” I spoke of the way in which philosophical language is rooted in nonphilosophical language, and I recalled a rule of hermaneutical method that still seems valid for the historian of philosophy as well as for the psychoanalyst, namely, the necessity of first ascertaining a surface or manifest meaning and, thus, of speaking the language of the patient to whom one is listening…”
“Freud himself will in fact take on the ambiguous figure of a doorman or doorkeeper. Ushering in a new epoch of madness, our epoch …”
“Freud as the doorman of today, the holder of the keys, of those that open as well as those that close the door, that is, the huis: onto the today or onto madness. He, Freud, is the double figure of the door or the doorkeeper. He stands guard and ushers in. Alternatively or simultaneously, he closes one epoch and opens another. and as we will see, this double possibility is not alien to an institution, to what is called the analytic situation as a scene behind closed doors.”
This psychology loses all relation to a certain truth of madness, that is, to a certain truth of Unreason. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, breaks with psychology by speaking with the Unreason that speaks within madness and, thus, by returning through this exchange of words, not to the classical age itself — which also determined madness as Unreason, but, unlike psychology, did so only in order to exclude or confine it — but toward this eve of the classical age, which still haunted it.”
“It is through a return to unreason, this time without exclusion, that Nietzsche and Freud reopen the dialogue with madness itself.”
“to recall the necessity of taking into account a certain Evil Genius of Freud, namely, the presence of the demonic, the devil, the devil’s advocate, the limping devil, and so on in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where psychoanalysis finds, it seems to me, its greatest speculative power but also the place of greatest resistance to psychoanalysis (death drive, repetition compulsion, and so on, fort/da!).”