Freud's invention of psychoanalysis emerged from a field of knowledge structured by scientism, the creed that empowers science to embrace all reality. For some authors, this scientistic starting point would weaken Freud's discourse epistemologically, which would be overcome by an insuperable contradiction between a mechanist program (based on concepts such as determinism, energy etc.) and a hermeneutics that is infinitely open to the subject's production of meaning. Focusing especially the "Project for a scientific psychology", in which Freud projects concepts of natural science in the psyche, in order to build a true psyche machine, we will show that the originality of the rationality invented by Freud consists exactly on being a borderline reason, that conjugates and separates sense from drive, blurring the line between established fields. We have therefore concluded that there is no contradiction in Freud's discourse that would force us to choose between force and sense.
psychoanalysis; scientism; subject; drive; meaning