Resistances of Psychoanalysis

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various resistances to analysis conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis s resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida s thinking about the subjects of the essays Freud, Lacan, and Foucault a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.