Alguns apontamentos sobre o ensaio Charcot e a formação do Método Clínico em Sigmund Freud / Some notes on the essay Charcot and the formation of the Clinical Method in Sigmund Freud

Freud’s essay Charcot, published in 1893 immediately following the death of the Parisian neurologist, has been received by the interpretive tradition as a text of a biographical- commemorative character. The present article rejects that classification and examines the doc- ument as an implicit articulation of a conception of clinical method. The research problem consists in determining the epistemological status that the 1893 essay occupies within Freud’s early work and the extent to which it formulates a scientific attitude irreducible both to nine-teenth-century neurological mechanism and to subsequent metapsychology. Through eminent textual analysis and cross-reference with autobiographical, clinical, and neurological texts from the same period, the article reconstructs the methodological traits attributed by Freud to Charcot’s clinical practice, i.e., the primacy of empirical observation, the suspension of prem- ature explanatory impulse, the rigorous elaboration of the clinical description, and the inter- subjective transmissibility of clinical knowledge. It is argued that the essay constitutes an au- tonomous conceptual document, before psychoanalysis proper, in which Freud elaborates a methodological program that will ground his subsequent investigative practice. The analysis engages with Foucault, Canguilhem, Bachelard, and Kuhn to specify the relevant epistemolog- ical vocabulary, without projecting anachronistic categories onto the 1893 text.