Conclusion: the haunting of Freud
The ubiquity of the use of the signifier of trauma can lead to confusion and can diminish the problems of those living with its effects. Whilst not disowning vulnerability and exposure to the other, the temptation to see modernity as the time of trauma can lose the specificity of the experience. An interest in trauma can be connected to a longing for intensity in order to cope with the emptiness of the specular and the cult of the future.
I have argued that clinical practice, in a manner which is different from the work of the academy, requires a place apart which is not subjected to surveillance and intrusion but which allows for a freedom for the ethical elaboration of transference on its own terms. NICE instantiates an instance of the colonisation of psychic space, with the loss of a clinical space which is separate from the social contracts of capitalism where it is possible for the client to relinquish the omnipotence of morbid guilt, to gain some acknowledgement of injustice and to seek to take responsibility, however limited for their suffering. NICE fails to honour the disjunction between the psychic and the social at the level of society which would allow for the clinical freedom necessary to deconstruct oppression and how it already links the psychic and the social. I believe that in order for psychoanalytic practice to remain relevant to contemporary life, it requires the space for self critique in order to address the dilemmas thrown up by trauma, which include: the event and fantasy, the literal and the fictional, and the necessity of taking a subject position which allows for the importance of the social link for psychic life to appear.
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