The philosopher on the couch. Psychoanalysis: A (scientific) model of methodology or an (aesthetic) analogue of philosophy?

Gordon Baker, the initiator of the works on Wittgenstein’s Dictées, is well-known for having defended the interpretation of philosophy as a form of therapy, according to the psychoanalytical “model.” My claim is here that the introduction of “aspects” into the method, long before Wittgenstein’s so-called philosophy of “aspects,” has far-reaching consequences as regards the reversal of the relation between model and analogy. “Model” ceases to be applied dogmatically (or projected from above), whereas analogy allows a kind of interpretative art, suggesting that philosophy is more like an applicative piecemeal art, calling for a descriptive technique adjusted to a fluctuating kind of “real,” rather than a “platonic model” to which the real should be forced to correspond. Understood in this way, one should not expect philosophy as a form of therapy to be a science. Rather, the analogy with an aesthetic kind of efficiency makes philosophy an interpretative technique of transformation.