Intimacy and Science: The Publication of Clinical Facts in Psychoanalysis

This paper starts by stating that in science there are no facts independent of theory. In psychoanalysis, the theory of the decisive importance of the unconscious makes it possible to grasp clinical facts. This leads to the centrality of transference in analysis. The latter is understood as a social fact. Transference, perceived as a private experience, can be known in the intimacy of the psychoanalytic relationship, through the communication by means of language, which is public. Psychoanalysis is then considered a science of intimacy. The analyst, in publishing clinical facts, faces the problem of the transposition of a fact from the intimacy sphere, considered as private, to the public sphere, and thus serves a scientific purpose. A treatment report is presented to illustrate the problems of the registering, editing and publishing of clinical facts, based on the parallel between making conscious that which is unconscious and making potentially public what is private. Thus the analyst confronts similar difficulties and anxieties, when publishing clinical facts, as the ones that the analysand must overcome to know, through the social experience of psychic intimacy, his or her private inner world.