Persuading rather than convincing: notes on Wittgenstein and psychoanalysis

The relations which Wittgenstein entertains with Freud's thinking, as indicated by some scholars, are markedly ambiguous: there is, for the one side, an acerbic criticism about the pseudoscientific character with which psychoanalysis presents its supposed "empirical discoveries", and, consequently, the fascination exherted by this kind of procedure. But there is also, for the other side, evidences of admiration by the dissolving effect the use of interpretations and metaphors in psychoanalysis realizes, encouraging Wittgenstein to even incorporate such strategy to his own method of logical investigation of philosophical concepts. In this article I intend to draw some reflection about the method incorporated to the Philosophical Investigations, in several aspects really similar to a clinic of a desubstantialized linguistic psychoanalysis, in order to add some positive points to the criticism usually made to the Lacanian conception of language.