Eyes Wide Shut – Hat die Psychoanalyse Kontakt zum Realen?

This paper deals mainly with the scientific and philosophical plausibility of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The Author carefully analyzes—and ultimately rejects—the four most common “answers” usually given by theoretical analysts to the question of the “foundations” of psychoanalysis: (1) the Cartesian solution--according to which psychoanalysis is based on the Cartesian subject as the subject of certainty; (2) the historic-narrative solution—according to which psychoanalysis is not a positive science but a method of historic reconstruction; (3) the scientist solution—according to which psychoanalysis is an empirically verifiable and verified science; (4) the hermeneutic solution—according to which psychoanalysis is an hermeneutic activity. He analyzes especially the influence of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, Popper’s and Grünbaum’s criticisms to psychoanalysis, the Lacanian reprisal of Cartesian subjectivity, and the hermeneutic dismissal of analytic interpretations (mainly through two French papers, by Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean Laplanche).
Despite the failure of the aforementioned solutions, the A. shows that psychoanalysis can be persuasive in so far as we recognize its power to “bite on” the real. He shows that psychoanalysis has an ethical specificity—that is, an impact on something real—which distinguishes it both from any scientifically based therapy as well as from any hermeneutic interpretation: analysis makes possible a subjective history by way of opening the subject to the other in the real.
The persuasiveness of psychoanalysis stems from what the A. calls the “affect of truth” which analytical interpretations are able to raise in the subject. This affect is certainly the result of the analyst’s likely historical-hermeneutic re-constructions which reveal the subject’s interpretative defense: but on the horizon, this affect of truth points out to the subject—finally perceiving himself as something other than what he believed himself to be—the possibility of interpreting himself otherwise, thus opening himself to that otherness which dislodges him.