THESE TWO talks given by Louis Althusser in 1963–1964, in the context of an ENS seminar on the question of psychoanalysis seen from Jacques Lacan’s perspective, deal with the topic of the
problematic scientificity of the human sciences in general. They are of strategic interest not only because they first reveal, just before the article “Freud and Lacan” was published in 1964–1965,
1 the deep intellectual influence exerted by Lacan’s thought on Althusser’s own theoretical task in these years—the
return to Marx, which involved a struggle against psychologism as well as against any philosophy of consciousness, but also because they involve a concept at stake in Althusser’s philosophical program of elaborating a theory of
ideology in general—the concept of the
subject.
The Question of the Human Sciences: A Central Philosophical Issue
It is well known that the question of the human sciences and their scientific status lay at the heart of French philosophical reflection in the second half of the twentieth century.
2When Althusser gave these two talks, he saw the problematic character of the human sciences—that is, their
uncertain scientificity—as characterized by their oscillation between science and ideology or technique. This problem may be considered central for philosophy, considered as theoretical philosophy, by contrast with what Althusser sometimes calls “ideological philosophy,” namely subjectivist and existential philosophy.
An almost contemporary article called “Philosophy and the Human Sciences” sheds light on what at stake in this problem of the epistemology of the human sciences insofar as philosophy is concerned.
3In “Philosophy and the Human Sciences” Althusser denounces contemporary philosophy’s continuing “predilection” for psychology even after the decay of spiritualism and Bergsonism. He also underlines a crucial reason why the “human sciences” are still not real sciences: the strange persistence of the philosophical notion of a “radical transcendence of the Subject.” Phenomenology, represented in the early 1960s by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—whose phenomenology is very remote from the original Husserlian insight—is the main target of Althusser’s attack, so far as it had become the mask for a philosophy of consciousness and of the subject. He suggests that the domination of this philosophical trend explains the unstable and unsatisfying situation of the human sciences, their lack of genuine scientificity. In contrast, Althusser calls for an autonomous philosophy based upon the rejection of “positivism,” “empiricism,” “psychologism,” and “pragmatism.”
Philosophy in general may thus be conceived as a double of the human sciences. One might therefore expect Althusser to assert the common destiny of philosophy and the human sciences,
against empiricism, positivism, and psychologism, which together form an
ideology generally identified with “empiricist ideology.” This ideology represents the adversary of philosophy considered as theory and not as ideology. More precisely, Althusser assigns to philosophy the epistemological task of “reflecting on the reality of scientific practice.” Consequently, once the myth of the sciences’ spontaneous comprehension of their own practice has been set aside, an important object of philosophical investigation is reflection on the specific scientificity of the human sciences, these “disciplines that call themselves sciences.” Therefore, philosophy’s general scope does not consist in the rejection of the “objectivity” of the human sciences but, on the contrary, in the attempt to give them conceptual tools that can help them recognize their own possibility as sciences and fully achieve scientificity.
However we must note that Althusser generally sees “philosophy” as occupying an ambiguous position
between theory and ideology—like the human sciences themselves. Hence the constant denunciation of this
ideological philosophy (existentialism, personalism, subjectivism) identified as “pseudo phenomenology,” a legacy of Bergsonian spiritualism, which he calls the ally of “technocratic ideology.” Thus Althusser draws a clear dividing line between this ideological philosophy and a theoretical philosophy—which he adopts as his own position—conceived as an antiempiricist and antipsychologistic reflection on scientific practice: what was later called a “philosophy of the concept.”
In that conflictual context, the role of nonideological philosophy is said to consist in defending the human sciences against what prevents them from being truly scientific, in permitting their transformation from their current status of techniques— human techniques—to the status of genuine sciences. Consequently it involves freeing the human sciences from technocratic ideology, whose correlatives are subjectivism, anthropologism, and psychologism.
The general perspective adopted by Althusser in 1963, just before these two talks, thus appears to be a critical perspective on the situation of the so-called human sciences at that time—human sciences whose scientificity was still to come and were for the most part mere techniques for adapting or readapting individuals to their social milieu: “Human Techniques of Adaptation” disguised as sciences. Linguistics, Althusser insists, is a remarkable exception, it is a real science with a specific object and a specific method. But other so-called sciences, such as contemporary sociology and psychology, or psychosociology, are nothing but techniques for gaining social control over individuals; they are still pseudo-sciences.
