little to do with the private and strictly individual practice
of psychoanalysis, which cannot be discussed from out-
side. Psychoanalysis expresses itself either directly in the
first person or else as depersonalization and loss; it is
either rapture or pain.

Unfortunately, psychoanalysis has not been able
to escape the attention of the mass media; it has become
something of a fashion. The lectures on which this book is
based might not otherwise have been commissioned. But
this aspect of the subject is of little importance.

So far from being "victims" of these contem-
porary phenomena, analysts have wittingly or unwittingly
taken part in them. Today it has even become fashionable
to disparage psychoanalysis, just as it was fashionable a
few years ago to accept its claim to be the new vision of the
world, with solutions to every kind of crisis. But by relying
on its observational techniques and testing its theories,
psychoanalysis has maintained its relevance and ensured
that it will be as effective tomorrow as it is today.

The practice of psychoanalysis is too complex to
summarize, but let me remind you of several elements
that I think go to the heart of the question. The analytic
subject, or analysand, in substance says the following: "I
am suffering from a primitive trauma, often sexual in na-
ture, a deep narcissistic injury, which I relieve by displac-
ing it onto the analyst. Here and now the omnipotent
author of my being or malady (my father or mother) is the
analyst. The deep meaning of my words is governed by
this hidden drama, which presupposes that I grant con-
siderable power to the analyst. But the confidence that I

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