On Difference and the "Beyond Psychotherapy" of Psychoanalytic Method: The Pivotal Issue of Free-associative...

It is argued that, in the course of the history of psychoanalysis since 1914 or thereabouts, the clinical and theoretical interests of psychotherapy have occluded our comprehension of the radicality of the free-associative method that is special to psychoanalysis. Setting aside the entirety of the range of endeavors that we might call "psychotherapy," this essay defines critically the practices of "psychoanalytically-informed therapies" and distinguishes them from Sigmund Freud's "analysis" that is tied to the unique method by which he discovered the inherent repressiveness of self-consciousness. This thesis implies that the human psyche can neither be properly understood nor healed by theory-driven techniques that prioritize epistemological considerations. Rather the liberatory potential of psychoanalytic praxis must be grasped as an "onto-ethical discipline," by which the ideological commitments of therapy might be subverted.