The work examines the basis of psychoanalytical research. It begins by examining the influence of scientific procedures, used by neurology and neurophysiology in the nineteenth century, on psychoanalysis. It then observes the discovery of a new subject matter of research the unconscious. The latter following the rules of rigorous and precise scientific thought still implies the need for new, adequate forms of investigation for the recently forged field of research. As a conclusion it states that rather than imitating the natural sciences procedures, psychoanalytical research needs to recognise the specificity of its subject matter. Such subject matter can only be apprehended during the analytic session, where analyst and analysand are involved in the very unconscious productions under investigation. This constitutes the particular, new kind of knowledge that so much has influenced the twentieth century thought and beyond.
Psychoanalysis; Research; Unconscious; History of psychoanalysis; Scientific thought