¹New York, NY, USA

Correspondence: Ona Nierenberg, 220 E. 26th St., Suite LD, New York, NY 10010, USA. E-mail: onierenberg@hotmail.com

Abstract

All over the world, new state laws are emerging to regulate the practice of psychoanalysis and the education of psychoanalysts. While, without question, this development is overdetermined, we can recognize it as a symptom of the psychoanalytic movement with its own problematic institutions and regulations. Because there is a new law in New York state which was initiated by a group of psychoanalysts as a response to the US history of restrictive institutionalized psychoanalysis, we have an invaluable opportunity to consider state regulation from the perspective of the internal resistances to psychoanalysis. In this paper, I use the case of the New York Law to illuminate how the misunderstanding of the question of lay analysis has provoked legislation creating a new mental health profession in the place of the "impossible profession," threatening the continued obfuscation of the specificity of psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it.