Logic of Truth and Logic of Erring in Kant and Lacan

Abstract

Four fundamental concepts (the Freudian concepts of repetition, unconscious, drive, and transference) articulate not just psychoanalytical theory, but also its practice. They relate directly to the phenomena that are present in the treatment; in this sense, they come under the first part of the Kantian transcendental logic, i.e. the logic of truth or the transcendental analytic of pure reason. Psychoanalysis cannot be satisfied by exploring the field of possibilities given in and by the phenomenology of these fundamental concepts without being confronted with the impossible; it must take into account that it bumps against something impossible for each of these Freudian concepts (the invention of the “object a” and its four forms by Lacan and Kant’s table or nothing) and this opens the infinite field of suppositions that go far beyond the phenomenological field; nevertheless these suppositions are very effective. The logic of noumenon, the logic that guides us, or the logic of these pure suppositions does not respond only to the research of truth, but to an approach of the Real and it corresponds to the logic of an erring or to Kant’s transcendental dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter entails another three Lacanian concepts (besides the “object a”): the subject and its questioning (corresponding to the paralogisms of the psychological idea of Kant), the phallus and its functioning (corresponding to the cosmological ideas of Kant), and finally the big Other and its ex-sistence outside every existence (corresponding to the theological idea of Kant).