"What is the psychoanalyst?": The specificity of the psychoanalytic experience in theory and in practice

Psychoanalysis has been treated as a component and object of academic discourse for most of its history, and in ways that have transformed with academic concerns of the time. Despite this, the relationship between the field of psychoanalysis and the university has always been one of complexity and friction. Fields such as phenomenology, ontology, and psychology routinely treat psychoanalysis as both an element of, but also an antagonist to or blind spot within, their lineages and trajectories of thought. This thesis begins a serious approach to what results from this incompatibility between psychoanalysis and academic discourse. It treats this incompatibility, not as an impossibility to be avoided, or a problem to be eliminated, but instead as the source of a new rejuvenating clarity, both for these fields and for psychoanalysis. The thesis identifies the core of this gap in the experience of psychoanalysis—as a clinical process that also constitutes psychoanalytic knowledge and the formation of a psychoanalyst. It argues that the psychoanalytic experience requires a specific intellectual approach that does not currently exist, but which would also make possible a profoundly reoriented perspective on any field that attempts to touch this experience. For this reason, the thesis does not attempt an empiricist study of this experience, but a series of interventions into the status of its borders with a set of conceptual and logical paradigms. Taking the Lacanian Orientation as its focus, its chapters attempt to illustrate the consequences for the statuses of psychotherapy, science, and ontology of thinking from the psychoanalytic experience; that is, of taking this experience as a starting point for rigorous psychoanalytic and philosophical thought. Out of this, the thesis suggests, comes a new way of looking at these relationships, which renews the old ideas that target psychoanalysis as a field, and poses crucial questions for a number of academic disciplines.