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The term psychoanalysis may refer to the discipline of analysts, its techniques, findings, and theories. It also may denote the phenomenology that unfolds when two people mutually undertake “a psychoanalysis.” In what follows, I will focus on the latter meaning.
The title of Gregorio Kohon's book invites the question “What is ‘the nature of psychoanalysis’?” The English word “nature” is derived from the Latin “natura,” a translation of the Greek “physis,” derived from the verb “phuo,” meaning to grow, to produce, to generate, to beget, or, as an intransitive, to arise, to spring up (Naddaf 2005). “Physis” thus originally referred to processes of biology, growth, and development. Unsurprisingly, from “physis” also derive our English words “physiology” and “physician,” as well as “physics,” the most comprehensive science, encompassing chemistry and biology.
For Aristotle (350 b.C.), nature most generally “is a source or cause (intrinsic to a thing) of being moved and of being at rest,” as distinguished from other causes of motion or change, such as externally applied violence, or human art. Each thing said to “have a nature … is a substance; for … nature implies a subject in which it inheres” (II.1.192a, 14-18; 33-35). Aristotle posited that something does not yet have its own “nature,” however, until the underlying material of which it is made has received the form that defines it as being that thing. (Thus, for example, calcium becomes bone.) The form is the actualization of what in the material had existed only potentially. Thus, “a thing's nature [is] exhibited in the process of growth by which its nature is attained” (193a, 36; 193b, 7-14). Just as we observe an infant growing through childhood and adolescence, so also in the unfolding phenomenology of a psychoanalysis we observe a natural process of growth by which a person's psychological
potential is actualized in its more fully realized form, that of a healthy adult.
The substance of psychoanalysis consists