Slovenian psychoanalyst and philosopher, Nina Krajnik, is the founder of the Slovenian Association of Lacanian Psychanalysis and the Achéron Institute of Ljubljana.

A decade after founding the Slovenian Association for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, how would you assess the state of psychoanalysis in Slovenia?

Nina Krajnic: When we spoke for The Times of Israel ten years ago, the Association was paving the way for the first Lacanian psychoanalytic practice while enduring a series of obstructions from the Slovenian academic establishment, media censorship, and political defamation. The beginning was difficult, marked by symptoms rooted in Slovenia’s socio-political past. Despite this, within ten years the Association flourished and became an international psychoanalytic School, particularly focused on the clinic of war trauma. It inspired me to inaugurate Lacanian psychoanalysis also in the Western Balkans by opening the first Lacanian practice in Serbia and launching a formation program for participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Croatia.

The most favorable reception was in Belgrade, which is not surprising. Serbia had a tradition of psychoanalysis before it was prohibited as a “Jewish practice” and later, during socialist Yugoslavia, as a “Western practice.” Nevertheless, Slovenia is now also home to an annual seminar in which I had the pleasure of hosting world-renowned lecturers and of a vibrant publishing activity. Looking back, it is exactly as Dickens wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This path has shaped me in a way I could never have imagined. So today it turns out, as Freud once said, that retrospectively it is precisely those years of struggle that I find most beautiful.

In retrospect, were the early conflicts around the “signifier Lacan” fundamentally about theory, institutional legitimacy, or power? How do you view Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual trajectory today in relation to psychoanalysis?

Nina Krajnic: Žižek’s use of the signifier Lacan is, in fact, at the core of the Slovenian capitalist privatization of public property, which started in the 1990s, after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. This privatization created a vast social inequality because it divided people into those who in a time of transition won the privatization process and those who lost it — or, in other words, into those who came to control public funds and institutions for their own agendas and those who were reduced to second-rate citizens. Since we are talking about a figure who is internationally known as a Marxist and psychoanalyst, while in Slovenia he is a representative of capital grounded in the privatization of public property who never engaged in psychoanalytic practice, it is important to address how this historically came to be.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a central question in Slovenia became: how to privatize and remain leftist? How to act as a capitalist and remain Marxist? The answer to this question is: “left privatizers.” “Left privatization” means the usurpation of public property — e.g., academic institutions, media, and political infrastructure — under the banner of “left politics.” Put differently, “left politics” funcions as a moral alibi for the transfer of public property and public funds into private control. Žižek and the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis are the ideological pillars of this privatization and its principal beneficiaries, receiving millions of euros of taxpayers’ money. They also promote the state-financed but privately exploited energy sector, politically navigated state media, and other segments of the tycoon network.

What is troubling is that anyone in Slovenia who addresses these issues — meaning 35 years of the exploitation of people by this dominant system and its fabricated narrative — is instantly labeled “alt-right” or “fascist” in order to be shut down. Žižek’s invocation of Marx in this context serves to mask the ideology of wild capitalist privatization, while his invocation of Lacan has resulted in Slovenia becoming one of the last countries in the world to introduce the discourse of the analyst — no earlier than 2015.

Do post-communist societies still exhibit a specific resistance to psychoanalysis, or has that historical tension dissolved? Has the cultural “double bind” you once described—permission coupled with obstruction—changed form, or does it remain structurally intact?

Nina Krajnic: It has transformed. In former Yugoslavia, the double bind was clear: “Psychoanalysis is allowed, but psychoanalysts are banned.” Such stances are typical of the old totalitarian regimes. Fascism, communism, and Nazism outright prohibited psychoanalysis. Yet no one can neutralize psychoanalytic discourse as effectively as contemporary capitalo-parliamentarism. I am referring to the reduction of psychoanalysis to psychotherapy, which today, in our so-called “open, democratic societies,” pushes psychoanalysis to the brink of its existence — not only in Slovenia, but worldwide.

In perverse capitalism, which is a new form of totalitarianism, we are confronted with a new double bind. Previously, we had psychoanalysis without psychoanalysts; now we have psychoanalysts, but no psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is no longer aggressively prohibited. Instead, it is quietly absorbed into capitalist discourse and its master signifiers — the “effectiveness” of therapy, the “usefulness” of scientific measurement, the “safety” ensured by state laws and regulations. Psychoanalysis, regressed into psychotherapy, becomes an instrument of capitalist perversion — its extended hand — steering not toward the truth of the subject or political subversiveness, but toward conformity, adaptation, and the maintenance of the political status quo. Once the ideological apparatus begins to intervene, repressive apparatuses are never far behind, and one can be sure that things will go south.

