The Discovery of the Subconscious
Do you allow me to summarize you in a few phrases that, without doubt
 will betray your thought?
-No of course not.
You made a distinction between two perspectives
In the first one, Philosophy
opens the domain  of Psychology,
but the Social Sciences
guarantee its effective and positive elucidation.
In the second perspective, 
which you said you prefer,
Anthropology becomes a definitive moment
in Philosophy as a type of culture,
through which the West succeeds formulating a thought about being
or attempts to achieve such a thought.
If it's alright with you, I would like to retake my question
in relation to the essence of psychology
 in each of these levels.
First, if we admit that philosophy
implicitly fixes its domain 
over the Social Sciences in general,
considering that the social sciences took the baton
from the positivist view of the old philosophical question
inside this viewpoint,
assuming you could imitate it provisionally,
what does the specificity of Psychology guarantee
within the other ventures which we commonly designate
with the name "Social Sciences"?
I think that what characterizes psychology,
and what gives it a reason for being and again for which
it will remain as the most important social science,
a disciplining social science in some ways,
was Freud's discovery of the unconscious...
That is to say that psychology itself,
in its interior, produced towards the end of the 19th century
a surprising restructuring
and that, in my opinion, opened
the most problematic and most fundamental dimension of psychology.
We can also say that psychology,
from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 19th century
essentially proposed itself in an explicit way 
an analysis of the conscience
an analysis of the ideas under the form of ideology;
an analysis of thought, of emotions, etc...
Then, at the end of the 19th century, abruptly
focusing on its object,
psychology
did not plant itself as a science of the conscious psyche,
but as a science of what had just been discovered,
the science of the unconscious.
From the moment in which psychology
disclosed itself as the science of the unconscious,
it not only annexed a new domain,
one that had been ignored until that present,
but in effect completely restructured 
the domain of all the social sciences.
Thus, in discovering the unconscious,
psychology discovered that the body itself
forms part of our unconscious,
that the collective to which we belong,
the social group, the culture in which we have lived
form part of our unconscious.
It discovered that our parents, mother and father,
are nothing more than figures inside our unconscious,
in such a way that the sciences close to psychology,
like physiology, like sociology,
saw themselves remodeled and recreated
from psychology itself from then on,
through this discovery of the unconscious.
This was the way in which psychology became,
concerning its secret foundations,
and probably itself held
the whole destiny of the of social sciences.
Now let's look at it from the other perspective,
What place can we assign to this freudian discovery
of the unconscious
within anthropology, seen this time
as a philosophical moment in western thought?
Well in this case a series of events happened...
(keep in mind that I always speak of events,
but I am a fierce partisan of factual history,
at least in philosophy, since after all, up to the present,
we have never placed the history of thought
in any other way than abstractly...)
of general, ideal, and atemporal structures.
One would have to risk a purely factual history
of philosophy and not of philosophers.
If we created a factual history of philosophy,
I think that we would have to verify a series of facts,
of events within philosophy itself,
which occured in the 19th century.
This unconscious that psychology
discovered as a new object, and at the same time,
as a universal method for all the social sciences...
Indeed, this unconscious
had already been analyzed by philosophy itself
starting from Schopenhauer.
Now, this unconscious which was a philosophical object
since Schopenhauer and was as such until Nietzsche,
was for philosphy at the same time,
what allowed the anthropological question to take form,
the question that Kant had assigned to p hilosophy
as its most general domain.
Thanks to the observations on the unconscious,
we finally realized, to put it in a vulgar way, 
that man does not exist.
And that is exactly what Nietzsche discovered when,
in affirming God's death, he demonstrated that this death
was not simply the end of christian religion,
nor the end of all religions,
but the end of man within his reality
and his humanist value
which he had recognized since the Renaissance,
since Protestantism, and probably since much earlier,
since Socrates.
And it is in this way that we arrive at this curious chasm
within the fundamental events
of western knowledge in the 19th century...
The appearance of anthropology
as the destiny of western philosophy
from the beginning of the 19th century,
discovered by the philosophy of the unconscious
as the foundation and
at the same time as the disappearance of this anthropology.
And moreover, the social sciences and psychology
retake, near the end of the 19th century, 
this unconscious;
mix the social sciences
in a way that interprets itself, that sees itself as,
and that can be positive,
but when the social sciences
were dissolved in their positivity,
man, philosophically speaking, disappeared.
And if nowadays that link-nonlink 
exists between philosophy and psychology,
it is maybe precisely
because of this phenomenon.
Philosophy imposed the subject of anthropology
on all western culture
and, when Psychology retook this subject
and gave it - thanks to the unconscious - 
an absolutely new and perhaps positive word, 
philosophy discovered that man himself does not exist
and it is due to the positivity of psychology...
It did not have anything more as a foundation 
than this aberration, this void, this gap
that would be man's existence.
You said that the great reconsideration of psychology,
and including of the social sciences in general,
came the end of the 19th century around
the subject of the discovery of the unconscious.
The word "discovery" is generally taken
within a scientific or positivist context.
What exactly do you mean
by the discovery of the unconscious?
I think we have to consider that word in a strict sense.
Freud literally discovered the unconscious as a thing.
Twenty years ago,
there was a prevailing way of thinking
where, despite the interest of psychoanalysis,
it was said that there was in Freud an eternal 
thingness postulate.
From Politzer to Merlau-Ponty inclusively,
the thingness, the postivism of Frued was criticized
as a sequel to 19th century
and this bothersome thing attempted to be re-introduced,
this thing which was the unconscious,
in a network of more subtle, more fine meanings,
within a network of meaning 
such that the unconscious was fixed
on a possibly transcendental subjectivity
or empiric or historic, so on,
but the unconscious
had ceased being that unpleasant and harsh thing
that Freud discovered
in the depths of the human psyche.
We must not forget that Freud effectively discovered the unconscious
as one discovers a thing
or, if you'd like, as one discovers a text.
It is well known,
the interpretations that Dr. Lacan makes of Freud
are unquestionable, 
it is well known that the freudian unconscious
has the structure of a language.
