17 ..17
P. S. I have the impression of having disappointed you. You consider Law 56 unjust and I consider it just (just for psychotherapy, indifferent for psychoanalysis). This is why I don’t start battling to change it. So you think of me as a traitor to the cause.
To remedy this, I shall remind you of what one should do with an unjust law according to Freud (at least to him you will concede the right to say what is ethics?). Simply, and more bravely than Augustine, he says that with such a law there is nothing else to do than ‘es herzhaft zu übertreten’: bravely transgress it. He says it in Laienanalyse! The quotation is in German because you would look for it in vain in Musatti’s farcical translation, which limits itself to suggest that one should ‘take no notice of it’. To continue the parade and dissipate the pathetic tone, I offer you also a polemical trigger in code. ‘Sag’ mir mal: die Ministerien zu besuchen, gilt es für dich als das ungerechte Gesetz herzhaft zu übertreten? Es sieht mir zwar aus, sich zur Sache überzutreten’ [‘Tell me: does frequenting ministerial departments mean to you courageously transgressing the unjust law’ To me, this seems a conversion to it].
(1) ‘Idiot’, but also ‘turd’.