A ‘PUNCEPT’

The previous chapter ended with a dilemma: if the human is that ‘living being’ which can actually be separated from what once was held to be its essence, that is, ‘language’, what possible effectivity – whether of diagnosis or treatment – is left to psychoanalysis? The ongoing psychiatric, pharmaceutical and philosophical assault against psychoanalysis is one thing; the loss of its very basis for being is quite another. The first, as I have shown throughout this book, is hardly the threat to psychoanalysis that it is often supposed to be; but the second would be fatal. The second, in fact, is tantamount to an experience of what we could telegraphically call ‘the renaturalisation of man’, and its effects are patent across the universe of discourse.