Psychoanalysis between inheritance and subversion

Abstract

This review analyzes Laurie Laufer’s book Emancipated Psychoanalysis: Reconnecting with Subversion, highlighting her defense of subversion as an ethical and methodological principle of psychoanalysis. The author calls for a return to the critical forces present at the origins of the Freudian method, particularly the inversion of positions introduced in Studies on Hysteria, in which the patient’s speech becomes a source of knowledge. Drawing on Freudian texts on sexuality, Laufer questions the normative effects that have become crystallized in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. The review argues that reconnecting with subversion also entails acknowledging the political dimension of listening, including contemporary challenges raised by marginalized subjects, which call psychoanalysis to reconsider its assumptions of neutrality and universality.