Up to a Point

Abstract

This chapter explores the omission of the essay from psychoanalytic literature, both as a form to which analysts refer, and as one in which they write. The absence of the word from the titles of professional publications, and the sense that the essays of psychoanalysts are a truancy from institutional forms, suggest that the essay’s scepticism and unfinishedness are in opposition to psychoanalytic expertise. The avoidance, even repression, of the form reveals what psychoanalysis denies in order to become an institution. As the example of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality shows, however, the essay’s experimentalism, provisionality, and incompletion are in fact analogous both to Freud’s account of desire and sexuality, and to the serial process of psychoanalytic treatment. The essay’s privileging of the useful and interesting over the right and perfected offers both a model for psychoanalysis, and, despite its neglect, an apt form for its insights.