Abstract

This article aims to discuss psychoanalytic cure as a particular kind of health dispositive. I argue that, when psychoanalysts leave the critique of concepts such as healthiness, normality and cure behind, our praxis could perpetuate violent social values. Initially, I explore how our expectations of healthiness and normality are socially mediated through a return to the Freudian notion of “love and work”. Two sections are specifically dedicated to analyzing each of these figures, respectively. Such demonstration sustain itself in an approximation to the liberal concepts of work and love. My argument concludes with a critical appropriation of the Lacanian concepts of analytical act and sinthome, which I suggest could help us build a clinical praxis engaged with social emancipation. That opens room for a new, critically oriented reading of healthiness and cure.