Abstract
Just after the turn of the century, a psychoanalyst colleague asked the author about “the evolution of the situation in the US.” The reference was political, to the politics of the psy field in the US, and most specifically, in comparison to France, which had just seen at that moment the appearance of a new work—Le livre noir de la psychanalyse. With regard to psychoanalysis at the start of this twenty-first century, there is no public debate or media positioning in the forms of books or essays or whatever in the United States that is comparable to what is happening in France, and in other parts of Western Europe and, to an extent, South America. The matter of psychoanalysis in the United States is, to generalize, settled—in fact, it was settled and is seen as a twentieth century abberation. In the last quarter century, the fall of American psychoanalysis has been marked by the very same distinguishing characteristics.