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This conscious and controlling subject marks the difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis. Here, their epistemological terrain is distinct. Linguists and psychoanalysts apprehend the same words in different ways. Linguists first try to describe languages and construct a scientific theory of their workings. Their concern is one of generalized objectivity, which could be described as an Aristotelian approach. Consequently, they attempt to eliminate any subjectivity, while psychoanalysts acknowledge it as part of the process of association. The analysts' goal is not to put forth a theory of language but of the unconscious. This is why there are so many differences between the two fields in spite of the many borrowings by psychoanalysts from linguists (philologists for Freud) in the first half of the twentieth century.

Today, however, the situation is reversing itself, and some psychoanalysts consider the near "assimilation" of the mental apparatus to the language apparatus to be a failure (Green, 1984, 1989). Moreover, the number of linguists and semiologists who acknowledge the influence of psychoanalytic theory in the humanities is growing. For example, research on the contiguity between these two fields (Michel Arrivé, Jean-Claude Milner) has been conducted by linguists who have undergone analysis or who are analysts themselves; they have introduced psychoanalytic ideas into research on sign systems, writing, enunciation, modes of text analysis, meaning, and so forth. Links between the fields exist despite the fact that their founders never met. Freud may have seen de Saussure's name quoted by Meringer; de Saussure may have seen Freud's in a report on <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> written by one of his colleagues at the University of Geneva (Théodore Flournoy). And although Freud never read de Saussure, it is certain that he heard him referred to as the "father" and author of the <i>Course of General Linguistics</i>. For one of Freud's patients was Raymond de Saussure, the son of Ferdinand, and Freud wrote a preface to Raymond's <i>The Psychoanalytic Method</i> (1922), where his father's book is mentioned.

[[Category:Symbolic]]

[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]