Resistances of Psychoanalysis to Continuing (2025)

Resistances of Psychoanalysis to Continuing

Published online, September 2025.

Editorial note:

This text is a situated editorial that interrogates the contemporary forms of visibility, transmission, and transformation of psychoanalysis. Drawing on two key propositions—the “position of psychoanalysis” (Allouch) and “its way of enduring” (Lacan)—it brings into tension the current uses of psychoanalytic discourse, caught between restoration, branding, and protest. Between a critique of pinkwashing, a reading of Foucault, and a call for effective depsychopathologization, it proposes a rereading of psychoanalysis’s internal resistances: not those it suffers, but those it opposes to its own mutation. It does not envision the end of a psychoanalytic world, but an opening—discontinuous, polemical, critical—of its conditions for continuation. Provided, however, that controversy is not refused by positions of principle…

Contents

Introduction

Allouch – position, power, resistance

Lacan – intransmissibility and reinvention

Cancelling and pinkwashing

Depsychopathologizing psychoanalysis

Conclusion

Where it starts from.

Jouissance is a matter of power and extent; orgasm is one of force and surface; pleasures sublimate the residues: the enjoyed being, its humors.

When I open my eyes to the world, I do not immediately see bodies and pleasures; almost contrary, sexes and wars impose themselves. A conviction in the first vein refuses the insolence and outrage of the failure of the living over eternity. Such is the slope; what castrates. The adoption of the second lets vivacity run toward its renewed destiny; the perpetual.

Is it human? How far and from what?

Introduction

This text is an editorial, a situated address in the psychoanalytic field—neither theoretical in the strict sense nor scientific in the academic sense. It participates in a critique of psychoanalysis in the process of being made, being said, being transformed. It starts from an impression, a discomfort, an enigma: psychoanalysis today seems both more visible and more invisible than ever. It exposes itself, claims itself, reformulates itself; it displays itself on bookstore tables under new labels, it thinks itself in intersection with struggles. And yet, a doubt remains: is this still psychoanalysis, or one of its images? A projection intended for its environment, or a resumption from its real core?

This text hopes to raise the controversy—expected—that now stirs more on social media than in constructed debates. It does not propose a doctrine or a synthesis, and even less a review of the texts taken as reference, but a latent viewpoint, for lack of being mine in the subjective sense.

Two historical propositions interest us here. One is by Jean Allouch and the other by Jacques Lacan. Seemingly comprehensible, having heard them repeated, they nevertheless deserve to be revisited, in order to have an informed use of them. Together, they spice up the ambient questioning in the psychoanalytic milieu about the continuation of psychoanalysis. And to be more precise, these two invite us to think about the “position of psychoanalysis” and “its way of enduring,” between Foucault and real reinvention (not merely symbolic).

The current state of psychoanalysis and its present situation are not easy to grasp in a single stroke; their contours and surfaces are troubled. The conviction that something is happening invites us there, however, in eclectic ways: from the psychoanalytic field itself, and from the rest of the world, from related sciences to the confines of its outside, in sum. Indeed, the multiplication of increasingly perceptible expressions, here and there, from South to North, from margin to norm, from logos to thought and from one era to another is illustrated in various forms of interrogations and openings bearing a questioning about what deserves to be called the position of psychoanalysis, today, its position to endure.

There will be no coherent answer or exhaustive questioning, only two or three threads that impose themselves, today, as productions of the present.

Allouch – position, power, resistance

Jean Allouch proposed, on January 13, 1998: “The position of psychoanalysis, I say, will be Foucauldian or psychoanalysis will be no more.” This short sentence, extracted from a broader and more complete statement, taken up on various occasions, gathers a multiplicity of stakes. It is unfortunately often distorted to prefer a handicapping shortcut—”psychoanalysis will be Foucauldian,” stripped of its position. Yet, without it (the position) there is no episteme; nothing but a dogma; neither Foucault nor Allouch nor Lacan aimed at that, quite the contrary: the numerous informed and advanced studies or commentaries on their propositions have demonstrated it; their interest in the founders of discursivity (Marx, Freud) encouraged them to define according to each of them (Foucault, Lacan) what a Discourse is—without prejudging, even retrospectively, the signified linked to “position,” under Allouch’s pen.

