Abstract

The presentation delivered by Georges Canguilhem in 1956 at the Philosophical College of Jean Wahl, “What is psychology?”, was praised by Jacques Lacan as a defense of psychoanalysis against the hegemonic claims of psychology. Is psychoanalysis, however, whose own birth is after all included in the genealogy sketched by Canguilhem, really safe from his criticism of psychology? The following contribution takes up the question of the constitutive instrumentalism of psychology mainly with view to three aspects: the relationship between science and truth, the reduction by Gassendi and the Aristotelian tradition of the primal and speculative level of the Cartesian cogito to the specular level of the physical knowledge of the soul by itself, and the Freudian and Lacanian choice of a being-for-death against any philosophy of life. In light of the scientism of psychoanalysis and its relation to myth and to the sacred, which Lacan no better manages to overcome than Freud, a link is finally established both to the archeology of psychoanalysis as developed in The Birth of the Clinic and later in The Will to Knowledge, and to the privilege among the human sciences that Foucault ascribed to psychoanalysis and ethnology in The Order of Things.