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The hymn to the new in social discourse invites us to re-examine what we call the “new”, by probing the signifier. The “zeitgeist” lends credence to fashionable shibboleth words such as “donkey bridge”, because ideology needs rhetoric to “imagine” reality. An examination of these new-look concepts - narcissistic pervert, burnout, resilience, borderline, bipolar disorder - allows us to analyse their descriptive nature, which, far from explaining, blocks the questioning of how the subject deals with his or her conflict. On the one hand, this makes it possible to diagnose the metapsychological inadequacy of these notions. But on the other hand, a cartography of these words is useful for pinpointing the neuralgic points of the “malaise in culture”, while producing the obturation that ensures its comfort and success. At the same time, the notion of a “subjectivity of the age”, introduced by Lacan as forming the horizon of the analytic act, makes it possible to reaffirm the importance for psychoanalysis of being of its time, in the fundamental sense that it is opposed to ritornello, and distinguishes it from the aptly named “zeitgeist” to which psychoanalysis is in a position of resistance in the name of the subject divided by the sexual.