A Few Remarks on the Subversive in Psychoanalysis Cover Image

Uwag kilka o tym, co w psychoanalizie niepokorne
A Few Remarks on the Subversive in Psychoanalysis

Author(s): Krzysztof Pawlak
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

Summary/Abstract: The text concentrates on a few basic but very often misunderstood psychoanalytic notions such as the unconscious and the subject and tries to show their subversive potential pointing to the anti-philosophical and anti-scientific status of psychoanalysis. Taking into consideration that philosophy is the “science” of the conscious mind, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as something which by definition cannot be brought to consciousness founded psychoanalysis as anti-philosophy. Additionally, psychoanalytic distinction between “disinterested” knowledge and subjective truth grounds psychoanalysis as anti-scientific. Since the subjective truth can only be the truth of the subject of the unconscious, that is, the unconscious desire, and this truth as such can only be expressed in language in which there are no signifiers for the split subject, such truth always interrupts itself on the way and exists only as narrative fiction, never arriving at its consummation, always not-all.

  • Issue Year: 2008
  • Issue No: 16
  • Page Range: 9-21
  • Page Count: 13