Psychoanalysis--a phenomenology of language.

It is often said that there is an unbridgeable gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. But this is only half the truth. Starting from Merleau-Ponty's proposal of an objectivistic and an idealistic divergence of Freud's enterprise the paper tries to reconstruct two possible movements: the objectivistic divergence of Husserl's enterprise as a phenomenological shift towards psychoanalysis and the idealistic divergence of Freud's enterprise as a psychoanalytical shift towards phenomenology. It is shown that this approach is possible on the field of language and semiotics where psychic life, as the essence of our subjectivity, may be rendered as a uniform phenomenon of an articulation in the world of signs. This thesis is elucidated at the end of the paper by discussing first (to the phenomenological side) a certain interpretation of the use of Husserl's reduction as a method of investigation in psychiatry and second (to the psychoanalytic side) the importance of Lacan's difference between repression and foreclosure for a psychopathological understanding of psychosis.