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Marcia Cavell, a psychoanalytically trained philosopher, has written this impressive book to show that certain strands of psychoanalytic theory can be underwritten by certain strands of contemporary analytic philosophy. Cavell is equally at home in the psychoanalytic and philosophical literature and moves with enviable ease from one to the other. Philosophically, she is most clearly inspired by the work of Donald Davidson.
Cavell endorses a theory of meaning which is usually called ‘externalism’. Externalism claims that - as Putnam famously put it - ‘meaning just ain't in the head’. Meaning is out there in the world, and the external world enters radically and forcefully into our mental processes. Many forms of externalism have been promoted by philosophers. True to her object-relational colours, Cavell advances a Wittgensteinian version: meaning is a function of participating in a language community. She also uses Davidson's notion of ‘radical interpretation’ to illuminate psychoanalytic concepts of interpretation. Radical interpretation is the process of attributing mental states to another person. Essentially, Davidson argues that we attribute mental states in a rationality-maximising fashion. We make sense of others' behaviour by understanding it as a relatively coherent whole. This leads to a third major philosophical doctrine: meaning holism. According to the theory of meaning holism, the meaning of an idea does not exist in isolation. The meaning of an idea is a function of how it fits into the whole fabric of a person's ideas. Every bit of the mind is intimately related to every other bit.
A second area of philosophical concern to Cavell deals with reasons, causes and psychological laws. Wittgenstein established the orthodoxy that causal explanations are fundamentally different from reason explanations and inspired a generation of philosophers to criticise Freud's alleged philosophical naivety in confusing the two. In the early 1960's, however, Davidson was wo