Para além do princípio de cultura: a psicanálise diante das ontologias dos outros

Basing itself on Philippe Descola’s anthropological approach to the decentralisation of the naturalist ontological framework, this article proposes a conceptual exercise inviting one to imagine a shift in one’s understanding of the place that psychoanalysis occupies within this new panorama. This work argues that, despite Sigmund Freud’s well-known naturalist positions, his work may contain elements that would allow psychoanalysis to be situated within a broader field of ontological variations. Besides naturalism, this field includes three other ontologies: animism, totemism and analogism. To this end, the article revisits four moments in Freud’s work: the opposition between nature and culture in Civilization and Its Discontents; the myth of the Primal Horde in Totem and Taboo; the loss of narcissistic omnipotence in On Narcissism; and the logic of the symptom and of dream interpretation. In each of these moments, the article asks to what extent Freudian psychoanalysis can be read as a variant of the different ontologies catalogued by Descola.