O real: a resposta da ciência e a resposta do psicanalista

Abstract

The objective of this presentation is to address the issue of what the analyst responds to the uneasiness of existing in civilization, seeking the specificity of  his/her offer in relation to another historically articulated field. For this, it is problematized the connections between Psychoanalysis and Science, returning to the point of how capitalism, freed from the necessity of its religious basis, emancipated itself from the father of puritan Protestantism and began to define its philosophy, ethics, specific objects of demand (goods), its logic of jouissance (the capitalist’s discourse) and its particular way of producing its knowledge: modern science, based on the elimination of singularities of the object of studies, in foreclosure of the subject, the disappearance of the author’s name (Foucault, What is an author?, 1983 [1969]) and in the progressive subjective destitution of scientists themselves (Soler, Variants of subjective destitution, 2002). The relationships between Psychoanalysis and Science are interrogated, reminding that the apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, the Freudian conviction of the scientific basis of psychoanalysis – “Psychoanalysis does not need a Weltanschauung, it is part of science and it can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung” (Freud, 1933/1980, p. 220) – also advocated by Lacan up to the mid 1960s. And, on the other hand, the Lacanian statements defending the internal exclusion from the field of science, towards the end of his work. It is proposed that a search of understanding these contradictions focuses on the way how Lacan’s decisive advance for the field of jouissance (the Lacanian field itself) and the precise delineation of the notion of real came to invite an innovative way of response by the analyst in his/her task of conducting the clinic. This answer, congruent with the revelation of an insurmountable opacity, points to a limit in search of meaning interpretations. Such a process required the formulation of a degree of freedom to the subject and of a direction for the pursuit of knowledge, which point to important differences in relation to what happens in the other scientific fields. The opacity of the real, now placed within the field as a conceptual element necessary and not dischargeable – once intrinsic to the object itself that it is being investigated – no more constitutes a residue that can be conceived as provisional, whose elimination can be expected from theoretical and methodological future improvements.