The Creature on the Couch Versus the Citizen on the Street

Abstract

The question of just what that thing we call the social fabric is, how it is established and how it is transformed, is certainly not an easy one to answer. But common sense suggests that some knitting together of our views of ourselves and the world and the possible ways of being rightly and wrongly in it, must occur before most parts of our experience appear seamless enough for the fabric to fit. For this reason alone ideas or practices that last but never really fit in with the fabric of our experience comfortably, like those associated with psychoanalysis, seem to me to be particularly interesting. In the approximately 120 years of its history, psychoanalytic thought has become, albeit mostly behind our backs, part of us, and it is true that today to be “modern” and “western” is to be in important respects irreducibly Freudian. Yet it also remains true that despite this often unwitting absorption of things psychoanalytic neither the thought, nor the curative practice developed by Freud, has ceased to be seriously, often bitterly, contested by a whole range of people from parents, children, and their lawyers, to a vociferous group of experts, some of whom confess to having once been ardent believers. What I want to do here is to take the fact of this continued contestation of psychoanalysis dead seriously and to examine in some detail a particular form of this contestation—that directed at psychoanalytic practice in particular which comes from what I have called “the citizen on the street.” In other words the spotlight will fall on public opposition rather than that originating from specialists of various kinds or from the dissenting insider—unless this opposition comes from the same space as that occupied by the (admittedly more or less imaginary) ordinary citizen. In other words, I am interested in the suspicion, alarm and even outright condemnation that psychoanalysis often elicits (directly or in effigy) from those on the side of the common sense, the common fairness, and even the common decency that together supposedly guide average citizens going about their business in the usual way. What is it in the “curious laboratory of psychoanalysis,” as Christopher Bollas describes it (52), that is curious, what kind of laboratory is it, and why does this particular combination of the strange and the experimental call forth such heated opposition?