The different analytical associations are increasingly putting to work the possible and necessary developments of our discipline, regarding the transformations of our world and subjectivities. They are absolutely right! But what is the weight of prejudices, of personal beliefs, in the work of each of them?

Freud, patriarch, and man of his time, nevertheless knew how to offer his “neutral and benevolent” listening to women, homosexuals, children, well beyond the moral constraints of his time. As for Lacan, a bourgeois of the 20th century and concerned with traditions, was he not nevertheless one of the most inventive and subversive analysts?

Some today advocate a feminist psychoanalysis, even sororal (no more fraternity!) or even emancipated from its fundamental concepts (developed during the time of patriarchy), and we are impatiently waiting to know with which concepts they will account for our clinical work…

To study the new ways of doing with speech and language, with castration, transference, drive, Name-of-the-Father, sexuation, desire, jouissance etc., implies being able to use all these notions developed, not without difficulties or good reasons, by our “old masters”. Even if it means questioning them in a renewed way and possibly adding, if some have the talent, a few new concepts which would prove accurate and useful. But rejecting these different notions, on the pretext that they are dated and therefore outdated, cannot in any way constitute progress.

One of the major questions that arises for us today is therefore whether we will be able to live up to what is being said on our couches, and capable of putting our questions and concerns into debate, in a serious and well-argued manner. Or if we will sink, as certain indications may lead us to fear, into vulgar demands and ideological quarrels. This would then amount to wanting to make psychoanalysis a “Weltanschauung”, against Freud’s recommendations. But it is true that it was a long time ago.