With this common error shortening the verbatim, this distorted invitation to the future, to qualify psychoanalysis rather than its position, everyone can know what is missed, what fails: leaving psychoanalysis unfinished as an object, to avoid promoting it as surplus-jouissance, like extra hay for livestock. And we can see it these days, the stables are filling up as the bales multiply.

No matter, for the occasion, to appreciate the clarifications provided by the author of the formula. Let us stay with the maneuver, since it is exemplary and touches a crucial point, which is not surprising; if it were not, as also happens very often with Lacanian slogans inspired by his revisited statements, the point identified would not engage such rhetorical constructions. Here, they interest us; they concentrate, regarding the Foucauldian position and the current state of psychoanalysis making a situation, everything that deserves our attention regarding psychoanalysis’s resistances to continuing.

Resistance, when it moves to the action of resisting, begins only in the relation of self to self, as Foucault emphasized, thereby specifying the point of resistance to political power. Which is also understood as: to resist is first to think against oneself. Such is the fundamental index of what position is. And two divergent questions: must the analyst think against themselves?; must the analyst think psychoanalysis against itself? One privileges nourishing a critical content, the other is passionate about obtaining a critical place. Let us say, to bring them together a bit, that what must be interrogated from them is the analyst’s position vis-à-vis knowledge and its use, therefore vis-à-vis medical or psychopathological therapeutics. After which the position can merge with the agent and its product.

This notion of position then engages another question: how does this position sustain itself over time, that is, how does psychoanalysis endure?

It is here that a double clarification can be imposed. On the one hand, what is meant by “Foucauldian position” for psychoanalysis—what Jean Allouch proposes—by rigorously distinguishing it from a “Foucauldian psychoanalysis”? A Foucauldian position for psychoanalysis does not mean that it must become “Foucauldian,” in the sense of a theoretical alignment or an external graft. It is rather about drawing on what Foucault called “thought from the outside”: a practice of thought that interrogates the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself, its points of subjection, its mechanisms of authority. Psychoanalysis, in this orientation, is no longer envisaged as knowledge about the subject, but as discourse caught in a regime of truth that produces subjective, political, historical effects. Such a position engages thinking against oneself, from the resistances that psychoanalytic knowledge provokes or rejects, not to defend itself but to re-elaborate itself. It is not psychoanalysis painted in Foucault’s colors, but a psychoanalysis that confronts its own outside: the norms it institutes while believing it analyzes them, the effects of power it generates without naming them. It does not become a critical tool; it allows itself to be criticized in what it brings about in its subjects.

For, distorted by truncated repetition, it becomes an abstract prophecy, a seductive but empty slogan, that makes psychoanalysis an adaptable, malleable object, “compatible with” rather than a discourse to be situated, historically and politically. Without the angle of position, there is neither episteme, nor subversion, nor possible historicization. Only a remainder remains—a fetish of knowledge, or a myth of resistance.

Lacan – intransmissibility and reinvention

Let us now add to it a brief reminder of another central invitation to our present interrogation, which is heard truncated, by tradition, in the milieu. Psychoanalysis is to be reinvented, supposedly thus said by Lacan, was for a specific thing: its way of enduring; Lacan speaks of psychoanalysis to be reinvented in its way of enduring, and not only of being reinvented itself. He says: “As I now come to think it, psychoanalysis is intransmissible. That is quite troubling. It is quite troubling that each psychoanalyst is forced—since they must be forced to it—to reinvent psychoanalysis. If I said in Lille that the passe disappointed me, it is precisely for that, for the fact that each psychoanalyst must reinvent, based on what they managed to extract from having been for a time an analysand, that each analyst reinvent the way in which psychoanalysis can endure.” He did not specify voluntarily or despite itself; he did not say “Psychoanalysis is to be reinvented.” This is not a reformist incantation or a plea for perpetual renewal. It is a worried observation: transmission does not work as it should. And this is not a logistical or generational defect: it is a structural effect.

