There has always been a resistance, at least among psychoanalysts themselves, to thinking of their work as mind-reading or fortune-telling. Despite the fact that most ordinary conversation is exactly this, or perhaps because it is, psychoanalysts have wanted to describe what they do as different, as rational even: dealing with the irrational but not dealing in it ('On waking,' Ferenczi writes mockingly to Freud, 'one wants on no account to have thought something quite nonsensical or illogical'). It was important to Freud that psychoanalysis should not become a cult of the irrational. The unconscious may be disreputable, but the psychoanalyst must not be. And yet Freud's description of the unconscious was a threat to, and a parody of, the more respectable versions of professional competence. If a psychoanalyst knows what's in the unconscious, or knows how it works, she has a specific expertise. But if the unconscious is what cannot be anticipated, can there then be experts of the unknown? 'The weather,' as Freud puts it here, 'of course never comes from the quarter one has been carefully observing.'

LRB 6 October 1994 | PDF Download