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The intention of Bárbara Bettocchi and Raúl Fatule, the editors of A Binocular Vision: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, is to articulate points of connection between these two disciplines, both of which, while
maintaining a narrow and often problematic relationship, study the nature of human consciousness and unconsciousness, fantasy and reality. While this would seem an ambitious goal for anything less than a work of several volumes, the editors might have pulled off something even better in this slim volume: an unpretentious and concise series of chapters, two or three to a section, offering glimpses into how certain psychoanalytic constructions are viewed through the binocular vision of deeply curious and philosophically minded analysts.
The contributors are mainly psychoanalysts, including one candidate with some specialization in philosophical studies, and three professors of philosophy. All are Latin Americans and members of psychoanalytic societies or university faculties in Peru, Argentina, or Europe.
The book's title evokes Bion and his use of the term binocular vision, used as an analogy with psychoanalytic vision: “The model is formed by the exercise of a capacity similar to that which is in evidence when the two eyes operate in binocular vision to correlate two views of the same object” (1962, p. 86). One image is created from the fusing of two unique and independent points of view. In this volume, Bettocchi and Fatule organize their contributors' binocular vision around four vertices: the relationship between intrapsychic and intersubjective in regard to recognition and drive; the epistemological status and reach of psychoanalytic concepts; the debate between the rational and the unconscious dimensions; and recent theoretical interdisciplinary proposals.
Francisco Otero begins the first chapter with a close look at the literature on connections between drive, repression, and will, centering the discussion around Schopenhauer's influence on Freud. This infl