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One of the main questions in teaching and research on psychoanalysis at university is a heuristic one. Indeed, the theoretical approach is not hypothetical-deductive, validation is not empirical, and discoveries emerge from a conjuncture that involves randomness in transference. Firstly, the author tries to show that nowadays, academic psychoanalysts (far from relying on a fictive extra-territoriality) are aware of the question and propose epistemological responses; secondly, that with the exception of those who support a neo-eclecticism or the subjection of scientific research to the demands of technical performance, academics as a whole are aware of the limits of a totalitarian positivism. Psychology’s current situation is affected by these often implicit tensions.