unconscious is
outside and in excess of individual control.
By the time Ecrits appeared in print,
Lacan’s teachings had already evolved,
placing more emphasis on what he called
the “Real,” the crucial point at which
structures are undone by an excess of
the very logic that makes them possible.
Often seen as a shift from structuralism to
poststructuralism – though not by Lacan
himself –the move coincides with the

founding of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris,
announced at the opening of the 1963–4
seminar, later published as the opening

chapter to Seminar XI: The Four Funda-
mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978).
Posing himself the guiding question of
whether psychoanalysis is a science or
more a form of religious revelation, Lacan
undertakes a discussion of the discipline’s
precarious position between scientific fac-
tual description and religion’s speculations
into the unknown. Where others spoke
increasingly of the “subconscious,” Lacan
now went even further in the opposite
direction, emphasizing the impossibility
of attaining the “real” object of uncon-
scious desire, “objet petit a.”
If the 1966 publication of Ecrits thus
marked the highpoint of structuralist psy-
choanalysis, it also thus marked the onset of
its decline against a resurgence of the disci-
pline of philosophy, which it had once threat-
ened to supersede. A 1965 conference on
structuralisminBaltimore,Ohio, announced
the emergence of a new generation of the-
orists, including Jacques Derrida, who
would both criticize and also extend
Lacan’s recasting of psychoanalysis as ef-
fectively a philosophy of the subject. That
they did so, for the first time, without
necessarily practicing as analysts, further
signaled the increasing detachment of the-
oretical psychoanalysis from the analysis of
clinical pathologies. Poststructuralism was
to confirm the shift of psychoanalysis to-
ward what Paul Ricœur (1970[1965])
called “cultural hermeneutics,” a way of
interpreting society as a whole and not
just its individual members.
May 1968 became a notable illustration of
this, and of the potential for psychoanalysis
to be political. The protesting students
looked first to Lacan for leadership, but
his role as celebrity doyen was short-lived.
The themes of Lacan’s later seminars over-
lapped to some extent with the questions
raised by the events of 1968, most notably
the 1972–3 seminar on female sexuality
(Seminar XX). For the most part, however,
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1966 ) 793
his increasing devotion to the obscure
mathematical field of topology, in which
he saw the potential for expressing the
“impossible” Real diagrammatically, saw
Lacan lose ground against those more will-
ing to tap into the public mood of sexual and
political liberation.
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY, ANTI-OEDIPUS,
AND SEXUAL LIBERATION
A philosopher by training but a practicing
(Lacanian) analyst at the experimental clinic
of La Borde, Felix Guattari was one of the
earliest practitioners of institutional and
group therapy. He suggested that the insti-
tution of one-on-one clinical sessions be-
tween the patient and analyst creates the
impression that pathology is intrinsically
individual, the result of biology rather
than society. By abstracting from the social
nature of the unconscious, he argued, tra-
ditional psychoanalysis deprives patients of
the possibility of creating social solutions to
their problems, new social bonds that could
facilitate their escape from socially and in-
stitutionally caused repression. His theories
resonate with those of Michel Foucault, who
notes in the first volume of the History of
Sexuality (1992[1977]) how the standard
format of analysis prescriptively reproduces
the power structures of the Catholic
confessional.
There were a number of similarities in
Guattari and Foucault to the British “anti-
psychiatric” movement of David Cooper
and R. D. Laing, who criticized the ethical
norms at work in the naming and diagnosis
of “madness.” Cooper in particular argued
that the supposedly irrational and incoher-
ent language of the “mad” constitutes a
legitimate attempt to communicate experi-
ences that are themselves irrational and
incoherent, falling outside our ability to
express them in conventional terms.
794 PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1 966)
These attacks on psychoanalysis’s sup-
posed neutrality become one of the domi-
nant themes of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Insights into the power relations of psycho-
analysis and the social history of madness
would also furnish the basis of Guattari’s
collaboration with the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze. Published in 1972 (and translated
in 1984), their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia polemically argued that psy-
choanalysis was grounded in an Oedipus
complex whose main effect was to reduce
the unconscious to a private and passive
theatre of dreams. For Deleuze and Guat-
tari, Lacan’s formulation of desire as
lack, the longing for an object (“a”) that
can never be attained, serves to conceal
desire’s capacity to produce and change
reality. It limits desire to the production
of dreams and confines it to the sphere of
the family. They go on to argue that capi-
talism, rather than desire, is the cause of lack
in subjects. Advertising and the constant
production of purportedly new and better
products means that satisfaction is, at best,
fleeting. Psychoanalytic attempts to natu-
ralize, or ontologize, this manufactured lack
serve only to legitimate it.
