The End of Analysis

“Tal’s book doesn’t propose an answer that would safeguard the status of psychoanalysis but rather a series of paradoxes that undermine its secure status. The end of analysis appears rather as a fantasy, not the traversal of the fantasy but the maintaining of it.” —From the Foreword by Professor Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia This book interrogates the “end of analysis” in psychoanalytic thought from Freud to Lacan. It demonstrates that the notions of mourning, renunciation, liquidation of transference, and traversal of fantasy cannot serve as a settlement for the castration complex (i.e., central to neurosis) but are rather prey to the castration complex itself. It shows how psychoanalysis remains incomplete as long as it has not surpassed them as fantasies sustained by psychoanalytic ideology. In other words, it argues that the analytic procedure must pull psychoanalysis out of this therapeutic tradition for it to be complete and to instigate an attempt of its renewal. The book equally revisits Freud’s and Lacan’s underpinnings in the Enlightenment project, in order to formulate the problem of transference on proper dialectical foundations—that is, the mechanism of alienation from Descartes to Hegel, Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, as well as the concepts of authority and value in Durkheim, Mauss, and Marx. In doing so, it provides fresh insights that will appeal to practitioners, as well as to scholars of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Mohamed Tal is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst; he held a private practice in Beirut, Lebanon, since 2009 and moved to practice in Dubai, UAE, since 2022. He is an affiliate of the Rome Institute, and a member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). Dr Tal has worked as a Psychotherapist with humanitarian organizations in the Middle East, including Doctors Without Borders, WarChild Holland, Handicap International, and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. He also held a seminar on The Real at the École Libanaise de Psychanalyse from 2018 to 2021.