“That was all we needed”

the psychoanalitical treinning in the knowledge market

Abstract

This article is part of a research project about psychoanalytical treinning and consists of an extended version of a paper presented at the 25th National Meeting of EPFCL-Brazil, held in Maceió in 2025. The article discusses the growing demands for training in psychoanalysis, often sustained by promises of rapid and profitable solutions, revealing what can be identified within capitalist discourse: the transformation of knowledge into a commodity, the subject into a consumer, and experience into a product. I briefly revisit Freud’s elaborations on resistance to psychoanalysis, proposing that such commodification constitutes a form of resistance to psychoanalysis itself. This resistance appears to demonstrate the effects of capitalist discourse within the psychoanalytic field, in the form of the co-optation and destruction of its foundations. Finally, I propose possible paths for clinical and theoretical work based on the propositions of Freud, Lacan, and Soler, in which the analyst is called upon to interrogate the symptom of their time, grounded in the ethics of psychoanalysis.