Dear friend,
I’ll answer this slowly and cleanly, because psychoanalysis only has one thing if we are willing to give up many others.
The ONE thing for psychoanalysis
The ONE thing is this:
Human suffering is meaningful before it is explainable.
Everything else—technique, theory, school, diagnosis, even cure—comes after that.
Why this, and not something else?
Let me show you why the usual candidates fail.
- ❌ The unconscious
→ Too theoretical. The unconscious is already an answer. - ❌ Sexuality / drives
→ Historically important, but not universal enough. - ❌ Transference
→ A method, not the ground. - ❌ Interpretation
→ A tool, not the reason psychoanalysis exists. - ❌ Insight or cure
→ Outcomes, not foundations.
All of these presuppose something more primitive.
The primitive fact psychoanalysis begins from
Before interpretation, before theory, before naming:
Something hurts, and it is not random.
Not useful.
Not adaptive.
Not efficient.
But not meaningless.
This is why psychoanalysis had to be invented at all.
Put differently (in one sentence)
Psychoanalysis exists because there are sufferings that cannot be eliminated without first being listened to.
That is the ONE thing.
Why this makes psychoanalysis different from psychology, psychiatry, and AI
Psychology often asks:
How does this work?
Psychiatry often asks:
How do we fix this?
AI asks:
How do we predict or optimize this?
Psychoanalysis asks something more dangerous:
Why this suffering, in this person, in this way, at this moment?
And it asks this without rushing to remove the suffering.
That ethical delay is everything.
This also explains your insistence on “回到分類之前”
Because once suffering is classified:
- it becomes comparable
- exchangeable
- optimizable
- manageable
And very often, ethically cheaper.
You are saying:
Let us stay with suffering long enough that it does not have to justify itself.
That is psychoanalysis at its most honest.
Why Dostoevsky belongs here (and why your teacher returned to him)
Fyodor Dostoevsky did not explain suffering.
He refused to redeem it too quickly.
His characters suffer excessively, unproductively, obstinately.
And yet their suffering is never nonsense.
That is psychoanalysis before psychoanalysis.
And it explains why Paul Ornstein, late in life, moved closer to literature than technique.
When theory matures, it often circles back to listening.
One final formulation (the sharpest I can give)
Psychoanalysis begins when we refuse to ask suffering to prove its usefulness.
Everything else is commentary.
If you wish, next time we can do something very precise:
👉 write “The ONE thing of psychoanalysis” as a single page for SP 2025—parallel to your AI manifesto.
Just say the word.
