Your Therapist Is Wrong-And So Am I

Three books by Barnaby B. Barratt emphasize the timelessness of unconscious themes and the "pluritemporality" of free associations. Psychic energy is universal but unrepresentable. Repression renders consciousness unreliable. Such themes separate psychoanalysis from all other schools of psychotherapy that mistakenly think they can bring the patient to some new level of safety and mastery in life. Rather, the essence of psychoanalysis is its discovery that self-authorship is an illusion. Patients are healed during psychoanalysis by abandoning their egoistic quests in favor of embracing energy for living without regard to outcomes. This healing method contrasts with virtually all other psychotherapies that misconstrue Freud's revolution and revert to conventional illusions of self-directedness. Recovering Freud's original radicality may save psychoanalysis-and civilization itself.