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Is the field of philosophy relevant for psychoanalysis, and, if it is, what does it have to contribute to the field? By the same token, can it be argued that psychoanalysis is relevant for philosophy, and, if it is, what does it have to contribute to that field? Jerome Wakefield's meticulous and brilliant work, powered by his scholarly knowledge in the areas of philosophy and psychoanalysis, is displayed in this book and is welcomed in this context.
Wakefield, in his first chapter, poses the question “Should Freud be taken seriously as a philosopher of mind?” In the three hundred sixty pages that follow, he takes us on an informative, stimulating, highly enriching, and fascinating journey into the complex relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Carefully, systemically, and patiently, Wakefield delineates a certain thread and develops a strong argument that Freud broke ground that philosophy of mind has trod in irreversible ways.
Wakefield responds affirmatively to the question he poses. Freud, he argues, should be viewed as a philosopher, a philosopher of mind: “scattered throughout Freud's writings there is a systematic and—even when judged by current philosophical standards—rather sophisticated and subtle philosophical argument about the nature of the mental.” The argument he reconstructs “reveals Freud as a prescient and important philosopher of mind who made a seminal and underappreciated contribution when judged by the concerns that dominate philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition today” (p. 2).
Alfred Tauber lays out the birth pains of positivism and scientism in the nineteenth century and Freud's own experience of this struggle in “Freud's Philosophical Path” (2009) and later in “Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher” (2010). In the former, Tauber traces the historical origins of
Freud's thinking in the context of his struggle with philosophy as a field, as he gradually separated himself from it to create a positivist ground for the new science of