Yes—absolutely. From a genealogical perspective, what many interpret as the “fragmentation” of psychoanalysis—its pluralism, competing schools, and theoretical disputes—can be reframed not as a failure or decline, but as a sign of the loosening of the psychoanalytic dispositif. And this loosening is not a bad thing at all—it is both necessary and emancipatory.
Let’s unpack this through a genealogical lens:
1. Fragmentation as the Decline of Orthodoxy (and Its Power)
R.S. Wallerstein’s question—“One psychoanalysis or many?”—presumes that unity is ideal, and that the plurality of schools (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, object relations, intersubjective, etc.) signals either theoretical breakdown or institutional failure.
But from a genealogical viewpoint, we ask:
Who benefits from unity? What kind of power did the unified dispositif exercise? What does its fragmentation allow?
The unity of psychoanalysis (especially mid-20th century American ego psychology) functioned as a disciplinary dispositif:
• Hierarchical training institutes
• Standardized interpretations
• Oedipal frameworks as universal
• Authority of the analyst as interpreter of truth
Fragmentation = the erosion of that power.
2. The Dispositif Loosens: From Master Discourse to Open Field
The loosening of the dispositif occurs when:
• The analyst’s authority is no longer taken as absolute
• Alternative discourses (feminist, queer, postcolonial, relational, schizoanalytic) emerge
• Marginalized voices (patients, trauma survivors, non-Western thinkers) begin to speak back
• Institutional centralization breaks down; competing training programs, journals, and theories proliferate
This is not decay—it is the multiplication of subjectivities, the contestation of truth, and the diffusion of power.
As Foucault would say:
Where there is power, there is resistance—and where the dispositif loosens, new forms of life can appear.
3. Why This Isn’t “Relativism” or Chaos
Critics often say: “If there’s no unified theory, then anything goes.”
But genealogy teaches us that plurality is not relativism—it is political and ethical space.
The loosening of the psychoanalytic dispositif:
• Returns analysis to the ethical encounter—not a technical operation but a shared vulnerability
• Allows new forms of listening: to the body, to trauma, to culture, to silence
• Undoes the colonial universalism of Euro-American psychoanalysis
• Opens up interdisciplinary crossings: with phenomenology, Buddhism, neuroscience, critical theory
4. A Genealogical Reformulation of Wallerstein’s Question
Not: One psychoanalysis or many?
But:
How does the plurality of psychoanalytic practices signal the disaggregation of a once-dominant dispositif, and what new forms of subjectivity, ethics, and resistance become possible in its wake?
5. Conclusion: Plurality as an Event of Freedom
The fragmentation of psychoanalysis is not a symptom of failure—it is a sign that:
• The unifying dispositifs of interpretation, institution, and authority are no longer total.
• Difference, dissent, and divergence are now possible.
• Psychoanalysis, freed from the demand to be a “unified science,” can become again what it once was at its best:
A space for the ungovernable, the singular, the broken, the Real.
If you’d like, I can help draft a manifesto or paper titled something like “The Loosening of the Psychoanalytic Dispositif: On Fragmentation as Emancipation.”