In this respect, it is conceivable that psychoanalysis, taking linguistics as its model, might also constitute a precious paradigm of scientificity in the domain of the human sciences, insofar as it could be seen as built on a rejection of psychology. And this is where Lacan comes in. He addresses this question of the complex relation between psychoanalysis and psychology, which involves the possibility that psychoanalysis can form a genuine theory, a genuine science, and not a mere intersubjective practice, by making a radical break with the tradition of psychology: a break entailed by the Freudian concept of the unconscious. This concept may be considered strategic insofar as it allows us to build
a bridge with the human sciences, in the rigorous sense of the word
, and with their “objective reality.” These sciences are related to a certain conception of the unconscious, namely the unconscious as the structures that determine the laws of the anthropological sphere—like modern linguistics, which postulates the unconscious character of the laws that govern the human use of language. This understanding of psychoanalysis as the theory of the unconscious is developed by Lacan precisely through his recourse to linguistics and structural analysis.
4The Complex History of Freud’s Reception in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
In the first talk, Althusser develops a historical reconstruction of the introduction of Freudian psychoanalysis into French thought, and specifically into French philosophy. Such a historical perspective is striking in two ways.
First, it offers an autobiographical retrospective through which Althusser shows the importance that phenomenology had in his own philosophical formation, before he departed from it. He emphasizes the important role played by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and also Ricoeur in the initial reception of psychoanalysis within French philosophy. All these authors were deeply influenced by Georges Politzer, who introduced Freudian psychoanalysis into French philosophy. Politzer’s crucial reading of Freud’s theory in the
Critique des fondements de la psychologie (1928) identified psychoanalysis as the path toward “concrete psychology.” We should note that this historical inquiry includes Althusser’s description of his own encounter with psychoanalysis through Politzer’s interpretation, and leads to a
retrospective critique of his initial understanding of Freud’s attempt to depart from classical psychology. The main issue at stake is the adequate conception of the distinction or
break between psychoanalysis and classical psychology.
But this historical reconstruction also helps us understand the premises of the antagonism—so important in twentieth-century French philosophy—between structural analysis and phenomenology, or between a “philosophy of the concept” and a “philosophy of consciousness.” Some years later, this antagonistic configuration was defined by Michel Foucault as a dividing line that separates a “philosophy of experience, of sense and of the subject” from a “philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of the concept.”
5 The philosophy of the concept involves a strong antipsychologistic claim, and, in the context of such a struggle, Jacques Lacan, who was an obstinate and ferocious adversary of psychology and opposed to any attempt to obliterate the dividing line between psychoanalysis and psychology, represents a precious ally. In that respect, Lacan’s perspective concerning the irreducibility of Freud’s theory with respect to psychology is closely related to Georges Canguilhem’s attack on psychology, its instrumentalism and its false pretension to constitute a
science, in the famous 1956 article entitled “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” (“What Is Psychology?”).
6The second version of Althusser’s historical reconstruction deals with the topic that gives the volume its title: the relation between psychoanalysis and the human sciences—anthropology, sociology—and psychology.
The crucial examination of the relation of psychoanalysis to psychology is inserted within a consideration of the broader encounter of psychoanalysis with social psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology that began in Freud’s time and indicates the necessity of the historical move leading psychoanalysis toward the “general object of the human sciences.” It is in this framework that Althusser examines the symbiosis, in 1963, between psychoanalysis and psychology in the “current state of the social sciences”—a symbiosis that takes the particular form of the psychoanalysis of children, in relation to the psychology of child development and to the different theories of its “phases” or “stages.”
This historical importance of the theory of child development reveals a conception of psychoanalysis that is inadequate, insofar as it is still framed by anthropologism, and not yet scientific. More precisely, it appears to be governed by an idealist conception of the encounter between the individual and society, or “social praxis,” and to imply a misunderstanding concerning the object of psychoanalysis identified in the interaction between the individual—considered as the biological individual—and the “social milieu.” This configuration leads to the reduction of psychoanalysis to a technique of social adaptation that was the object of a constant critique by Lacan, under the name of “American psychoanalysis,” which he considered as “the exact opposite of psychoanalysis,” as Althusser puts it.
The first historical encounter between psychoanalysis and human sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and psychiatry, seems therefore to be characterized by anthropologism and psychologism, i.e., by idealist determinations that prevent the human sciences from achieving scientificity.
