It has become something of an orthodoxy in the “philosophy of psychoanalysis” of the past three decades to assert that typical psychoanalytic explanations are motivational in character.1 This is sometimes put by saying that psychoanalytic explanations give reasons for actions, rather than causes of mechanical

movements or processes; that specific explanations of particular actions in terms of motives are fruitful, but that the broader, theoretical overviews attempted in psychoanalysis are useless; that typically psychoanalytic explanations are framed in terms of ordinary, men