But then, what would be this way of enduring to be reinvented, for psychoanalysis? The way in which psychoanalysis can endure, in the sense proposed by Lacan, does not pass through a repetition of foundations or a reproduction of dogmas. It implies that each analyst, by risking the act, draws from it something from their own passage through the analysand experience—a way of holding the transference, of making the unconscious exist, which has nothing of a method, but everything of a style. Reinventing the way of enduring is not founding a new school, nor relaunching a collective project. It is an ethics of relaunching within the experience itself, always situated, never modelizable. This presupposes abandoning the very idea of transmission as reproduction. What is transmitted is the impossibility of transmitting, and the decision to make something of it. To endure, for psychoanalysis, is not to self-assure. It is to interrupt oneself, to lose oneself, to better let a cut do its work—which does not reconduce, but reopens. This does not mechanically impose the experience of the Passe as the foundation of expected theorizations; other procedures or practices can be based on it, but it does impose that all theoretical propositions must exude the stakes of the analyst’s formation.

Psychoanalysis is not transmitted as knowledge, a protocol, or a doctrine. It is transmitted on the condition of always being re-engaged in an act, in a subjective reinvention.

In this way, reinventing psychoanalysis in its ways of enduring is certainly not reinventing it from the ground up, nor restarting it from zero or refounding it. Psychoanalytic institutions can be refounded, restarted from zero: many groups, associations, or schools are created, others dissolve. But psychoanalysis… how could it be other than continued, since it is not “yet accomplished” as Jacques Derrida emphasized?

In Resistances—of Psychoanalysis, he writes “There is undoubtedly a psychoanalysis in progress, but there is above all, in my eyes, a psychoanalysis to come, still unaccomplished, which has not yet arrived in its most radical possibilities,” and adds “It is not only society that resists psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis that resists itself, its own mutation. A psychoanalysis that refuses to transform itself becomes its own obstacle,” or again “Psychoanalysis cannot stand apart from the ethical and political stakes of our time. If it does not take the risk of engaging, it loses its potential for subversion and emancipation,” and finally “Psychoanalysis is not a closed system. It is an infinite opening, an endless work on resistances, on the unconscious, on what remains to be discovered and understood.” Not yet accomplished, he writes. Not closed, can be heard. Established in part, certainly, but unfinished. Supposed and unsuspectable. Untenable and indomitable purveyor of knowledge still unknown, unheard of.

Must we re-hear here that psychoanalysis itself, and not only the cure, is finite and infinite although sometimes carried to its term—necessary for those who move to the analyst’s chair, but not for the Freudian experience? Intransmissibility is not only a fact: it is also an effect. Psychoanalysis is constructed as a discipline of transference, but it institutionally reproduces forms of knowledge that are non-transferable, sacralized, untouchable. This contradiction must be interrogated as a form of internal resistance. The paradox is therefore the following: psychoanalysis resists its disappearance, but also its continuation. It wants neither to die nor to change. It settles into a repetition of its structure, in the rigidity of its discourse, in the sometimes deadly fidelity to its great names. And yet, it calls for reinvention, for the act, for what interrupts the chain.

Again, it is not about throwing everything away. But about knowing what, in current discourses on psychoanalysis, serves as mimetic conservation, or conscience polishing for shareholders attached to their dividends, instead of living, de-instituted transmission. For it is not psychoanalysis that is to be saved, it is its gesture. And this gesture can only be reconducted if it breaks with itself, in an act that does not make a trace, but a rupture.

To endure, for psychoanalysis, is to accept not recognizing itself. To pass through forms that do not reassure it. To let itself be caught at fault. This is what Lacan called reinvention, and not a contemporary rebranding. A way of saying that psychoanalysis has no ready-made future. It has only the possible to open. Therefore the new, and not only commentary, more or less subversive, and even less the shelving of counterphobic objects or anti-stress balls to soothe affects.

Cancelling and pinkwashing

The book Pulsion, co-written by Sandra Lucbert and Frédéric Lordon, offers a paradigmatic example of the tensions raised here: what is a psychoanalysis that no longer thinks from its position, but from another knowledge? What does a discourse produce that borrows its concepts from psychoanalysis without exposing itself to its effects of division?

