From Clinical Medicine to Psychoanalytic Clinic. Brief Epistemological Reconsideration

Writing a text intended to conceptualize the historical emergency conditions of psychoanalysis is a task that requires attention to two considerations. One of discursive order, relative to the double relation of rupture and continuity in which its field is situated within the medical-scientific tradition of the time, and another destined to specify to what extent, as Lacan affirmed, the Freudian field could only be constituted from the emergence of the Cartesian subject of science. As we will see, both aspects coincide in a certain way. To locate the historical foundations of psychoanalysis is to establish the structure of their relations both with Cartesian philosophy and with the scientific discourse in that medical knowledge to which Freudian thought is both heir and deserter.

psychoanalysis, subject, epistemology, medicine, history.