Barthes, The Neutral, and Our Neutrality

In order to explore the psychoanalytic concept of neutrality, the essay considers the late work of Roland Barthes. Neutrality has had an unstable career in the history of psychoanalysis: a shibboleth to some practitioners, a charade to others, and never consistently defined within the field. After sketching out one central conflict in how analysts have understood this concept, the author engages in an associative process with Barthes' course on what he called "the Neutral." Barthes' approach to reading a text, in which reader and writer become inextricably mixed, becomes a generative source for understanding the psychoanalytic relationship and the process that follows. Pleasure emerges in the ambiguity of free association as the arrogance of certainty and self fade away.