Abstract
In some psychoanalytic groups, it is Imaginary rules that define the process by which a person is named a psychoanalyst—numbers of sessions or supervisions, being present in a class, and so forth. The Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, however, acknowledge Lacan’s famous statement that the analyst authorizes himself or herself. Any two people may engage in spoken discourse that could be structured as psychoanalysis. Freud had a very particular way of reading these texts. They are always read through the perspective of the Oedipus complex. It is hard for people in their current moment to recognize the shock that this reading of Freud had on his patients and on society. From a clinical perspective, though, many of the first people who came in to see an analyst felt a dramatic relief, a significant diminution in the suffering of their symptoms as these symptoms were deciphered through Freud’s reading.