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John Muller and Joseph Brent, editors, have put together in this volume 15 of the wonderful series Psychiatry and the Humanities, a collection of 10 texts that link the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce to psychoanalysis. As readers, we are set on a singular road that invites us to a careful reading of the Peircean universe. This volume, writes one of the editors, assumes that Peirce's thought can provide a fruitful basis for the development of psychoanalytic theory. The singularity of this enterprise may be compared to the reading of Freud's work.
In his “Brief Introduction to the Life and Thought of Charles Sanders Peirce,” Joseph Brent, Peirce's biographer, provides an insightful look at the “humiliating and tragic life of this singular man,” who lived from 1839 to 1914, often described as “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have produced and who uniquely reinvigorated semiotics, the antique doctrine of signs.” At the age of 25, after having mastered the works of Immanuel Kant, Peirce wrote of the necessity to reduce all our actions to logical processes, so that to do anything is but to take another step in the chain of inference. Inquiry, a term that Peirce uses very broadly, addresses the many ways we go about trying to find things out by means of signs and symbols, which are then subjected to logical criticism. Peirce's semiotic is a well-conceived theory of thought-signs, which provides a broad and adequate basis for understanding symbol formation.
For Peirce, a sign is anything that stands for something to something. What the sign stands for is its object; what it stands to is its interpretant. The universal character of a sign is its triadicity. He holds this position in opposition to many, beginning with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed that a sign can stand in an essentially dyadic relation—its meaning to its object.
According to Peirce, the irreducibly triadic property of the sign always has three elemen