From the Couch to the Chair, Secret or Mistery?

Abstract

Abstract Initiated as a search for the truth hidden by the symptoms of hysteria, psychoanalysis, but in fact psychoanalysts, had a particular relationship with the secret over time. Beyond the historical truth of using the word „secret” to name meetings back in the time when the first group of psychoanalysts was being formed, beyond the stigma of secret society or even occult society with which the psychoanalyst society was then labelled, or, more precisely, the community of psychoanalysts was labelled (some still believe this is the case), the question of secrecy has been present since the beginning of psychoanalysis, not only in the minds of those who, in one form or another, were approaching psychoanalysis, but right in the center of the experiences of psychoanalysts’ practices. Between confidentiality and urging the patient to say “whatever goes through their mind”, between the phantasm of the primitive scene and the construction of intimacy, the meaning of the secret carries the psychoanalyst forward towards revealing the pathogenic truth and the construction of the sanogenoic mystery. From free association to evenly suspended attention, we have a sinuous trajectory of certain affects that, freeing the sensorial that carried them, inscribe the papyrus of the Ego’s history, detached from the Id.