A natureza em Freud: entre a vida e a teoria

Abstract

This thesis seeks to develop a Freudian conception of nature, investigating Freud’s so-called naturalism along two main lines of analysis: the conception of life and the making of theory. In the first part of the thesis (on the notion of life), the aim is to describe and analyse four interrelated concepts (Trieb, support, imitation and translation), seeking to understand Freud’s theoretical elaboration of certain problems central to his theorising, such as the psyche-body and energy-meaning dualities, for example. The analysis shows how life, in Freud, is marked by specific temporal processes, in which various figures of repetition – which we term ‘modalities of repetition’, including ‘instinct’, support, imitation and translation – simultaneously bring about the reiteration and possible alteration of models (Vorbilder) from the past, when reinscribed in a new vital dimension. This in the modality of “translation”, when a certain psychic content (an unconscious fantasy, for example) can be translated and imitated in other vital domains (a paranoid delusion, a hysterical symptom, a work of art). The analysis of “translation” also reveals that the Freudian scientific method itself is based on a repetition of this kind, for Freud repeatedly states that he must translate unconscious contents into the vernacular language common to all. This leads us to the second axis of this thesis, which sought to demonstrate to what extent Freud’s own theorising is linked to the intelligibility of its objects, which is shown in the activity proper to them. The hypothesis put forward is: as a support for his theorisation, Freud takes some of his objects (the literary writer, paranoia, hysteria) as models and imitates them in his method and theory, appropriating some of the characteristics of their psychic activity and translating this activity (which may be pathological or non-scientific) into the refined language of science. Freudian psychoanalysis would be a new version of science as an imitation of life, the Freudian object being conceived here as endowed with methods, activities and techniques immanent to life, but lacking in reflexivity. Freudian knowledge would consist of a final (yet always unfinished) reflective repetition of the unreflective knowledge of life; with this, the synthetic formula “to make the unconscious conscious” takes on a new, truly epistemological meaning.