Psychoanalysis and the “Life Cycle”: An Introduction

Upon accepting the subject I am to introduce to our Seventh International Forum, I cannot refrain from referring to the evolution of psychoanalysis as a purported science, by attempting a definition of principles. Psychoanalysis as a differentiated science has its specificity in that it is not to be confused with general psychology, social psychology, or developmental psychology, and even less so with a philosophical anthropology or a kind of ontology.

Psychoanalysis can be delimited as knowledge of a intersubjective field, valuing the superdeterminism of the unconscious which cannot be reduced to a demonstrative empiricism of “scientificism.” The association of a conception of intersubjectivity to the concept of the unconscious, which forces psychoanalysis to consider the problem of meaning, leads us to maintain that the methodological basis of psychoanalysis demonstrates that what puts this hypothetical construct of a determinative unconscious in contact with its reality-without reducing it to an empirical datum -is a social relationship which does not relate the individual to the collective but which “refers the subject to its absence as subject” (Lacan, 1968b), referring psychoanalysis as a purported science, not to the knowledge of man but to its determining unconscious structures.

We are based on the assumption that psychoanalytical practice declares that “every reality is based on and is defined by a discourse” (Lacan, 1975). If we agree that “there is no prediscursive reality,” we will already be referred to a more inclusive theoretical model (Vital Brazil, 1980), giving value to a relationship that structures itself on produced meanings, and considering clinical practice as the field for implementing psychoanalysis. This is tantamount to saying that-referring to a linguistic model —we shall make use of the construct of a dynamic unconscious associated to the concept of structure, in a revaluation of those Freudian concepts which cannot be reduced