General ideas

Freud started his theoretical formulations on a physicalist (materialist) basis, as is obvious in his Project of 1895 which rested on two fundamentals: “neurons” and “quantity”. Yet, in the very writing of the Project Freud had to consider the passage from quantity to complexity. A complexity that he in fact kept on tackling during the forty-five years that followed, through his constant development of psychoanalytic theory .

The Freudian developments, however, were not exempt from problems and “strayings” in need of a critical reexamination. Fortunately, Freud’s central invention itself – the psychoanalytic method – provided the tools for such a critique. If, indeed, we stay firm on the explicit and implicit principles at work within the Freudian method, we can see that psychoanalysis is a self-organizing, self-transformative process and discipline. It does not accumulate discoveries upon discoveries in a linear sequence; rather, it can revisit analytically its own foundations; something akin to what the analytic process offers to its analysands.

At the practical level, indeed, the object of psychoanalysis is not the human being in general, but a subject that can “formulate and give shape to their own experience” (Laplanche, 1987). It is therefore the human being as a self-interpreting, self-theorizing or self-symbolizing subject.

At the metapsychological level, the specific object of psychoanalysis is psychical reality– another name for the systemic, repressed unconscious. The self-symbolizing movement observable in the empirical individual is indeed the manifest expression of what goes on at the level of the body-psyche conceived as a self-organizing collection of interlocked systems and sub-systems.

At both levels, psychoanalysis deals with the body-psyche, its constitution and its evolution. Within the wider context of evolution, the body-psyche operates at the meeting point of the biological, psychological and social/cultural levels. At every level, we can describe the same pattern of system-environment relationship. Among these multiple systems, the unconscious system matters to us the most in that it is a system that, though operating in a bio-psycho-social individual, is neither biological nor social, and yet not simply psychological. The system unconscious modifies –distorts– the virtual “normal” course of the three other systems. It subverts the ethological-biological process of attachment (think of seduction); it impacts and disturbs the psychological cognitive functions (think of symptoms, slips, parapraxes), and is involved in many grave phenomena at the social and cultural level (think of mass psychology and of the hubris manifest in the exertion of power and destruction). The system unconscious is therefore what gives the human individual its unique status among the living.

At both levels, psychoanalysis deals with the individual body-psyche, its constitution and its evolution. Within the wider context of evolution, the individual body-psyche operates at the meeting point of the biological, psychological and social/cultural levels. At every level, we can describe the same pattern of system-environment relationship. Among these multiple systems, the unconscious system matters to us the most in that it is a system that, though operating in a bio-psycho-social individual, is neither biological nor social, and yet not simply psychological. The system unconscious modifies –distorts– the virtual “normal” course of the three other systems. It subverts the ethological-biological process of attachment (think of seduction); it impacts and disturbs the psychological cognitive functions (think of symptoms, slips, parapraxes), and is involved in many grave phenomena at the social and cultural level (think of mass psychology and of the hubris manifest in the exertion of power and destruction). The system unconscious is therefore what gives the human individual its unique status among the living.