On the Art of Abolishing the Unconscious by Decree or The Plague Threatened by Rats (2025)

On the Art of Abolishing the Unconscious by Decree or The Plague Threatened by Rats

 

Published online, November 2025.

It appears that Amendment 159 seeks to save science. It’s ironic: every time a power wants to silence people, it invokes science as others invoke God. A fine tale indeed! Now, in the Senate, a few guardians of the technocratic temple have decided that, starting in 2026, the unconscious will be too expensive. Curtain. The subject’s shop is closed. Singular speech? Not reimbursed. Subjectivity? Not evaluated. Psychic life? Not “evidence-based” enough. There’s no box for it in their spreadsheet, so, poof, into the trash.

 

These apprentice hygienists are touching, convinced that humans can be disassembled like IKEA furniture and that a battered existence can be repaired with a PowerPoint protocol. They still believe that suffering is a dysfunction, that a jumbled soul is a bug, and that all of this can be resolved by checking three items validated by the High Authority of All-Knowing.

 

One might think we’ve returned to those tranquil times when a single office was enough to decide what was true and false, normal and pathological. Replace political commissars with “scientific bodies” and you get the same scent: the police of methods. The same authoritarian gesture: you yes, you no. The same sad passion for the homogeneous, the smooth, the compliant.

 

Fascism doesn’t always need boots: sometimes it dresses up as bureaucratic rationality. It’s the reduction of the world to a single theory. It’s the hatred of anything that escapes measurement. The box. The protocol. It’s the panic in the face of the subject, in the face of what is murky, twisted, opaque about it. In the face of what cannot be normalized.

So yes, let’s say it: this amendment reeks of the old drive for order, the one that dreams of a psychology without conflict, without stories, without history at all — just an army of well-calibrated, well-behaved, well-docile citizens. People who don’t talk too much. Or who talk as expected.

 

Psychoanalysis is not perfect, no. But it has one unforgivable flaw: it lets people speak. It welcomes what they don’t know. It allows the bizarre, the void, the failure, the crack, desire to emerge. All things that mental health managers would like to see disappear to optimize public spending and secure their certainties.

 

But the unconscious doesn’t vote on budgets. It returns. It insists. It messes things up. It makes overly neat discourses grate. It crosses out their tables. It writes itself, against them. It has never been, and never will be, politically correct.

 

Let them abolish reimbursement (a Trojan horse): they will abolish nothing. They think they are targeting a profession; they are targeting a freedom. A tiny zone of disobedience where the subject does not obey metrics. A dangerous enclave for all those who dream of a programmable human.

 

Let’s not be mistaken: this is not a budgetary dispute. It is a struggle over the value of a life. A life that speaks. And which, always, speaks crookedly, speaks too much, speaks poorly — speaks differently.

 

And that is precisely what they would like to silence.

 

VB – November 18, 25.