You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Applied psychoanalysis has had a checkered history since Freud first attempted to employ his theories and methods outside the clinic in 'Jokes' (1905) and the 'Gradiva' essay (1906). Analysts have been drawn irresistibly to it, both as a means of testing their concepts in the world beyond their consulting rooms, and as an opportunity to bring their cultural and social interests together with their professional or scientific point of view. Scholars in other disciplines have been ambivalent, some embracing this new source of illumination, others resentful of the intrusion of outsiders into their realm or sceptical about the value of their efforts. Analysts have often courted such dismissal by failure to immerse themselves in the data and methods of the field under study, earning thereby the rebuke of dilettantism. In particular, they have often paid inadequate attention to the rules of evidence generally accepted by students of the discipline in question, and have thus invited refutation—as in the now familiar case of Freud's mistranslation of 'nibbio' in the Leonardo essay (1910), an example, says Charles Hanly, of how 'a great thinker can construct a brilliant edifice upon the sand of a false premise' (p. 38).
Hanly anters the lists with unusual qualifications. A trained philosopher and professor of philosophy, he is also a trained and practising psychoanalyst. He is, thus, thoroughly schooled in the methods both of academic and clinical inquiry, and his aim in this collection of papers is to explicate those methods and to demonstrate the value of the psychoanalytic approach for the elaboration of knowledge in a variety of areas of human activity. As such, his focus is largely an epistemological one, i.e. how do we learn to know, and how can psychoanalysis help us to do so?
Appropriately, therefore, Hanly begins with a consideration of the problem of truth in general and its relevance to psychoanalysis. Setting forth the distinction between the 'correspondence