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Lacan's interest in science was in function of his effort to clarify in what way psychoanalysis can be considered a science. Clearly Freud wanted to qualify it as such, for this was the only way, he thought, to give his discovery of the unconscious intellectual respectability in the scientifico-cultural world of his time. The classical hypothetico-experimental methodology of nineteenth century science held for Freud an abiding fascination, and his ambition, initially at least, was to develop a theory of psychoanalysis that could approximate an analogous certitude. But the classic methodology rested on an epistemology that was positivistic in nature, where objects of research were essentially accessible through sense perception, and any contribution of the subject to the knowability of the object could be, in principle, disallowed by the rigor of procedure. For Lacan, however, the scientific paradigm of choice was not nineteenth century physics but twentieth century linguistics. Here, the role of the subject, especially when the method is applied to psychoanalysis, is inseparable from the research procedure itself, and the scientific character of the process must be conceived differently.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_29

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