Да живееш с призраци: психоанализата като призракология

Abstract

The present article attempts to examine the practice of psychoanalysis and the field of psychoanalytic experience from the perspective of the so-called hauntological turn in the humanities. In the logic of the unconscious, the central event of analytic interaction is seen as an apparition in three different aspects: that of the revenant (the return of the repressed), that of the phantom (as the secret of the Other in the subject's unconscious), and that of the spectre (as a relation of responsibility to the Other). We will suggest that psychoanalysis – and perhaps only psychoanalysis – gives the ghosts a real place; and even more: in a particular way psychoanalysis makes them a place of truth, incorporating them into itself, giving them a full share in its history, and opening up the possibility that they can have their own refuge in it, their own history. Psychoanalysis, in other words, endows ghosts with the freedom in which any articulation of meaning for the subject is possible.