Psychoanalysis as the third sophistic

Psychoanalysis is certainly part and parcel of the Greek tradition, but also the Jewish tradition. However, it lies far from Platonic idealism. The hypothesis put forward in this text is that psychoanalysis could ground a third sophism, oriented by rhetoric in which the logic of argument prevails over deductive elaboration, all the more so when enriched by the knowledge acquired from pragmatics. Thus, the theoretical corpus of psychoanalysis can be considered as a set of beliefs that ground the analyst’s position at the start of each treatment in such a way that casuistry challenges it and forces both analyst and patient to take a theoretical step further.