In contrast, the new program established by Althusser, which requires Lacan’s decisive contribution, would make possible a renewal of the encounter between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, an epistemological reflection on their articulation emancipated from anthropologism and psychologism. This would also mean a real encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy, based on a radical redefinition of psychoanalysis itself and of its own scientificity.
For it happens, Althusser explains, that the first encounter between philosophy and psychoanalysis occurred under the jurisdiction of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and implied a false conception of the respective functions of these two domains. According to this conception, psychoanalysis would provide the
concrete, the material: in the present case, the intersubjective situation of therapy (
la cure) or, in other words, the “dual situation of the relation between doctor and patient.” The insistence on the existential surroundings of psychoanalysis identifies the latter as a
practice, a therapeutic practice that lacks its own concepts, whereas philosophy is supposed to provide the
concepts. Psychoanalysis would thus be reduced to a mere empirical practice and would therefore not be able to constitute itself as a
science.
One understands better in this light Lacan’s (and Althusser’s) recurrent denunciation of the “theoretical imposture” represented by the philosophical interpretation of the intersubjectivity supposedly at work in the psychoanalytical experience of therapy, their rejection of the phenomenological focus put on the double relationship between patient and doctor. This explains the intensity of the controversy engaged not only against Sartre and Merleau-Ponty but also, in a more implicit way, against Ricoeur himself and his “philosophy of intersubjectivity.”
The Exportation of Lacan’s Thought Into the Domain of Philosophy
One could sum up the theoretical debt that explicitly links Althusser to Lacan—starting from the text of 1963, “Philosophy and the Human Sciences,” continuing through these two talks, and still at work in the article “Freud and Lacan” in 1964—in the following schematic points. Lacan’s return to Freud reveals that psychoanalysis invalidates the myth of the
homo psychologicus, just as Marx’s theory read by Althusser invalidates the myth of the
homo oeconomicus. In this regard, Althusser wrote in “Philosophy and the Human Sciences,” regarding Lacan, “We owe him what is
essential.”
Lacan’s insight about the scientificity of psychoanalysis, entailed by the claim that it has made an epistemological break with psychology, is a model for the definition of the specific scientificity of the human sciences in general, particularly with regard to historical materialism.
Lacan’s insistent questioning about the specific status of psychoanalysis is taken up by Althusser from the beginning, but in a specific way; it is exported to the domain of philosophy. That is the object of the title and of the incipit of the first talk: the reading and the interpretation of Lacan are immediately subordinated to the epistemological topic of the human sciences, considered through the prism of psychoanalysis.
The central question, inherited from Lacan, is thus: what is the essence of psychoanalysis, and what is its specific, scientific, object?
This question thus concerns the theoretical status of psychoanalysis. It was first formulated by Lacan against the tradition of a psychology of consciousness and resolved in the pungent critique of any reduction of psychoanalysis to an existential experience that would take the form of an intersubjective process.
This question underpins Althusser’s philosophical reflection on the theoretical status of the human sciences in general and the possibility that they might escape the ideological field in which they were born and with which they have to break in order to constitute themselves as sciences: i.e., subjectivism and psychologism.
Thus Althusser’s resumption of Lacan’s reading of Freud suggests that reflection on the epistemology of psychoanalysis leads to reflection on the epistemology of the human sciences.
This might help us better understand Athusser’s insistence on what might at first seem a disconcerting task: translating Lacan—a task that is described as “a very important cultural necessity” at the end of the first talk. Through this programmatic statement, Althusser expresses the wish to make Lacan’s thought operate in the field of philosophy, to extract it from the baroque envelope that seems to characterize it as long as it remains in the closed realm of the practicians of psychoanalysis. Indeed, Lacan’s attempt to give a coherent, theoretical definition of the essence of psychoanalysis is strategic with regard to “the whole domain of the human sciences” in general—together with Marxism and “the problematics inaugurated by Marx”: the two theoretical “points of departure,” the “mooring-points.” This definition of the essence of psychoanalysis is essential for the understanding of the “relation de jure between psychoanalysis and the human sciences.”
