Epigenesis and Psychoanalysis

In a previous essay that addressed the epistemological status of transference content (Maguire, 1982a), I observed that recent trends in the psychoanalytic literature include attempts to define psychoanalysis on either narrative, hermeneutic, or linguistic grounds. While not disputing the contributions of these perspectives to the understanding of our discipline, I argued that the notion of psychoanalytic process, in both its conceptual and technical dimensions, requires a much broader explanatory base than any of these perspectives—which essentially derive from the social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)—can provide. I went on to argue that psychoanalysis is a conceptual system of dialectics that responds epistemologically to a data base that draws on both sides of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy; it follows that psychoanalysis cannot espouse a conceptual position that addresses only one side of the mind-body equation and hope to remain on epistemologically tenable ground. I therefore advocated an epistemological model able to accommodate both sides of the Cartesian dichotomy. My proposal was guided by my belief that only a dialectical approach that does justice to the full complexity of psychoanalytic