Psychoanalysis may work. Not just because telling someone who cares (someone who cares because I pay him to care) about my problems is always a relief. Understanding, or convincing myself that I am afraid of open spaces because I am afraid of yielding to unbecoming desires, and this because I am afraid of being castrated and devoured by a mythical father, and understanding that these fears are perfectly normal because everyone entertains unbecoming desires and dreads being devoured, this understanding could free me from my fear of walking outside, or from my vertigo, or my phobia of mice, crabs, jellyfish, whatever. I would no longer have phobias, or the fearsome things, or the fearsome emptiness, would be subdued, and the fear would be erased from the world around me. It could be.

The problem is not that psychoanalysis does not work. Quite on the contrary, the problem is that it may work and erase this fearsome aspect of singular objects, or replace it with a more general, universal, fear, which we cannot get rid of but which we can take with a certain detachment. Our world, then, becomes quite ordinary. Mice, crabs, jellyfish no longer stick out of their surroundings as if they had magical powers. Windows are just to be opened for fresh air. It is not that this world is flat or boring. It is that something has been lost which called to be described.

That is what philosophers do, or should do: describe. As Merleau-Ponty phrased it, “bring experience to expression.” However, instead of coming to terms with our experience, psychoanalysis aims at erasing an aspect of our experience, so that all the things around us would appear on the same plane, and only in ourselves would there be extraordinary desires.

Coming to terms with our experience: that is, describing, putting our experience into words, and at the same time accepting our experience, being able to cope with it. Putting the fearsome thing at a distance, or on the stage of a story, so as to be able to cope with the fear. Words, when they are chosen with some care, just a little bit of attention, do imply some distance. They should be transparent but they are not immaterial.

Besides, stories are not told with reason only. One cannot reason a good story. If, or when, stories work, they have their own logic, their own coherence, in the way they are told. The logic of stories is not that of reason, nor perforce that of psychoanalysis. Stories play with monsters (as Hercules played with lions disguised as women, a multi-headed hydra, man-eating birds, and so on). Psychoanalysis deals with desires. Telling stories is not psychotherapy. It goes in another direction but it implies, just like psychoanalysis, a break from “reason,” “intelligence,” as Freud used the term.

The philosopher, as a storyteller, does not have to take Pascal's test and walk on the board above the abyss. We agree that reason does not work here.

Then psychoanalysis has its psychoanalytic answer to any objection. In a famous passage in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, defending the claim that dreams are the accomplishment of a desire, ponders over the dream of one of his patients, which seems to be a counterexample to his theory. He concludes that the dream was indeed the accomplishment of a desire, which was to make him, Freud, wrong. In the present case, certainly, my desire to tame phobic objects through stories, keeping them at a distance but keeping them alive, would confirm the function that Freud gives to phobias as an advanced post exteriorizing and hiding the true inner fear.

Psychoanalysis aims at erasing the fearsomeness of things (the absurd fearsomeness of things, when danger is absent): there would only be fearsome desires. Whereas, I believe, philosophers describe, or should describe, experience through stories. But, because of the distance that words imply, or because of the imaginary exercises to which it gives room (to take up again Bachelard's therapy), telling stories may be enough to tame the fearsome things. It is not that psychoanalysis may not be necessary. The fearsome thing may just be too fearsome to let itself be caught in the network of words. Then the fearsome desires that Freud places at the bottom of our phobias may also be part of the reality. However, psychoanalysis cannot be the whole story. The fearsome thing, as soon as it has been coaxed, needs be told.

Then telling stories might work, or it might not. We can but keep our fingers crossed. But there is no point going on about Freud.