ABSTRACT
The revolution provoked by psychoanalysis has to do with the way in which it turned our own relationship to knowledge upside down, by revealing our own libidinal involvement with knowledge. Psychoanalysis can be understood as an attempt to develop an objective knowledge of subjectivity, but this act of knowledge is always tinder the inevitable influence of the subject's unconscious. Pragmatic philosophy proposes that knowledge is assumed to have only a practical function, that of adapting to reality and controlling it; that the meaning of an idea or proposition resides on the practical consequences that result from its use. The impulse for knowledge does not exclude the desire to ignore. This is fully demonstrated in every session by the patient on the couch: after all, it is the patient's unconscious resistance to knowledge which allows psychoanalytic treatment to happen. Human beings do not have a "special" knowledge of themselves, nor are they in a position to "control" their unconscious desires.