Driven by the idea that “the real is not
impossible,” Deleuze and Guattari call for
psychoanalysis to be superseded by
“schizoanalysis,” a practice of creative ex-
perimentation with new and unconvention-
al forms of social (and sexual) relations,
unhindered by prescriptively Oedipal con-
figurations of desire. Record sales and a
dramatic philosophical impact made Anti-
Oedipus the most successful in a long line of
attempts to synthesize Marxism with psy-
choanalysis, including Herbert Marcuse’s
Eros and Civilisation (1955) and tentative
works by the Marxist structuralist Louis
Althusser.
Another social movement to benefit
from the revolutionary stirrings of the
1960s was feminism. Many feminists had
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
typically seen psychoanalysis as a bastion
of patriarchal culture, to be rejected on
account of its characterization of women
in terms of Penisneid (penis envy). Others,
such as the London-based New Zealander
Juliet Mitchell (1974), also saw it as a vital
tool for understanding male-dominated
society. A one-time Lacanian, the Belgian
analyst Luce Irigaray is similarly ambiva-
lent, both vociferously criticizing her
mentor’s refusal to recognize female sexual
difference, while also affirming the need to
psychoanalyze the unconscious of Western
philosophy from which descends the pa-
triarchal tendency to denigrate women. In
works including This Sex Which Is Not One
(1985[1977]) and To Speak Is Never Neu-
tral (1985[2002]), Irigaray’s highly literary
feminist critique of Freud and Lacan leads
into discussions of the female body, moth-
erhood, and the bisexuality of female de-
sire. In this respect, she comes quite close
to another practicing analyst, novelist, and
literary critic, the Paris-based Bulgarian
Julia Kristeva. Kristeva (1982[1980])
develops the concept of the “abject” to
refer to the unsettling effect of the flows
and excreta of the human body. She shows
how woman has often been deemed syn-
onymous with the abject in literature and
argues that attempts to “purify” the abject
negate the crucial role women play in
giving life to children, prior to their im-
mersion in the language by which women
and the body are later suppressed. These
critiques of the sexual and Oedipal politics
of psychoanalysis have helped to pave the
way for gender studies’ and queer theoret-
ical critiques of Freud and Lacan’s hetero-
normativity, such as Butler (1990) and
Bersani (1995).
Particularly relevant to the literary study
of psychoanalysis is its deconstruction by
Jacques Derrida. Derrida (1987[1983])
deploys the idea of “phallogocentrism” to
suggest that Lacan encounters the same

problem that undermines much of modern
Western philosophy, namely its attempt to
impose reason, laws, and identity on that
which refuses them. Paying particular atten-
tion to the ability of (Lacanian) psychoanal-
ysis to yield authoritative interpretations of
literary texts, Derrida suggests that psycho-
analytic readings work only because they
presuppose their own validity. The discovery
of psychoanalytic “Truth” is achieved
through the imposition of a restrictive psy-
choanalytic frame of reference on texts that
would otherwise escape the assignation of a
fixed meaning. Lacan reconstructs the liter-
ary text so that everywhere he looks he finds
confirmation of his own ideas, but in so
doing he suppresses the openness to inter-
pretation by which literature is defined.
Derrida’s claims have since given rise to
significant debate on the exact relationship
between deconstruction, literature, and psy-
choanalysis, with Slavoj Zi  zek (2000) pro-
viding a recent defense and clarification of
the Lacanian position. The criticism has not
stopped – particularly Lacanian – psycho-
analysis from becoming a valued methodol-
ogy of comparative literary studies and other
related fields, including gender studies and
queer theory, on the one hand, and trauma
and Holocaust studies, on the other. With
regard to the latter, works like Cathy Caruth’s
Unclaimed Experience (1996) have drawn on
the idea of experiences too traumatic to be
fully integrated into consciousness, too in-
tense to be coherently remembered and con-
veyed in speech, to explain the fractured,
disjointed structure of testimony.
 zek who is at
Yet it is the aforementioned Zi
the forefront of the recent resurgence in the
fortunes of academic Lacanianism. Debuting
in English in the early 1990s, with a number
of works on how to read Lacan through film
 zek’s writings have grown
(and vice versa), Zi
increasingly political, promoting a politi-
cized Lacan as the positively totalitarian al-
ternative to what he sees as the politically
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1966 ) 795
correct, “weak thought” of Deleuze, Derrida,
and cognitive behavioral psychology.
THE END OF PSYCHOANALYSIS?
