Bite into the bean – Epiphany (With humour) (2026)

Bite into the bean – Epiphany (With humour)

Published online, January 2026.

At last, they are revealed. The three psychoanalyses.

One could almost speak of a council, or of a major theological moment—except that no one really believes in it, and everyone is deeply attached to it. A deliberate analogy with the three monotheisms, then: a joke, but a serious joke, as psychoanalysts know how to make when they speak of what they cannot let go of.

The first sets its course toward the Symbolic.

This is the psychoanalysis of established institutions, training rules, codified transmission, of the Father who keeps the household in order. It speaks the language of recognition, legitimacy, of the framework that lays down the law. It claims to be the guarantor of an order: that of theoretical filiation, of continuity. One enters it through respect for the Symbolic as a compass, and remains in it through identification.

The second sets its course toward the Real.

Here, there is no promise of wholeness or stability. There is the Pass, the act, the cut, the ending that closes nothing. The Real is not what one understands, but that into which one does not enter when one collides with it. This psychoanalysis is founded on the impossible, on what does not cease not to be written. It does not organise an order; it sustains a traversal. It distrusts any guarantee, including its own.

The third sets its course toward the Imaginary.

It is the one that circulates, that moves about, that is cobbled together at the margins. It draws on queer studies, on psy practices, on situated narratives, on unstable identities. It embraces images, identifications, speaking bodies, minority lived experiences. The Imaginary expands within it.

One might think of three camps, three dogmas, three holy wars. But no. For these three psychoanalyses hold only when knotted together. Symbolic, Real, Imaginary: none holds on its own. Cut one, and everything comes undone.

Institution without the Real: dead bureaucracy.

The Real without the Symbolic: mystical wandering.

The Imaginary without the other two: ego psychology repainted as subversion.

Their truth lies not in their separation, but in their Borromean knotting. Each sometimes believes it is the centre; each is mistaken. What holds is not the supremacy of one psychoanalysis over the others, but the tension between them. Three revelations, then—and no religion. Just a structure. And an old joke, still timely: psychoanalysis never ceases to divide itself in order not to disappear.