Certainty, knowledge and truth in Freud’s praxis and the orientation towards reality formalized by Lacan

Abstract

Some homologies bring Freud and Descartes closer, with regard to doubt as a path in the search for knowledge: Cartesian methodical doubt and the method of free association and interpretation both presuppose the destitution of the ego as a safe and free source of alienation and mistakes. From there, both derive their certainty: the existence of res cogitans, in the case of Descartes, and the unconscious, in the case of Freud. Both operate cuts in knowledge and create previously non-existent fields: modern science and psychoanalysis. But there are also dissymmetries, Lacan shows in Seminar 11. If the real in Descartes is in the transition from “I think” to “I exist”, the search for the true leads him to resort to the res infinita: God. In Freud, certainty comes from the persistence of doubt and not from its elimination. There is a love for the truth and a passion for the signifier in Freud, which sometimes position him as a master of the truth of the unconscious of his analysands. But, by not avoiding disappointments with mistakes, the stumbles in his practice always confront him with the real: the lack that the subject cannot escape. I intend to reflect on how, by not seeking the guarantee of a Grand Autre and not weakening in his search, Freud protected the impotence of truth in the field of psychoanalysis. From this, Lacan defined the real as the nucleus of certainty that all fictions refer to without exhausting it and formalized the disjunction between knowledge and truth. This is why, in the analyst’s discourse, the analyst maintains itself on the dominant place, as the semblance of object cause of desire, and allocates knowledge in the place of truth.