In this stimulating and brilliant attempt, a dialogue between psychoanalysis and Spinozist politics. The work actually operates a reduction of the drive to a deductible force, a primitive energy, an ontological foundation of the subject. The drive becomes the essential motor of all subjectivity, thought of as fundamental given—and not as a paradoxical construction, edge of representation, symbolic montage and analytic fiction. Unbound from the clinical scene and the unconscious, it re-naturalizes itself. The signifier becomes substance. This slippage signals a reversal: psychoanalysis is no longer here a situated knowledge, but a reserve of concepts mobilizable for a pre-established theoretical project. It is not about reinvention from psychoanalysis, but about a redeployment of psychoanalysis in the service of an already constituted theory of the subject. As such, Pulsion embodies what this text criticizes: a supposed relaunch of psychoanalysis without testing its position, its mode of endurance, its internal resistances. At no point does the work take into account what Foucault, Allouch, or Lacan posed as essential: that knowledge, in its very form, is linked to a dispositif of power, and that psychoanalysis is transmissible only on the condition of undoing itself, in an operation that engages the subject’s body, and not only the logic to be destroyed of an oppressive system. In this respect, Pulsion divides nothing. It comments, it recuperates, it elaborates—but from an external place. In other words: it confirms psychoanalysis as image, but does not prolong its gesture. It nonetheless remains that in attempting to criticize it, after having read it, everyone can progress by leaps and bounds in their apprehension of theory, which in itself is already so much more decisive than most other current propositions.

It is here that the decisive fracture is located. A psychoanalysis that endures without thinking from its own position, without passing through the non-knowledge it opens, becomes an epistemic object among others—a theoretical ornament. What Pulsion names “drive” is no longer what psychoanalysis engages there: a point of the real, uncontrollable, which obliges one to begin again from this non-place and not from the place of a thought.

If psychoanalysis wants to think of itself as discourse, it must still assume its participation in a regime of truth, that is, in procedures of enunciation, legitimation, and power. Now, when it refuses to test itself against its own effects of truth, it ceases to be a critical knowledge to become an instituted truth. It is now a matter of grasping how these stakes of position and endurance are replayed in contemporary debates, marked by forms of radical protest, critical rewriting, and sometimes recuperation at the risk of cultural reappropriation—particularly from queer and decolonial cultures.

This therefore requires new invention, elaboration, and conceptualization, to keep at bay the mirage of a strategy that would be purely reactive. Without this risk-taking, there is only commentary on existing theories to fill the absence of serious research. But this requires, before anything else, particularly good intentions—always poisoned—to articulate what position is as a way of enduring. The Foucauldian position, eminently critical, encourages us to consider knowledge as never neutral, and always linked to a relation of power. It is not about objective, external, or pure knowledge, but about knowledge produced in historical, political, social dispositifs—and this knowledge itself participates in the construction of subjects. In this sense, knowledge is both what illuminates and what subjugates. Foucault thinks that knowledge is part of the mechanisms of power. There is no truth outside a political context: what is considered true depends on the dominant regimes of truth, that is, on what institutions, authorized discourses, social practices make credible at a given moment. It may therefore be, particularly today, that only bad facelifts appear, well filtered like flattering selfies.

This also requires clarifying the ways of enduring vis-à-vis the History of subjectivities. In this sense, the nuances savored dialectically by Laure Murat in her recent text call out to us. How to summarize them?

Murat denounces the term “cancel culture” as a catch-all label, often used on the right to blur and discredit very diverse practices—activism, toppling, denunciation, boycott, cyberbullying—under the same negative halo. She prefers to speak of “culture of protest,” more accurate and clearer. The toppling of statues (e.g., Confederate figures after George Floyd’s death at the hands of American police) is perceived as an awareness of historical blind spots, and not an attempt to erase history or rewrite official memory. But this is not enough, and this is where the interest of her encouraging proposal lies, so well formulated in French by the equivocation of réécrire/récrire: the first does the job, the second dodges it, procrastinates.

What does the visible current state of Psychoanalysis teach us, in 2025? Various propositions are emerging, illustrating a kind of tremor, a movement—plural, no doubt. These appeared discreetly at first, then quite visible now, in the titles of conferences, seminars, or bookstore tables. An epistemological, editorial, and clinical current state. What do we find there? A psychoanalysis restarted, rebooted, reworked or refounded, rethought, renewed. These propositions have appeared recently; they multiply and challenge all the more, those said by the verb reinvent which held the ramp until now.

