Abstract

1. There is a discrepancy between most philosophical uses and critics of psychoanalytical concepts and the very complicated meaning they have within psychoanalysis. Even phenomenologists who came to an apparent understanding with psychoanalysis, actually misunderstood it. As an exploration of the veiled underground of mental life, normal as well as abnormal, psychoanalysis is surely kin to one of the directions of phenomenology -the analysis of archeological constitution -and it had great influence on Scheler, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Strauss. As a result, the transcendental direction of husserlian phenomenology has been neglected, except by linguists (R. Jacobson). By reason of some common ideas, phenomenology thought it could integrate psychoanalysis and it felt authorized to reinterpret its fundamental theoretical concepts. In fact, it did not recognize their irreducible specificity. And the psychiatry that adopts the phenomenological reinterpretations of psychoanalysis, evacuates the dynamic explanation of pathological phenomena as psychoanalysis presented it. If we maintain that psychoanalysis is irreducible to philosophy are we then forced to replace metaphysics by meta-psychology, as Freud pretended ? Will scientific anthropology substitute itself to philosophical anthropology, in the same way as a scientific study of nature integrated and surpassed philosophical cosmology? 2. The clinical observation imposes the unconscious as a positive datum of which philosophy can have no direct experience and that it cannot conceptualize by itself. Therefore psychoanalysis proceeds as a science, constructing and transforming its own theoretical concepts, hypotheses and theories, in order to make its observations intelligible. As in every science, theory and fact are correlative. The fundamental insight analytical observations bring about is that the life of the psyche consists of the vicissitudes of pulsions ; that is : meanings - even in the apparently meaningless - obey the economic principle of distribution of forces and counter-forces. Hence the analysis of displacement of meaning, of the mobility of cathexes, of the resistances, of the inversions ; these are all processes that can only be reconstructed. The principle of the hidden association between meaning and energy, which disturbs philosophers, restores the observed and apparently inhuman events to their human dignity. The psychoanalytical interpretation differs thoroughly from philosophical hermeneutics ; it is rather akin to philological reconstructions of distorted texts. The whole psychoanalytical observation, as it is elaborated in theoretical explanation and guided by it, conducts to define the Unconscious as consisting of „unconscious thoughts” ; with respect to linguistics or to philosophy we should say : signifiers splitted from the signified, representations without anything intentionally represented, thoughts without a cogito. No philosophy can grasp this fact and its paradoxical nature, neither by introspection, nor by perception, reflexion or phenomenological reduction. Because of the specific and scientific nature of psychoanalytical interpretation, many discussions concerning the opposition between psychoanalytical and philosophical „ hermeneutics” miss the point. The topological structure of man falsifies the hypothesis of two symmetrical antithetical claims on truth. 3. The interaction between the Unconscious and the Conscious can only be understood with reference to a symbolic order. In analytical praxis the interpretative reconstruction of sequences of unconscious thoughts reorganizes the lived and conflictual experiences and moves them to pursue their veiled, frozen and distorted meanings. The same applies to analytical interpretations of cultural phenomena. For the unconscious is at the same time personal and universal or „collective” ; however not in the sense Jung conceived of it. Challenged by the question of the origin of the unconscious, Freud proposed a phylogenetic theory, but it clearly suffers from the positivistic evolutionalistic mind Freud inherited from the 19th century anthropology. The „collective unconscious” is to be interpreted with respect to contemporary linguistics that conceive of language as an auto-constitutive symbolical order. Recent studies of mythes, rites, familial and social structures convey the same idea. 4. This discovery of human positivities, as founded in a supra-individual symbolic order, presents a new conception of human nature and it liberates it from the antinomy of idealism and positivism. The human psyche is a tabula rasa, as the medieval tradition understood it, but at the same time and, from the origin, it is structured by the indelible inscriptions of the symbolic order. This view gives moral philosophy a new basis. More fundamentally, it imposes its limits to the pretention of speculative reason. Neither a regressive archeological analysis nor a constitutive and transcendental reduction can reach the absolute origin of meanings. The question Husserl asked himself with respect to cultural anthropology, has to be radicalized. However, the recognition of the unconscious and of the symbolic order does not make vain philosophy. Because, or to the extend that they resist the recuperation by philosophical rationality, unconscious thoughts require that their effects of meaning be developed by the meaning productions in philosophy, art, ethics and religion. Inversely, if psychoanalysis does not undermine the philosophical claim on truth, no more than structural analysis of societies and of texts do, one can conjecture that the human sciences will lead to a reconstruction of philosophical concepts. A new type of philosophy will probably develop, different from metaphysics that leaned on the models of ancient physics, different also from the egological philosophy that discovered the subject as opposed to the object of sciences of nature.