My take on Freud is that it is the clinic and speech of the patient that is most important. For good psychoanalysis, the speech of the patient or analysand is sacred. The motto is “say anything”, let the speech go where it will. Listen! It is a wild and aleatory space that is anxious for analyst and analysand alike. Each new case should carry the promise of completely reforming all of psychoanalysis. The theory is brilliant despite its many warts, but at the end of the day that theory is always an attempt— always inadequate —to make some sense of the endlessly surprising event of speech that happens in the clinic. Above all Freud was drawn to the detritus of our speech, all those things we dismiss as meaningless and without significance. For it is there in the symptom and the parapraxes that something of our being is brought forth.

Advertisement