ABSTRACT
In 2001, Daniel Widlocher was president of the International Psycho-Analytic Association (IPA) founded by Freud. Widlocher considers that to move forward with success into the twenty-first century, psychoanalysis must become a medical science. Blending Brentano, hermeneutics, and neuroscience, Widlocher’s philosophical conceptions forge a new vision of humankind, one that is devoid of all substance. As for the Freudian discovery, it was carried off into the fields of the natural sciences, then liquidated, leaving no further obstacles to the advent of the totalitarian regime of “scientific psychology”. Freud’s judgement on experimental method is not contingent; it is a structural necessity demonstrated by his definition and employment of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. The concept of desire is a further objection to psychoanalysis being absorbed back into a pseudo-scientific materialist empiricism. In the analytic experience, desire manifests itself as an indestructible negativity because it is conditioned by an object that is lost forever, one that no other object can adequately replace.
