¿De qué libera el psicoanálisis? Una superación de la dicotomía libertad-determinación a partir del psicoanálisis de W. Winnicott

Abstract

It is a common experience to hear that a psychoanalytic cure is regarded, according to the patients, as “freeing”. Though obvious it may sound, one of the effects of psychoanalysis consists in modifying the subject’s relation to its symptom and its suffering. Without promising happiness psychoanalysis forges an ethics based on desire, which liberates, but with the peculiarity that it does not do that in the sense of liberating the oppressed will of the modern self, it does not do it in the sense of optimising the modern self in order to, upon the end of the analysis, enabling it to accomplish the will which the symptom had been hindering. Conversely, psychoanalysis reveals that freedom and will (so understood) may well be reason of suffering. 

In the current writing, thus, for the purpose of answering the question entitling it, it will be our objective to derive a conception of freedom implicit in Descartes, on the one hand, where we appreciate the relation between freedom and suffering characteristic of the modern self, and on the other hand, that which is derived of a series of works by D.W. Winnicott, where we will focus on the varied faces of the articulation between dependence and independence and between spontaneity and compliance in the development of the individual. Such rich diversity of relations, we conclude, far from reducing to a mere disjunction of mutually exclusive terms, as common sense may point at first sight, includes two founding moments: one of disjunction and another of reciprocal necessity, where independence and spontaneity find their most intimate source lying on dependence, possible way for overcoming the classical freedom-determination antinomy.