Sorry about this. I promise I will connect these two points in part two of this piece.

Thanks for this Lauren, it helps me a lot. I agree with almost every thing you say except with 3 and 6.

In the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis he says "psychoanalysis... proceeds from the same status as Science itself ." I don't think this means he is employing a scientific methodology. In fact what is a scientific methodology? After Canguilhem can we really claim their is A methodology to science?

I don't think Lacan is asking this question "how is truth established." This reading is too caught in a foucauldian discourse concerning Regimes of truth and so on.

I do think Lacan would perhaps claim that Psychoanalysis is more scientific than science itself. Which means that psychoanalysis is deeply concerned with the question "What is the nature of science." Which I think we agree on this. But I think its a mistake to identify it with the foucauldian question since foucault already presupposes that science is a cultural form.

Okay So I have to admit I haven't put enough labour in really engaging with this piece. I've read it a couple of times and Brendan's comments. However, I don't really feel that I have a hold of what is at stake. Part of the problem is that the mind-body problem really bores. But also, like Brendan, I am left questioning who is our enemy. My general sense is that that position is being occupied by "science," which makes me really uncomfortable. If science is indeed the enemy here I think there has been a profound misunderstanding of psychoanalysis' relationship to science. Lacan isn't a stupid post-modernist asking what is "truth." He, like Freud, believed psychoanalysis to be the torch-bearer of the project of enlightenment. "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden." There is a profound taxonomogical error if science is reduced to positive empiricism. For Lacan, in my understanding, what is irreducible about science is its formalization of knowledge. In this regard Lacan strived to be absolutely scientific, just read the Instance of Letter. In fact from my small understanding of the Lacanian/Heideggerian split this is the heart of the divide, and perhaps you are falling in the latter camp. For Hiedegger science is just another metaphysics, a stance which is quite obviously deducible in his intellectual progency (i.e. derrida and to a lesser extent foucault) while Lacan holds that science is "new" exactly because of its formalism.