Has contemporary capitalism further commodified critique, including psychoanalysis itself, or are there limits to that absorption?

Nina Krajnic: The characteristic of contemporary capitalism is that it installs the critique of itself as its own internal phenomena. In this way, it creates the impression that there is no external position, no “outside,” no alternative. This is why it is so difficult today to establish authentic conflict. All disagreements are immediately absorbed into the system. Thus, every potential breaking point closes, making genuine change impossible.

Another characteristic of contemporary capitalism is, as you say, its limitlessness. In the Weberian version of capitalism — which could be called neurotic — capitalist self-denial in favor of capital accumulation functioned as a limit. Contemporary capitalism, by contrast, functions as a drive that dismantles all boundaries. This is also the reasony why mania and melancholia the most common symptoms of our time.

The only possible limit would be a renewal of the bond between law and desire. This is the solution I see. Otherwise, what we get is a perverse form of law, meaning that exploitation, torture, violence, and appropriation can be carried out in the name of the “law.” Historically, we know where this can lead.

How has the digital transformation of subjectivity—social media, algorithmic life, AI—altered the analytic clinic?

Nina Krajnic: In January, Elon Musk wrote on X that 2026 will be the year of singularity. Of course, the technological singularity is different from the singularity we engage with in psychoanalysis. It is also distinct from the political program I introduced during the Slovenian presidential elections in 2022, which I titled Politics of Singularity. At the time, the Slovenian media were flabbergasted — some researching the meaning of the term, others openly mocking me because of its apparent strangeness.

Today, however, it has become evident that “singularity” is turning into a mot-clé, although for  different reasons. In technology, singularity refers to the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence and all previous frameworks for understanding the world become obsolete. In psychoanalysis, on the contrary, singularity refers to the unconscious as something that cannot be contained within knowledge, because it is a knowledge unknown even to itself. This is the difference between transforming the human being into a machine, or the machine into a human being, versus acknowledging the singularity of the unconscious, which can never be captured within a compendium of knowledge.

This singularity has a name: it is called ethics. Like a subject, AI can encounter ethical challenges in the gathering and use of data, potentially feeding manipulative systems under the cloak of knowledge neutrality. I am referring to issues such as the current laundering of misinformation through platforms like Wikipedia, the manipulation of identities, deepfakes, and algorithmically enforced hostility. Yet, when operated ethically, AI can embody impartiality that human cannot, precisely because it can adhere to ethical principles without distortions or bias.

In the past, this “cloak of knowledge neutrality” belonged to university discourse as an extension of political power. The relationship between psychoanalysis and university discourse has always been tense precisely because the unconscious escapes any attempt to be integrated into “universal knowledge.” In the era of AI, however, this very incompatibility becomes a major advantage of psychoanalysis. A human being is a subject of the unconscious, which means there is always something that slips beyond knowledge based on information.

Remember the film Oblivion. Jack is technologically engineered, brainwashed into obedience, and multiplied into thousands of clones. Yet he experiences flashes through his unconscious, his dreams. When he accidentally finds a book on Horatius — a relic of the world before technological domination — he begins to remember his subjectivity. Only then does he become capable of acting ethically.

This ethics marks the difference between ideologically indoctrinated subjects and singularity of the subject, as well as between scientism and psychoanalysis — a topic that was the focus of my PhD thesis, chosen in 2009, and later of my book Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Science and Subject. In the era of AI, psychoanalysis is the shelter of singularity. Only the singular is ethical. And wherever ethics exists, a real political subject will emerge.

How has ten years of clinical practice reshaped your understanding of Lacan’s anti-philosophy? If you were beginning today as a philosopher turning toward psychoanalysis, would you take the same path, or has the terrain fundamentally shifted?

Nina Krajnic: Lacan used to say that one does not become a psychoanalyst because one chooses to be, but because everything else has proven to be a semblance. Philosophy gave me a depth of knowledge, but psychoanalysis made me modest in relation to that knowledge. It taught me that who we are always precedes what we think. So, if I were beginning today, I would take the same path. Not because the terrain has remained stable — on the contrary, it has changed drastically — but because the desire that led me to psychoanalysis has not changed. Moreover, the political crises we are witnessing have made this desire even stronger. Being sensitive to human pain, suffering, and enjoyment, which shape political structures in a new techno-era, is today more necessary than ever.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)