For a new Gaya Scienza of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

“[P]sychoanalysis needs to survive, it’s a big problem. Will it survive after my death?” (Il faut que la psychanalyse survive, c’est un grave problème. Survivra-t-elle quand je serai mort?). This is how Lacan ended a lecture in Tokyo in April 1971, delivered on the occasion of the Japanese translation of his Écrits. It is well-known that with respect to the survival of psychoanalysis, Lacan did not expect anything from Japan, and considered the Japanese as ‘un-analyzable’ as Catholics. Yet there is no reason to believe that what Lacan designated as the ‘big problem’, here, would not present itself as such elsewhere, and that the survival of psychoanalysis is guaranteed in the Western world.