24

The Freudian discovery of the unconscious has opened up an anthropological and epistemological field that implicitly includes, theorizes and develops, its clinical aspects included, the question of the limit and its avatars, in connection with the unknown and the unknowable, as Freud proposes them. By drawing on Freud’s reflections, particularly in the 1925 article “Negation”, in his studies of the dream and its navel, in connection with the role of illusion in religious belief and the malaise in the dynamics of civilization, we can see the extent to which encounters with the limit are numerous and of great significance, both heuristically and clinically. We also find grounds for deepening the link between the particular and the universal, about which analytic theory maintains a demanding internal inquiry, as well as a constant dialogue with related theoretical fields.