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What is metaphysics? For Robin S. Brown in Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the Post-Relational (2017), it is extremely important, but also nothing special, or at least nothing difficult to understand – so don’t let the philosophical term in the title lead you to believe this book is for philosophers only. Brown is comfortable with a range of quotidian synonyms – beliefs, basic assumptions, idealisms, myths, first principles, articles of faith, to name a few – arguing that metaphysics is “implied in all discourse” (p. 35) and that “metaphysical presupposition inevitably plays [a role] in shaping our interactions with others” (p. 18). With metaphysics thusly situated within the everyday, we all become metaphysicians – whether we know it or not.
And therein lies the problem. If metaphysics is the water in which we all mentally swim – naturally, inevitably – why do we so often claim that we are the dry ones and everyone else is all wet? To say that problems arise from this situation is a grievous understatement. Wars and violence ensue; unique subjectivities are forcibly deformed. “Metaphysics repressed,” writes Brown, “returns as a fundamentalism” (p. 13), and “fundamentalists know what needs to be corrected” (p. 103): the metaphysics of others. And so it goes with ISIS, the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church, and psychoanalysis. Indeed, as Brown’s catalogue of unrecognized metaphysics accrues – often in the work of our most respected thinkers, e.g., Ghent, Aron, Mitchell, Greenberg, Hoffman – it increasingly appears that contemporary psychoanalysis is a purveyor of dangerous fundamentals: not necessarily dangerous in and of themselves, but rather because they are repressed, then wielded as bludgeoning truths.
Among numerous inspiring quotations curated by Brown from across philosophy, literature, and psychology, one from Alfred Adler stands out: “Unfortunately there are many people who have a wrong idea of metaphysics; they wish to exc