The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis: The Rise and Fall of Cognitivism

by Agnès Aflalo

It can happen that a law incurs the wrath of the very people it set out to protect. This is what happened in France at the end of 2003 with the Accoyer Amendment, a Bill that intended to regulate the exercise of psychotherapies even at the cost of the disappearance of psychoanalysis itself. The public that this law was supposed to protect thus ran the risk of finding themselves stripped of certain freedoms that democracy usually guarantees. How had it become possible to reach such a point? This is what this book sets out to examine. Evaluation and cognitive-behavioural scientism, which have been progressively infiltrating different forms of knowledge with destructive effect, undoubtedly played a major role. And then, the International Psychoanalytical Association, despite having been founded by Freud to protect his invention, started to endorse the forced cognitivisation of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, psychiatry slid back into its nineteenth century hygienic obscurantism and its new recruit, epidemiology, began playing host to racialist discourses.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

186 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2014

About the author

From the publisher's website: "Agnes Aflalo
Agnès Aflalo is a psychoanalyst, member of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Her articles have appeared in various collections in French, and in Hurly-Burly, The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. Since its first publication in French in 2009, The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis has been translated into English, Spanish, and Portuguese."

Reviews

[Iuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book portrays the battle of ideas that happened in France in 2003 after an Amendment attempted to regulate the profession of psychoanalysis. This is what the author termed as an attempt to kill psychoanalysis under the guise of the ideology of evaluation.

From the preface, it is stated that this ideology complies to the following definitions and expectations of human beings, i.e. the man with anything but quantities : "That man is computable, that he is an object of measure through and through, body and soul pound for pound, mental and physical suffering alike, the whole adventure of thought, and that, beyond this, subjectification too is calculable inasmuch as it may be reduced to an abstract piece of machinery with cogs that hold no mystery - a kind of hermeneutics run amok, founded on the utopia of total meaning with no leftover, purged of the very shadow, opacity and meaninglessness that are part and parcel of what we are". (p. xvi).

Hanna Segal once wrote that "Silence is the real crime", and thankfully and thought a very rich and intellectually stimulant discussion and presentation of arguments, this book allows us to at least spend more time with the victim.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! A conspiracy.

The text made me some times wonder if white power supremacists have gained places in the academia. And yes, it seems that quite a few holocaust deniers are paid good wages by the French state as part of some University or another. Yet, this has nothing to do with that gang. This is a different gang with the same kind of arguments. And the arguments are muddled by accusations of 'scientism' or whatever. Closing the book I wonder if psychoanalysis is not just another quackery like the homeopathy, another popular pseudoscience in France. Or if it works, why do any criticism leads to such drama?