Psychoanalysis as an instrument of self-knowledge: devices, obstacles and limits

Abstract

This article examines psychoanalysis as an instrument of self-knowledge, questioning what Freudian theory authorises and what it refuses in that common expression. It argues that the knowledge of oneself produced by analysis is not an extension of introspection but an operation of another nature: it presupposes that the subject is not transparent to himself and that knowledge about one's own psychic functioning can only be obtained indirectly, from formations — dreams, parapraxes, symptoms, repetitions — that the ego does not recognise as its own. Drawing on the Freudian corpus, the article reconstructs the technical devices that render such knowledge accessible: free association, dream interpretation, the reading of parapraxes, and the handling of resistance and transference. It is argued that resistance and transference, far from being obstacles to the process, constitute its most consequential material, since they bring into the analytic relationship what narrative cannot reach. Finally, the intrinsic limits of the enterprise are discussed as Freud himself formulated them in 1937: analytic self-knowledge is partial, slow and without guaranteed term, and it is precisely this finitude that distinguishes it from the promises of self-transparency now circulating under the same name.