Psychoanalysis After Representation: The Philosophical Framework

It belongs to the nature of psychoanalytic theory that it harbors powerful philosophical presuppositions. Of crucial importance, then, is the philosophical tradition within which psychoanalysis situates itself. I show that Freud drew heavily in his epistemology and his philosophy of mind on the Cartesian/Lockean tradition. Frontline contemporary work in the history and philosophy of science and in epistemology both discredits and offers a cogent post-Positivist alternative to the Cartesian epistemological tradition. And the later philosophy of Wittgenstein provides a conception of mind that complements these recent developments. I argue that psychoanalytic theory greatly benefits from situating itself in this contemporary current. In the course of showing the suitability of these developments for psychoanalytic theory, I defend a coherence theory of truth, a Wittgensteinian analysis of mindedness, and a conception of causal explanation that both places psychoanalysis solidly in the tradition of science post-Positivistically conceived and as actually practiced, and further develops epistemological themes articulated for psychoanalysis by Roy Schafer and Donald Spence.