Abstract

The challenge nowadays is how to critically evaluate psychoanalysis without assuming one’s position within the usual debates regarding its truth or falsity. Through an examination of Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, and associated works, this paper calls for an analysis of space deployed at three distinct levels. First, there is the physical reality of the lecture theatre, in which Freud stood before a live audience of the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic. Second, there is the imaginary space created by Freud’s discourse, produced through the rhetorical imagery he deploys in order to create the effect of the possibility of psychoanalysis. Finally, there is a third space, a psychoanalytic space, in which Freud attempts to shift his discourse away from being imaginary toward achieving a certain degree of ‘reality-congruency’. This paper argues that Freud’s inability to establish this psychoanalytic space opens the way for a fresh examination of how the physical and the imaginary interact.