We are living in a world of war, climate catastrophe, extreme polarisation, fracturing of democracies, social, political and economic uncertainties, increasing isolation and uncertainty. If there was ever a time when psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts might have something to say within our society, it would be now. Yet psychoanalysis is also in crisis — increasingly sidelined from mainstream mental health, culture and institutions, and trapped in the same extreme polarisation as the rest of the population. At the heart of this crisis, the paper argues, is a deep and pervasive fear: the annihilation anxiety of a discipline that fears its own extinction, experienced most acutely as a fear of being — or becoming — irrelevant.
This paper argues that this fear drives a crisis that takes two mutually reinforcing but equally deadening forms. The first is Fortress Analysis — a defensive orthodoxy that mistakes the preservation of psychoanalytic form for fidelity to its spirit. The second is Palatable Analysis — a reformist impulse that waters down the fire of the unconscious in pursuit of relevance. Both are responses to the almost unbearable feeling of irrelevance. And paradoxically, both defences achieve precisely what they seek to prevent — the death of analysis itself: dead theory, dead application of known methods, and an aliveness snuffed out by the very attempts to preserve it.
Against both, the paper proposes a third path: Alive Analysis of Emergence. Drawing on the bedrock of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion, yet equally founded in the contemporary work of thinkers such as Ogden, Bollas, Ferro, and Civitarese, it understands psychoanalysis as both an emerging science and a science of emergence — always unfinished, always responsive to its moment, always willing to be surprised by the living mind it studies.
Speaker: Matthew McArdle
Chair: Richard Price
