‘Project for a Scientific Psychology: The Impossibility of a Text’

Eschewing a chronological approach to psychoanalytic writing, Manuel Batsch examines the earliest incarnations of what Freud would call his ‘metapsychology’. In this essay, Batsch traces some of the earliest attempts of psychoanalysis to get to grips with the nature of its objects – in particular, the model of human memory suggested by the peculiar symptomatology of hysteria. Analysing Freud’s and his readers’ attempts to fit the logics of hysterical memory into neurological and hermeneutic methodologies, and engaging with Jacques Derrida’s reading of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, the chapter proposes that the ‘fertile impossibility’ of this text marks out the way for a new genre of theoretical writing in psychoanalysis – the essayistic and fragmentary metapsychology. Both these first two chapters ask what is being done – and what might potentially be done – with the objects of psychoanalysis at the level of the theoretical text.