The order of the empirical and the transcendental function in psychoanalysis: A critical review of the concept of drive in the face of the 21st century

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between the empirical order and the transcendental function in Freud and Lacan, drawing on Foucault’s analyses concerning the birth and death of Man. The concept of drive is taken as the unit of analysis for this examination: theorized by Freud within a nineteenth-century anthropological model and reformulated by Lacan under the structuralist framework of the twentieth century. Considering the paradigmatic and epistemic differences between both authors, and following Foucault’s critique of the unproductiveness of the anthropological dream, the paper seeks to problematize the epistemological foundations of contemporary directions in psychoanalysis—those oriented by the works of Freud and/or Lacan—in view of their possible future developments.