Below is a formal, polished, yet philosophically faithful English short essay titled
“An Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis.”
I have preserved your metaphors (zoo, park, wilderness), your critique of instrumental reason, and your cosmic-ethical direction, but rendered them in a form suitable for academic, intellectual, or cross-cultural readership.
An Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Monday, November 24, 2025
At the end of the nineteenth century, instrumental reason had grown so triumphant—and so deaf to the cries of the living—that life itself became alienated, displaced, and spiritually homeless. It was at this precise historical juncture that the irrational returned with force. Psychoanalysis emerged not as a celebration of the irrational but as its necessary counterweight: the moment when life, exhausted by the regime of calculation, insisted on speaking again. One could say that the more rigidly instrumental reason asserted itself, the more vividly the irrational resisted; when instrumental reason weakened or became naïve, the irrational lost its force. This tension forms the primordial dialectic at the heart of psychoanalysis.
The later development of self psychology and object relations unfolded within a more domesticated landscape—one defined by the rhythms of the modern bourgeois city. Here, human beings live as if inside a zoological garden: a carefully managed habitat where one observes and is observed in return. “You looking at me,” “me looking at you,” “you seeing the version of yourself refracted in my gaze,” and “I seeing the version of myself reflected in yours”—these recursive mirrorings generate the dialectic of self and object. The dynamic is intimate, erotic, even invasive, and yet it remains fundamentally confined. Despite the complexity of its reflective surfaces, it seldom escapes the boundaries of the zoo.
Deleuze and Guattari led us a step further. In traversing their thousand plateaus, one at least exits the zoo and enters the public park: a space still tended, still mapped, but undeniably more open. Their thought gestures toward escape, toward lines of flight, but the landscape remains, in some sense, landscaped.
Contemporary psychoanalysis, if it is to respond to our era, must go further still. We are waiting—not for another theoretical refinement of the past century—but for a psychoanalysis capable of walking into the wilderness, capable of standing before the ruins of civilization without nostalgia or despair. Such a psychoanalysis must return to the source, to a place prior to the tensions that gave the discipline its historical form. It must confront life directly, without mediation, and allow life, in turn, to face the multiplicity of beings—flies and bees, water buffaloes and moss, rocks and withered trees, even the silent stone embedded in a mountain’s crevice.
This encounter is necessarily unadorned. It is a face-to-face whose strength lies in its simplicity. What is natural reveals itself as good; what is strained or contrived reveals itself as false. When flies, bees, buffaloes, mountain flowers, grass, wood, and stone can simply be themselves, their being becomes a mirror through which the human may finally be seen. And only in being thus seen—seen by the more-than-human world—does the human regain the possibility of becoming human in a fuller, more ethical sense.
Contemporary psychoanalysis, then, is not merely a therapeutic method but an opening:
a movement from the zoo, through the park, toward the open wilderness;
a willingness to be exposed to the non-human;
a readiness to be reflected and transformed by the world itself.
Only there, in that unregulated clearing, can psychoanalysis rediscover its vocation as a practice of life—one that allows life to encounter other lives and, in that encounter, to recognize itself anew.
If you want, I can also prepare:
- a more academic version (with citations and disciplinary framing),
- a poetic/meditative version,
- or a compressed version suitable as a preface for a paper or seminar.
Just tell me which form you’d like next.
