La notion de paradigme indiciaire dans l’élaboration de la psychanalyse par Sigmund Freud

Abstract

ObjectivesThe objective of this article is to question the comments of historian Carlo Ginzburg concerning the influence of Giovanni Morelli's theory of attribution in art on the establishment of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, as well as the relevance of the bringing together of these two authors within a very specific epistemological paradigm that Ginzburg calls the evidential paradigm. MethodThe article first presents the general problem; it then exposes Ginzburg's theory of the evidential paradigm and Morelli's theory of attribution in art. This allows us to directly address the influence that Morelli could have had on Freud in the early stages of the development of psychoanalysis, particularly around the issue of overdetermination. ResultsWe can find the influence of Morelli's method on psychoanalysis in the way Freud approaches the problem of overdetermination of the symptom, and in the way he considers the overabundance of clinical material offered by patients in their speech as a valuable tool of analysis rather than as an obstacle. We can, indeed, find the principles of the evidential paradigm in psychoanalysis, because the latter seeks to uncover a reality that is inaccessible at first, i.e., the reality of the unconscious, from traces of this unconscious emerging in the patient's speech. DiscussionWe then wanted to question the limits of Ginzburg's convocation of Morelli and Freud, and thus determine whether psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it is indeed an adaptation of Morelli's principles to another object, or whether he only drew inspiration from the latter's theoretical and practical contributions, in order to conceive of psychoanalysis as a method going beyond the principles of the evidential paradigm. ConclusionWe are thus able to show that psychoanalysis is not limited only to the principles of the evidential paradigm in its approach to the unconscious, by looking, for instance, at the evolution of the Freudian conception of interpretation.