Each action verb, thus advanced, presupposes a conception and an experience of the object of psychoanalysis as compatible as they are irreconcilable, from which one must begin to extract the ferments to clarify their processes and their aims (unconscious, political, theoretical); for the object should be followed by the goal, of psychoanalysis, if it is a matter of clarifying its future. But we find nothing there that responds except to confirm psychoanalysis as object. It follows that it is sufficient unto itself, tinged with new colors and crucial knowledge. It is reinvented in the manner of the shortcut overwhelming the prophet’s citation, thus elevated by disciples.

The error pointed out here surely constitutes one of the ferments in question. They intersect the internal resistances of psychoanalysis—let us specify of psychoanalysts. Among the most determining, let us make room for the insolent propositions of other cancelling. In a flamboyant sheaf could be thrown overboard the cumbersome, the monsters whose inventory can be stated: the Oedipus, the Phallus, castration, the psyche to cite only the most evoked in this domain. This can be sexy or funny for some, but not much more than a misleading advertisement on PsyGPT (an AI application for psychs who got the wrong practice).

After which, it can be difficult to submit to critical analysis that psychoanalysis can be renamed “feminist,” “queer,” “materialist,” “intersectional,” etc. While the erasure of the name by its complement distances all the more the attempt at any reinvention, which already fails on the shores of a crude denial, by the refusal of historicized time and the perversion of space—that of enunciation in particular, which sees supposedly situated knowledge only stolen from a few too convenient ambassadors.

Depsychopathologizing psychoanalysis

If Lacan, for example, makes of the Phallus what we know of it, therefore at least three distinct definitions, leaving intact the bite of the signifier without signified and signified of jouissance as surplus-jouissance, to detach from Freudian penis envy, it is not without a prodigious interest in reinventing the position of psychoanalysis and working on its way of enduring. Toppling statues reinvents nothing, it is a symbolic necessity, not dialectical. It must be completed, even before being envisaged, by an otherwise deeper enterprise to relieve psychoanalysis of what prevents it: depathologizing psychoanalysis, depsychopathologizing psychoanalysis. Depsychopathologizing psychoanalysis does not mean removing all clinical scope from it, nor denying psychic suffering as the matter of analytic experience. It means breaking with subjection to the medical model, to pathology as a reading grid, to the obsession with identification prior to listening. It is refusing that the subject be assigned to a structure before having even spoken. This implies thinking the unconscious no longer as a place of production of classifiable symptoms, but as a scene of cut, equivocation, resumption—a scene without category. This obliges shifting the center of gravity of analysis: no longer to cure or adapt, but to open a space where the subject’s invention prevails over their evaluation. It is there that an essential line of flight is drawn: to exit the academic and institutional logics that—under the guise of scientificity or supervision—constantly reassign listening to normed frameworks. The psychologization of psychoanalysis, via diplomas, nomenclatures, so-called clinical masters, or even affinity or identity groupings in the form of intellectual connivance is not an extension of terrain: it is its domestication. We must get out of there. Get out of the university, certifications, competence criteria, the illusion that one must be legitimized to be able to listen—when it is listening itself that disorganizes all legitimation.

Historically, psychoanalysis constituted itself against psychiatry, but without ever departing from its vocabulary. Neurosis, psychosis, perversion—these terms come from the outside, and if they were subverted, they nonetheless continue to structure practices of naming, classifying, mastering. Although this triptych identifies the psychoanalytic perspective, distinct from other categorizations or markers, it is not constituted of signifiers released from the psychoanalytic experience strictly speaking, but from uses, certainly well-felt, but of which it is permitted to wonder what these words have become after more than a century of experience. Since they are taken in the first theoretical developments of the Freudian experience, as it emerged at the end of the 19th century, and they carry with them the determinants and knowledge of their uses, are we so sure of maintaining them as such? For, to depsychopathologize is therefore also to de-hierarchize: to renounce the illusion of a conceptual coherence to defend, of a scale of disorders, of an objectifiable depth, of a “case” to understand. These three signifiers, functioning as master-signifiers, but not only, have not become so different from themselves: they remain filled with fantasmatic fixations, of which first and foremost domination by the norm. When and how will they be irradiated, under a poetic thrust freed from metaphorical facilities, with other significations, other places, other lives to make room for other sayings freed from their theoretical said? Where they will serve other sexuations than those of dominating normality.

