ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how, in the aftermath of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics and facing psychoanalysis’s inability to meet the verificationist demands of the Vienna Circle and its followers, psychoanalysts have gradually jettisoned their basic tools and relinquished any wish to universalise. In the light of the strictly metaphorical value of the notion of psychic energy, the recusation of Freud’s conceptual reification and the critique of supposedly mechanistic and organic pseudo-explanations exposed as mere speculations, analysts have thus been led to reinstate the “person” and the person’s intentionality at the heart of their theorisations. Their focus has become the new agent of a coherence achieved via a narrative consolidating identity and existence.
