The witch's brooms

Abstract

This article is an answer back to João José Rodrigues Lima de Almeida's article "The pragmatic psychoanalysis and the paradox of interpretation". It deals with notions such as introspection, private language, inner life, referential language, meaning, intentional action, symptoms, criteria, causal reasons, and aims of the psychoanalytical clinic, all of them objected to by Almeida. It is suggested that the criticisms on Marcia Cavell's and Jurandir Freire Costa's readings on those conceptions are due to theoretical misunderstandings rather than conceptual incompatibility between the psychoanalytic vocabulary and the linguistic neopragmatism.