This is an ethical as well as political gesture. It is not about advocating a soft relativism or benevolent neutrality. It is about recognizing that certain subjectivities—queer, trans, dissociative, outside-language—do not find their place in the systems of meaning endorsed by institutions. It is about welcoming what escapes, what overflows, what does not fit into the clinic of identification. This presupposes assuming that psychoanalysis, if it wants to endure otherwise, must also exit itself. Not to adapt to the world, nor turn its back on it, but to open itself where the unknown insists—where no label, no diploma, no academic knowledge guarantees anything.

Trans people—before all others—show us the way, the limits, and the ways of dealing with it with dazzling pedagogy, without this truly becoming teaching, among psychoanalysts who take up the pen or the floor. To resist continuing is not simply to refuse to change. It is to persist in repeating oneself in apparently critical forms, but which reconduce fundamental blind spots. It is to continue without transformation, and to transform without division, without controversy—which we hope is otherwise more informed than the comments scattered on Facebook and other Instagram, etc.

Let us think, here, of the long-haul work faced by the cures of tomorrow’s analysts who came out of the University with a psychologist diploma enhanced with a mention clinical psychopathology or clinical psychology, these language elements become totems—on this, everyone can know what it is about. They all cannot avoid, even to relieve the experience, redoing the path of emerging meaning to know its excesses. And to learn, by the same token, how the symbolic only establishes itself without reaching any order of the same name, except for reactionaries, still outside dialectic. Which can only be appreciated at the risk of wandering, of poetry, as far as possible from nosography, from concept or from the academicism of scholarly writing.

The only chance to work at the heart of its concern: what is said about madness, what is thought of the mad (all categories concerned). Far from a polishing guided by temporary circumstances.

Conclusion

To resist, for psychoanalysis, is not to defend itself. As one clings to sex where the last branch—perhaps the first, in reverse—presents itself to avoid the attraction of the underlying abyss, one can cling to the Logos in an identical or almost identical manner. It is against this that additional and complementary breakthroughs must be established, founded on the powers of castration in experience—notably—which does not necessarily make a Complex, as Freud proposed. And to apply the same audacity to other supposed relics. Psychoanalysis deserves to be depsychopathologized, not to be vaguely cancelled or pinkwashed.
The task is immense, but it has begun. Where some want to enclose psychoanalysis in a restored, prestigious, or consoling image, others introduce dissensus, trouble, the negative. It is not about adding new watchwords, but about listening to the faults, the failures, the ruptures—and hearing in them the seeds of another possible. What is coming is less a revolution than an underground work, in practices, dispositifs, speaking out. Where the symptom is no longer indexed on a norm, but on a singular invention; where the analyst is no longer the guardian of knowledge, but the one who consents to lose a bit of it, and no longer recognize themselves in it—not even for their narcissistic needs—as an identity, a political identity.
Psychoanalysis: what does not continue repeats itself (often in a simply inverted and often disappointing form).

In support of this journey, it has appeared that two propositions deserve today to be reworked without fetishism. The first—the “position of psychoanalysis”—engages not to confuse critical discourse and integration strategy. A Foucauldian position for psychoanalysis is not a psychoanalysis in Foucault’s colors: it is a psychoanalysis capable of thinking from its own edge, in a non-identity relation to knowledge, and in the test of its subjection. It does not adapt, it de-subjects itself. The second—”its way of enduring,” according to Lacan—obliges us to exit a logic of conservation or frozen heritage. To endure is not to transmit a corpus, but to experience a gesture always begun again, in the intransmissible itself. And for this, psychoanalysis must consent to exit its sanctuaries, its chairs, its schools. It can only endure by putting itself outside: outside categories, name effects, diplomas of superiority.

This text hopes to raise a series of fertile controversies, rather than impose a viewpoint. Can psychoanalysis be anything other than a discourse that defends itself? Is it ready to expose itself to the conditions of its own loss—to produce the new, and not a replacement discourse? Under what conditions—political, ethical, symbolic—could we invent a psychoanalysis that stands up to contemporary subjectivities without dissolving into demand? And if we finally spoke seriously about the resistances of psychoanalysis—not those it confronts, but those it opposes, some of which, principal ones, have been raised here?

END