Once again, Althusser’s investigation deals with the epistemological specificity of psychoanalysis considered not as a therapeutics or an existential intersubjective apparatus but as a
theory: the theory of the unconscious as such. Here Althusser seems to be following Lacan’s reading of Freud, which aimed at isolating the specific
scientificity of psychoanalysis at stake in Freud’s discovery concerning the
concept of unconscious, against regressive readings by the followers of the “ego psychology” theorized by Anna Freud and the representatives of “American psychoanalysis.” The critique of the trend to absorb psychoanalysis within psychology is repeated in the second talk, in relation to the question of the separation of psychoanalysis from psychology. Althusser refers to Lacan’s rejection of a “psychological theory of the unconscious.” The latter is particularly represented by what he sees as Anna Freud’s misinterpretation when, reading Freud’s second representation of the psychic apparatus (the ego, the id, the superego), she reactivated the notion of the psychological subject, the supposed
centrality of the “ego.” For Althusser, the core of the misunderstanding consists in Anna Freud’s rechanneling of the
psychological subject conceived through the form of the centered ego, “the “ego” being the central position that tries to remain central, that tries to maintain its position against the aggressions of the “id” or of “social reality.” This leads to an instrumentalist and theoretically misleading conception of psychoanalysis—typical of American psychoanalysis—that consists in the reduction of psychoanalysis to a “technique of readaptation” of the individuals to the social context in which they live and to the norms to which they are supposed to conform.
The main issues at stake in this general reflection on the relation of philosophy to the human sciences are therefore the epistemological distinction between science and ideology and the parallel distinction between psychoanalysis and psychology, a question that represents the core of the second conference, entitled “Psychoanalysis and Psychology.”
These texts by Althusser, so deeply informed by Lacan’s work, might also be read as a laboratory for the concept of “epistemological break” (la coupure épistémologique). This concept, borrowed from Bachelard’s epistemology, makes possible a distinction between science and ideology, and its use will be determinant in Althusser’s later texts (For Marx and Reading Capital, in 1965) in the context of the “return to Marx.” These texts are concerned with the scientificity of Marxism and historical materialism in the context of Marx’s revolutionary discovery, the discovery of the continent History, leading to the constitution of historical materialism: a scientificity that must be constructed on the rigorous distinction between the young Marx’s writings, still influenced by Feuerbachian humanist ideology, Hegelian idealist philosophy, and classical political economy, on the one hand, and on the other Marx’s mature works such as Capital, freed from anthropologism and historical teleology, after the “break” represented by The German Ideology in 1845.
Lacan’s return to Freud is exemplary in that respect. It is a decisive attempt to transform and systematize, within the theoretical field of psychoanalysis, the conceptual apparatus inherited from Freud, and to reveal the “epistemological break” through which psychoanalysis emancipates itself from its ideological background. In Freud, most concepts are still borrowed or “imported,” they are inherited from theoretical areas that form the prehistory of psychoanalysis: biology, energetistic physics, economic theory. Lacan transformed these borrowed concepts into “domestic ones” (according to Kant’s distinction), having recourse to
linguistics and its epistemological framework, that is, structural analysis, which deeply inspired Lacan’s reading of Freud in the 1950s.
The analogy between Lacan’s strategy and Althusser’s some years later is particularly significant on this epistemological level, and it could explain Althusser’s insistence on what he sometimes calls his debt (as a philosopher and as a Marxist philosopher) to Lacan.
The Premises to the Theory of Ideology
These analyses of the analogy between the return to Freud and the return to Marx lead us to another crucial point of encounter of Althusser with Lacan, i.e., the
conceptualization of ideology, which involves and requires two different origins: Spinoza’s materialism of the imaginary and—what interests us most here—Freud’s concept of the unconscious as it was reread and systematized by Lacan himself in the
Ecrits.7The elements for a theory of ideology borrowed from the Freudian-Lacanian perspective in connection with a theory of the process of humanization-subjectivization are systematically delivered one year later in the article “Freud and Lacan” and determine the further systematization of the theory of ideology as such in
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, a text written in 1970.
8But it is already possible to track down some decisive premises of these theoretical elements in the talks themselves, particularly in the second one.
Let us recall first that in
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser asserts his central theoretical program to develop a
theory of ideology in general, on the model of Freud’s
theory of the
Unconscious. Thus, far from being reducible to the illusory domain of conscious representations, ideas, etc., that is, to the simple inversion of “real life,” ideology is endowed with a necessity, an omnihistorical character, and a “material reality” that proceed from its necessary inscription in social institutions (“ideological state apparatuses” such as family, army, church, etc.) and also from the fact that its own causal effectiveness is comparable to the causal effectiveness of the unconscious, conceived in the Freudian way as an independent system. This explains why ideology, as Althusser already underscored in
For Marx, cannot be eliminated from any social formation: it is an “
essential structure” of human societies in general.
