ObjectivePsychoanalysis and epistemology raise multiple questions, and provoke debate and lively controversies. Without wishing to take up the old debate on the scientific nature of psychoanalysis, we wish to question its place in a contemporary epistemology, an epistemology of research, rather than one of science. We propose to think about psychoanalytic epistemology on the borders: between the theoretical and the clinical, between research and the practice of the cure, but also in dialogue with other hybrid disciplines such as psychiatry. MethodStarting from the observation that progress in scientific disciplines such as physics has led to the abandonment of the illusion of a universal theory of knowledge and to the shattering of the affirmation of epistemology's unique conception, we study the specificities of psychoanalytic epistemology as well as current conceptions of epistemology in science, research, and evaluation. We are interested in metapsychology as a Freudian epistemology, as well as in its limits and the criticisms it raises. ResultsPsychoanalysis carries a specific form of knowledge based on the hypothesis of the unconscious. It is a hybrid object with a hypercomplex causality that mixes nature, culture, and the clinic. Thinking about its epistemology roots us in the processual logic of the notion of epistemological obstacle, as opposed to epistemological impasse. The liveliness of psychoanalytical epistemology rests both on its confrontation with clinical practice, and with the progress of other sciences such as the chaos sciences, which open up to non-linear causalities and take dissipative structures into account. The epistemology of research in psychoanalysis requires compromise but also makes “border work” possible; here, a metapsycho-epistemological gap is put to work. DiscussionThe possibility of a psychoanalytical epistemology is not unanimously accepted. The best-known skeptic is perhaps K. Popper, whose proposals on the criteria of scientificity were ultimately refuted by epistemologists of the physical sciences. Scientific models’ lack of uniqueness makes the exclusive recourse to the experimental model based on the triptych observation-hypothesis-verification obsolete from an epistemological point of view. Its epistemological specificity lies in its method, which articulates the theory of unconscious processes with a transference-based clinical practice, making it a regional epistemology. The epistemology of psychoanalysis is situated at the borders of the natural and the cultural, the individual and the intersubjective, science and fiction, hermeneutics and phenomenology, clinical practice and research. Its multiple borders are, according to the times and the theoretical choices, more or less open or even porous, more or less closed or even impassable. ConclusionPsychoanalysis's epistemological stakes reflect the contemporary evolution from an epistemology of science to an epistemology of research and therefore of evaluation. The hypercomplex nature of the human psyche and of psychic facts makes the transposition of epistemic models from other sciences inadequate. The border position of psychoanalytic epistemology cannot be limited to a form of causalist and theoretical originality; it is first and foremost rooted in the specificity of its method, which is itself on the border between practice and theory. The processual part of psychoanalysis as a theory, but also as a therapy, is essential and thus opens to a questioning of the transmission of psychoanalytic epistemology to the field of research, to the sciences as a whole. The wager of the transmissibility of the epistemology of psychoanalysis remains a challenge but we consider that thinking about it as a dialogue – that is, a confrontation with and an opening-up to other disciplines – is necessary in this between compromise and border work.
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Oct 1, 2021
Jessyka Finley 
Open Access
