ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis constitutes a body of knowledge, acquired and developed through study and personal experience, the object of which is the psychic reality of the human subject. As a theory, psychoanalysis is a deconstructing method which never reaches an absolute conclusion. Psychoanalysis can be understood as an attempt to develop an objective knowledge of subjectivity, but this act of knowledge is always under the inevitable influence of the subject’s unconscious. Psychoanalysis finds its purpose in the therapeutic process that takes place in the exclusivity of the consulting-room, where patient and analyst gain access to the patient’s unconscious in an encounter through language, marked by the dynamics of transference and countertransference. Psychoanalysis is neither a science nor an art but inhabits a place of its own, with its necessary characteristics and approaches. Psychoanalysis can be compared to how music was conceived by John Cage, the American composer who created the indeterminacy movement in New York in the 1950s.