9Hence the definition: “an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representations (images, myths, ideas, or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.”
10This characteristic of ideological reality also entails that human life, the life of human individuals, is necessarily in the grip of ideology. Human beings are in this sense “ideological animals,” which means that they are always already assigned to become subjects: subjected to the “law of culture,” the other name for the necessity and power of ideology in all social formations.
According to this approach to ideology—directed against the pre-Marxian conception of ideology as a mere fantastic inversion of reality, deprived of any form of specific reality and effectiveness—the fundamental mechanism of ideology is what Althusser calls the “interpellation into subject,” the
subjectivization-subjection process.11Now, this later theorization of the ideological function is deeply marked by Lacan’s definition of the object of psychoanalysis as being the
humanization process, the humanization of the little human child: “the little child’s becoming human, his integration into culture through the defiles of the signifier,” in Althusser’s words. Thus it refers to the claim of the constant precession of the
symbolic function with regard to the humanization-subjectivation process. And light is shed on this Lacanian conception of the primacy of the symbolic order by the Rousseauist concept of the “law of culture.” Together with Lacan, Rousseau operates, with his
Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ingalité parmi les hommes, as a decisive ally
against the ideological-psychological representation of the humanization process that supposes the continuity of the passage to humanization: a classical representation that was at the core of eighteenth-century reflection (see Condillac) on “wild children,” for example. Through Rousseau’s paradoxical claim of the discontinuity between nature and culture, we are led to understand the necessity of culture’s self-precession, i.e., the antecedence of the symbolic order (antecedent to the imaginary order itself) with respect to all the “stages” of human development.
Althusser’s use of Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order and of Rousseau’s concept of the “law of culture” thus appears to be rather original: he chooses to link them together in order to work out the crucial claim that was to be at the core of his own theory of ideology: namely culture’s self-precession, its constant and necessary antecedence with respect to the humanization-subjectivization process.
What the alliance between Lacan and Rousseau makes it possible to conceive is therefore the inadequacy of the traditional representation (inherent in ego psychology or the classical psychology of child development) of the humanization process as a passage from nature to culture, from the biological to the cultural-social-anthropological sphere.
In opposition to this representation of the subject as psychological subject, a subject of needs, and the representation of language as a tool for communication between individuals—a mediation used by the psychological subject to signify his needs to the other subjects—the reference to Lacan’s perspective sketches out a different perspective based upon
modern linguistics, which implies the opposite claim that entails a whole (antipsychologistic) theory of the subject, conceived not as the imaginary ego (the ego of consciousness) but as the symbolic subject, a subject in the grip of language.
As a result, Rousseau and Lacan, both of whom conceptualize “this precession of culture with respect to itself,” provide the foundations for the strategic refutation of philosophical individualism (Hobbes) and for the disqualification of experimental psychology and psychology in general. This Lacanian-Rousseauist refutation could be understood as the conceptual basis for the double rejection of the homo oeconomicus and of the homo psychologicus: two ideological figures that together form a system. In its turn, such a rejection might constitute a central precondition for the elaboration of the human sciences as such, a precondition for their break with ideology and technocratic thought that rely on anthropologism, individualism, and psychologism.
These elements required for the elaboration of a theory of ideology reveal at last the importance of the category of the subject: a particularly intricate and enigmatic category in Althusser’s approach to psychoanalysis considered as a key to understanding the ideological humanization process, identified as the subjectivization process.
In that respect, we should pay particular attention to the end of the second talk, which propounds a study of the Cartesian
cogito together with the genealogy of the institution of the subject as a main category of idealist philosophy. This genealogical inquiry uses the opposition between Spinozism and Cartesian-ism with respect to the philosophical category of a “subject of truth,” a “subject of objectivity”: a subject of knowledge identified as the Cartesian
cogito, which was remarkably rejected in Spinoza’s philosophy, as is shown by Althusser’s analysis of “Spinoza’s abandonment of the subject of objectivity.”
What is to be noted at this stage is the relation sketched out, through Althusser’s genealogy of the cogito, between the institution of the subject in philosophy and the elaboration of the psychological subject.