The fate of clinical psychoanalysis seems less
certain, however. In France, which (along-
side Argentina) is its last remaining strong-
hold, a very public debate on the future of
psychoanalysis has been triggered by con-
cerns over the regulation of the country’s
8,000–14,000 practicing psychiatrists, psy-
chotherapists, and psychoanalysts. The de-
bate has centered around the publication of
the Livre noir de la psychanalyse [The Black
Book of Psychoanalysis], a volume of some
1,000 pages containing 80 articles by 30
authors across the disciplines, united by a
desire to redress the information gap that
has allowed the survival of an allegedly
outdated therapeutical technique. Faced
with an exhaustive array of criticisms, rang-
ing from the failure of psychoanalysis to
treat depression, to the flaws in its science,
its cynical manipulation of patients to fit
diagnoses and the stigmatization of parents
deemed to have “failed” their children, the
analytic community responded with a book
 zek’s men-
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Zi
tor and the son-in-law of Lacan. The L’Anti-
livre noir de la psychanalyse (2006) rails
against the dangers of cognitive and behav-
ioral therapy and reasserts the legitimacy of
the “unscientific” talking cure. It argues that
CBT achieves results not by eliminating the
problem or cause of suffering, but simply by
eliminating the symptoms that express it.
The same has been said of prescription
medicines, whose controversial role in the
treatment of depression has recently been
brought back into focus by clinical trials
showing antidepressants like Prozac to be
only marginally more effective than sugar
pill placebos (see, e.g., Leader 2008). Such
findings reinforce psychoanalysts’ case for
796 PSYCHOANALYSIS ( S I N C E 1 966)
the importance of a more flexible, human
therapeutical dimension – a treatment seek-
ing to eliminate the sources of trauma,
whose very unconsciousness makes them
impossible to measure scientifically.
Caught between psychiatry and non-
medical intervention, between chemical
prescription and the “talking cure” of ther-
apeutically discussing one’s problems, psy-
choanalysis continues to struggle with ques-
tions over the legitimacy of its therapeutic
role and institutional status within the med-
ical, scientific, and academic establishment.
 zek, this combination of
Yet, according to Zi
being both unfashionable and impossible is
precisely what makes it so important. His In
Defence of Lost Causes (2008) opens with the
description of psychoanalysis, alongside
Marxism, as one of the two great “lost
causes” of contemporary debate, their re-
spective attempts at an overarching theory of
everything having given way to a prolifera-
tion of less ambitious minor sciences. The
age of psychoanalysis may be over and the
fragile position it has come to occupy at the
intersection of the arts and natural and social
sciences may well be wrong and even “crazy,”
 zek acknowledges. But the attempt to oc-
Zi
cupy a position of overarching truth is still
better than the alternative of not even trying,
of contenting oneself with a multiplicity of
surface level explanations that dull the symp-
toms without treating their cause.
SEE ALSO: Butler, Judith; Deleuze, Gilles;
Derrida, Jacques; Feminism; Foucault, Michel;
Freud, Sigmund; Kristeva, Julia; Lacan,
 zek, Slavoj
Jacques; Zi
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED
READINGS
Althusser, L. (1997). Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud
and Lacan (trans. J. Mehlman; ed. O. Corpet & F.
Matheron). New York: Columbia University Press.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Beck. A. T. (1976). Cognitive Therapy and Emotional
Disorders. New York: International Universities
Press.
Bersani, L. (1995). Homos. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press.
Cooper, D. (1979). The Language of Madness. Lon-
don: Allen Lane.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. R. Hurley,
M. Seem, & H. R. Lane) London: Continuum.
(Original work published 1972.)
Derrida, J. (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond (trans. A. Bass) Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. (Original work
published 1983.)
Dufresne, T. (2003). Killing Freud: Twentieth-Cen-
tury Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis.
London, New York: Continuum.
Foucault, M. (1992). History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: The
Will to Knowledge (trans. R. Hurley). London:
Penguin. (Original work published 1977.)
Fromm, E. (1971). The Crisis of Psychoanalysis.
London: Jonathan Cape.
Irigaray, L. (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One (trans.
C. Porter & C. Burke) Ithaca: Cornell University
Press. (Original work published 1977.)
Irigaray, L. (2002). To Speak Is Never Neutral (trans.
G. Schwab). London: Continuum. (Original
work published 1985.)
Kohut, Heinz (1978). The future of psychoanalysis.
In P. H. Ornstein (ed.), The Search for the Self:
Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1950–1978, vol.
2 New York: International Universities Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection (trans. L. S. Roudiez). New York:
Columbia University Press. (Original work pub-
lished 1980.)
Lacan, J. (1978). Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1963–4 (trans. A.
Sheridan; ed. J.-A. Miller). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (1998). Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality.
The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore 1972–3
(trans. B. Fink; ed. J.-A. Miller). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in
English (trans. B. Fink, H. Fink, & R. Grigg).
New York, London: Norton. (Original work
published 1966.)