Symptom and Signification

Let us begin this discussion by saying that philosophy, ever since the demonstration of “the illusion of meaning,” particularly by Nietzsche and Heidegger, must be a “hermeneutic art of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur), which consists in finding, behind every manifest/conscious or “symptomal” discourse, the traces of what is unsaid, unthought, repressed/contained. Psychoanalysis's contribution to this pronouncement of the limitations of a consciousness identified with the concept of a metaphysical and ideological subject imposes on modern thought the task of “deconstructing” interpretations by the meaning-producing alienated subject. And it is psychoanalysis-in the development of its own history, beginning from a biological and physicalistic model still constrained by medical modes of knowledge, which intended to pinpoint the pathogenic factor of each disease and prescribe the cure for it-it is psychoanalysis that is best qualified, as a practice, to “denounce” consciousness “as a symptom,” as well as the alienation of a self which claimed to produce all knowledge, denying its lack of self-knowledge. The evolution of psychoanalytical theory frees psychoanalysis from a biological model, moving from a theory of libido restricted to the doctrine of a “psychical apparatus” associated with the concept of energy, through an informational (Sullivan) or cybernetic model and, based on the operational value of the concept of an achronic, unknowable unconscious, to the linguistic and semiological model (Lacan). Starting out from the aphorism that “man cannot but signify” we must face the fact of signification in our practice, involving analyst and analysand; we are stuck in an intersubjective field which prizes the overdetermination of the unconscious and the formation of the transferential object.

If a scientific theory is valid only for a set of observations restricted to a practice, this definition of psychoanalysis as knowledge of an intersubjective field refers its object to the