Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences > Status Update

the essential theme of Lacan’s criticism can be put in the following way: if we reduce psychoanalysis to the typical structure of psychology, we no longer understand what the unconscious is.

What interests us is the theoretical question that we are raising: what is the relation, not factual, concrete, actual, but theoretical, the relation de jure—I return now to what I said at the outset—between psychoanalysis and the human sciences? To answer that question we have to define the essence of psychoanalysis.

“It’s not easy to see what theoretical difference can be defined between psychoanalysis and psychology, between psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic medicine, between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, etc.”

But— and this is an extremely important consequence—this means that we can really find the object of psychoanalysis in society. If you read Sartre’s interpretations . . . you’ll see that this is the nodal point, because it’s where praxis, the individual project, is integrated into society.