"Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution"
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Greers line fuses a critique of religion with a critique of therapy. Confession is a ritual that culminates in absolution, a definitive word that your sin is forgiven and your burden lifted. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, invites the same exposure of secrets, guilt, fantasies, and shame, but offers no sacrament of release. The patient speaks, the analyst interprets, and the talking must continue. Insight replaces forgiveness; interpretation multiplies, but the ledger of guilt is never stamped paid.
That contrast suggests a subtle shift in authority from church to clinic. The analyst becomes a secular priest, licensed to hear the intimate narrative and to tell you what it means, yet withholding the one thing confession promises: the closing benediction. Instead of absolution, there is an ongoing project called working through, an interminable responsibility to excavate deeper layers of desire and conflict. For the person seeking relief, that can feel like an institutionalized deferral, a system that thrives on perpetual return.
As a leading voice of second-wave feminism, Germaine Greer aimed this barb at a discipline that historically pathologized female sexuality and dissent. Freudian constructs like penis envy or hysteria turned womens frustration under patriarchy into diagnoses to be managed, not injustices to be changed. By channeling suffering into the consulting room, psychoanalysis risks privatizing political pain, asking women to adjust themselves to oppressive arrangements rather than to transform those arrangements. Without social redress, the promise of absolution is impossible; the cycle of confession continues.
There is also a cultural warning embedded here. Modern life has replaced many religious assurances with therapeutic ones, yet the hunger for release remains. Greer cautions against trading one authority for another that cannot pronounce you forgiven. If liberation is the goal, it may require less self-accusatory introspection and more collective action, self-assertion, and structural change, the kinds of absolution that come from altering the world rather than endlessly interpreting the self.
That contrast suggests a subtle shift in authority from church to clinic. The analyst becomes a secular priest, licensed to hear the intimate narrative and to tell you what it means, yet withholding the one thing confession promises: the closing benediction. Instead of absolution, there is an ongoing project called working through, an interminable responsibility to excavate deeper layers of desire and conflict. For the person seeking relief, that can feel like an institutionalized deferral, a system that thrives on perpetual return.
As a leading voice of second-wave feminism, Germaine Greer aimed this barb at a discipline that historically pathologized female sexuality and dissent. Freudian constructs like penis envy or hysteria turned womens frustration under patriarchy into diagnoses to be managed, not injustices to be changed. By channeling suffering into the consulting room, psychoanalysis risks privatizing political pain, asking women to adjust themselves to oppressive arrangements rather than to transform those arrangements. Without social redress, the promise of absolution is impossible; the cycle of confession continues.
There is also a cultural warning embedded here. Modern life has replaced many religious assurances with therapeutic ones, yet the hunger for release remains. Greer cautions against trading one authority for another that cannot pronounce you forgiven. If liberation is the goal, it may require less self-accusatory introspection and more collective action, self-assertion, and structural change, the kinds of absolution that come from altering the world rather than endlessly interpreting the self.
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