Here, the Cartesian subject of truth and knowledge, the philosophical subject, appears to be implied by a whole theory of knowledge identified with a theory of judgment: the jurisdiction of a philosophical subject endowed with the faculty of deciding the truth value of its own ideas. And this Cartesian view is opposed to Spinoza’s conception of knowledge as a production, a “process without a subject,” already theorized in On the Improvement of the Understanding.
More precisely, Descartes’ perspective is seen as “a problematics that opposes truth to error.” And this miscomprehension of the nature of the distinction between true and false lies exactly at the foundation of the philosophical institution of the subject—if one follows Althusser’s provocative and rather elliptical hypothesis on that point. For him, the Cartesian problematics misunderstood the true meaning of the distinction or de-cision between truth and error. This is a philosophy of judgment, which “leads to a philosophy of the subject that decides between truth and error.”
On the contrary, Althusser sees the break or distinction between true and false as having been adequately grasped by Spinoza in the framework of his unprecedented model of the mind, based on the rejection of the Cartesian theory of knowledge and certainty, that is, on the refusal of the distinction between will and intellect. This issue is at stake in Spinoza’s abandonment of a subject of judgment, linked with an original conceptualization of truth independent of any “subject of truth,” as shown by the crucial notion of verum index sui et falsi in the On the Improvement of the Understanding or the concept of veritas norma sui et falsi in the second part of the Ethics. This conceptualization forestalls the classical identification of the distinction between true and false with an external opposition and consequently refutes the postulate of a philosophical subject at the origin of this opposition.
Finally, at the end of the second talk the genealogy of the psychological subject, considered as the obscure duplicate of the subject of truth and objectivity in Descartes’
Meditations on First Philosophy, is particularly interesting. The psychological subject, if it may be identified in Descartes’ view as the subject of
error, is the obscure correlate of the philosophical subject. What Althusser sketches out in these last pages of the second talk is an archeology of the psychological subject critically understood as the pathological double of the philosophical Cartesian subject.
In conclusion, let us briefly underline the ambivalence inherent in Althusser’s enigmatic philosophical treatment of the category of subject. On the one hand, the subject is a fundamental notion as regards Althusser’s previously discussed theory of ideology. But, on the other hand, Althusser’s critical reading of the philosophical subject considered as the theoretical premise for the elaboration of the psychological subject reveals a strong divergence with respect to Lacan in the interpretation of the Cartesian subject itself.
According to Lacan, the Cartesian subject, far from being a historical idealist category that constitutes the philosophical precondition of the psychological ego, should be understood on the contrary as an
empty subject, the subject of science, which anticipates the Freudian subject: namely the subject of the unconscious as opposed to the psychological ego.
12 Althusser, whose thought was constantly marked by Spinoza’s philosophy, could not accept such a rehabilitation of the Cartesian subject. His own reconstruction of the birth of the psychological subject remains dependent on an identification—contestable—of the
cogito with the subject of consciousness: an identification that was consistently refuted by Lacan. This question of the subject represents the point where Althusser (who is in general so deeply indebted to Lacan’s thought—and this is one of the main lessons of these two talks) departs from the initiator of the “return to Freud.”
Yet, beyond these discordances, Althusser’s strategic choice to grasp the forthcoming scientificity the human sciences through the particular prism of psychoanalysis must be explained by the antipsychologistic claim at work in Freud’s discovery as it was revealed by Lacan. Thus it is shown that the human sciences, if they tend to scientificity, must break with behaviorism, anthropologism, psychology, and also with an idealist philosophy of the Subject, a philosophy of consciousness: just as psychoanalysis did, at the price of a continued effort.
We may then infer that the sole “real sciences” would be linguistics and psychoanalysis itself—once the latter has fully separated itself from its ideological background. A similar conception of what could be the emerging break between the human sciences and anthropologism, historical continuism, and psychologism can also be found a few years later in Foucault’s
The Order of Things (1966). In the framework of his archeological sequence, Foucault takes ethnology, linguistics,
and psychoanalysis to be the models for such a liberation. The end of
The Order of Things is, in that respect, quite remarkable and consonant with Althusser’s earlier program of critically rethinking the scientific status of the human sciences, which already implied the delimitation of a “break” between
pseudo-sciences (whose typical expression is psychology) and
real sciences such as linguistics and, more laboriously, psychoanalysis itself.
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