Claude Dumezil – The Question of Orthodoxy – Clinical Reflections on the Direction of the Cure
 
THE LETTER 04 (Summer 1995) pages 126-147
 
It is not an easy task to resolve the dilemma whimsically expressed by Lacan when he said: ‘A psychoanalysis is the treatment one expects to get from a psychoanalyst’, and his remark, in counterpoint, that the former determines the latter.
 
I appreciate Lacan’s little joke because it connects the question of Freudian psychoanalysis with the practice itself rather than with a programmatic, defined conceptualization which would limit our leeway, given where we are now in terms of psychoanalytic study. This may explain why a reference to the dogmatic and even religious notion of orthodoxy is surprising for those of us who are still the lay people that Freud...