You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process, Frank Summers argues that psychoanalysis is unique in its approach to the experiencing subject, but that it must shed its attempts to explain human behavior through theory alone. Instead, he proposes that it move forward as a process-oriented, hermeneutic endeavor that stands in opposition to the dominant paradigm of our age, empirical science.
Summers states the problem plainly: Psychoanalysis is under attack from a chorus of mainstream disciplines because a large part of the field has been formulated and discussed incorrectly under the pretense that a theory can be considered correct without being empirically tested. It cannot, Summers argues, and many of Freud's popular ideas, reifications of metaphors such as “the unconscious” and “the id,” continue to be erroneously discussed as if they referred to some actual, measurable force or entity and ineffectively proven by anecdotal references to case material.
As an alternative to such spurious, “scientistic” claims of psychoanalytic truth, Summers offers a vision of the field as a process-oriented, hermeneutic enterprise aimed at self-actualization and transcendence, one that cannot fall victim to deductivism, the essential pitfall of psychoanalytic logic, because it seeks not to explain but rather to interpret and expand upon experience. In clear and scholarly prose, he surveys Romantic philosophy and psychoanalytic writings to arrive at a historically rooted conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a unique form of inquiry, one that helps patients to discover and then move beyond ways of thinking that have them trapped in self-defeating patterns. This moving beyond, what Summers terms “transcendence,” springs from the co-created effort between analyst and patient to open up a multitude of angles for reconsidering the past and formulating previously unanticipated future possibilities.
Subjective experience—idiosyncratic, i