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to the move taken by the relational schools from drive to affects in clinical psychoanalysis, and to the ensuing disregard for metapsychology it entailed (Anzieu-Premmereur, in: Durieux et Fine, 2000). They voice strong concerns on the role that the emotional engagement of the analyst came to play in North-American psychoanalysis. Empathy, as understood and practiced by the intersubjectivists, is very different from Freud’s understanding of the concept of Einfühlung , borrowed from Theodor Lipps and is incompatible with Freud’s concept of Versagung (refusement), linked to the benevolent neutrality of the analyst, an essential ingredient of the psychoanalytic method (Kahn 2014). More precisely, emotional engagement of the analyst, as well as empathy, draws the attention towards the quality and to the content of the affect rather than towards its quantitative manifestations. Furthermore, the conjunction of both elements tend to provide a more soothing environment than the classical analytic frame, thus controlling, obviously with good intentions, the building up of intensity in affective manifestations. Such a regulation prevents the analysis of the quest for excitation characteristic of libidinal processes. Consequently, as viewed from this perspective, the relational approaches do not provide the necessary conditions to properly take into consideration the economic point of view, yet an essential element of Freudian metapsychology and a discriminating sign of unconscious processes at work (Widlöcher, 2004; Kahn, 2014). Along the same lines, other critics emphasize the insistence on meaning and on the co- construction of meaning featured in the relational paradigm. They underline that this position does not account for the characteristics of unconscious derivatives, which, by definition are resistant to meaning and that it contributes to the assimilation of psychoanalysis with cognitive therapy. They also object to the contingent and secondary role granted to metapsychology, and to, what they regard as the pluralism and eclecticism of relational theories. (Kahn, 2014; Tessier, 2014a). III. Cca. Lagache And Lacan: Refusal of the interpersonal/relational paradigm Lagache and Lacan are usually mentioned among the first who referred to the concept of intersubjectivity in French psychoanalysis (Roussillon, 2004), though they both used it in different ways. Daniel Lagache held that psychoanalysis had a place within psychology, which he envisioned as a unitary field. Though he acknowledged that subjectivity and intersubjectivity were not psychoanalytic concepts, he underlined the intersubjective aspects of the clinical situation and considered subjectivity and intersubjectivity as basic notions on which a preliminary reflection was necessary within psychology, so psychologists can contribute to their subsequent developments (Lagache, 1961). Jacques Lacan had a very different view on the relation between psychoanalysis and psychology: he considered the two disciplines to be irreconcilable. He objected to a phenomenological approach of intersubjectivity, arguing that such a view was merely describing a relation with a similar other: it remained in the order of the imaginary and neutralized the radical otherness of the unconscious. For Lacan the key notion was the subject,
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