Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences by Althusser Louis; Rendall Steven; Gillot Pascale

Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences by Althusser Louis; Rendall Steven; Gillot Pascale

Author:Althusser, Louis; Rendall, Steven; Gillot, Pascale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI043000, Philosophy/Movements/Post-Structuralism, PSY026000, Psychology/Movements/Psychoanalysis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-09-05T16:00:00+00:00


2

Psychoanalysis and Psychology

WE’RE GOING to try to talk about the relation between psychoanalysis and psychology. That’s a tall order because these relations are highly problematic: all we can hope to achieve is a definition of terms of which we can be relatively sure and on the basis of which we might be able to reach not the solution but at least an initial, relatively rigorous formulation of the problem. I would like to put this attempt, whose difficulty I have gauged in trying to give it these reference points, under the protection of this formula of Freud’s: “Is it a mere accident that we have succeeded in providing a coherent and complete theory of the psyche only after having modified its definition?”1 A formula that I would place alongside this other formula of Lacan’s: “Saying that Freudian theory is a psychology is a crude equivocation.”2

The problem I would like to try to address is the following: why does Freud’s modification of the definition of psychoanalysis arrive at this conclusion, which radically separates psychoanalysis from psychology? To try to deal with this problem, to try to raise it, is practically to question the place of psychoanalysis. The presentations that you’ve heard so far have shown you that the question of the location of concepts within psychoanalysis was fundamental for their definition.3 I think that the same can be said about psychoanalysis itself: the question of its location within the domain of the objectivity of existing sciences or possible sciences is essential for its own definition. And if I didn’t want to avoid abusing an image here, I’d compare the description that Lacan gives of the subject of discourse, which is constantly haunted, as if by its absolute condition of possibility, by the empty site from which its discourse is uttered, with the situation of psychoanalysis itself, which, in Lacan’s thought, is constantly haunted by the site that it could occupy in the domain of the objectivity constituted.

Where is psychoanalysis situated? What is its place? What is its location in a space that does not yet exist? What are its borders with existing disciplines? What are its nonborders with existing disciplines? These are the kinds of questions that constantly haunt Lacan’s thought. And it’s no exaggeration to say that they also haunted Freud’s thought. What is equally striking, in both Lacan and Freud, is the following paradox. We find in Freud, as in Lacan, a twofold preoccupation: radically separating psychoanalysis from the discipline that claims to be the closest to it (psychology) and, on the contrary, trying to attach it to disciplines that are apparently distant from it (sociology, anthropology, or ethnology). This way formulating the problem and envisaging its solution might give new significance to certain texts of Freud’s that have too often been considered simply aberrant, precisely insofar as people had a psychological conception of psychoanalysis: texts like Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents, that is, texts in which Freud tried to give a sociological status to concepts that seemed to be psychological.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.