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The aim of this book is to provide the theoretical argumentation and clinical experience that would decisively place psychoanalysis among the Geistewissenschaften (human sciences) and remove it from among the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) where Freud is alleged to have mistakenly placed it. This conceptual relocation is to take place without losing any of the insights gained by traditional psychoanalytic clinical practice, while jettisoning most of its metapsychology. Clinical justification for the move is provided by alleged new insights into human psychology, and the psychoanalytic process in particular, as well as by the allegedly complete translatability of Freudian clinical practices into the terms of a phenomenological psychology.
The first third of the book is philosophical including discussion of Dilthey's hermeneutics of human history and of the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Some readers may find this a bit daunting, but working through it is worthwhile both for the insights it yields into those thinkers and into Atwood and Stolorow's own version of phenomenology adapted to and growing out of the psychoanalytic dialogue. The remainder of this section on basic concepts is a discussion of structuralism, the third tradition upon which their psychoanalytic phenomenology draws. All three converge in a conception of psychology as the study of a subjective world unique to the individual, irreducible to objective processes (Freud's error), yet with structures that can be studied in an empathic intersubjectivity that defines the psychoanalytic dialogue.
From this perspective character is the structure of a subjective world and motivation is provided by the personal meanings in terms of which subjectivity strives to actualize psychological structures. The dynamic unconscious is the set of self and object configurations that are repressed because of emotional conflict and is distinguished from the prereflective unconscious, viz all those st