What will happen to him if he is psychoanalysed? Will he lose his moral and religious convictions? Will he remain faithful to his previous commitments ? Will he still be Paul, Peter or John as we knew him before? These are the questions asked by friends and relatives of the person undergoing an analysis. Whether it is the doctor, the friend, the husband or wife, the parents, the spiritual director or religious superior, everyone has the feeling that from now on the person being analysed will escape them in some way and that he will enter the domain of a secret and mysterious power of which they have not the key … and that with a bit of luck he could become a balanced individual!

This desire to know ‘what it’s all about’ is all the more ardent because psychoanalysis does not fall into the usual categories of medicine. With medicine, the moralist and the believer consider that they can keep within their own domain: the doctor is concerned with curing the body and eliminating suffering; the Christian is concerned with judging moral conduct and speaking on the meaning of suffering. But with psychoanalysis, these yardsticks are of no use, so the argument goes, because the whole personality of the individual is radically questioned.

This uncertainty is inevitable. Indeed, psychoanalysis will be dead on the day that it is put to the service of some institution whether it be educational, economic, political or religious. It is concerned with something else: a truth which goes beyond the analyst and the analysed.