A Holistic Framework for Psychoanalysis

This paper is a methodological reflection on the structure of psychoanalytic theory. It is an attempt at an elaboration of a model of human experience at its foundation. At this level of explanation, the goals of disparate disciplines converge: psychoanalytic theory, methodology of science, aspects of neuroscience, philosophy, epistemology, and theories of meaning in natural language. These fields can be viewed as engaged in closely related, largely overlapping projects, addressed from differing perspectives.

Any theory of meaning that seeks to explain language acquisition would include an explanation of how, from a combination of universally human and idiosyncratic experience, the members of a language community can communicate and share meaning. A theory of psychology would include a discussion of how, from the universally human and the idiosyncratic, individual and social psychological meaning is generated. The points of emphasis and the vocabulary of each theory may be different, but ultimately they are closely allied, and, at many points, probably the same project. At the basis of each, there are certain irreducible factors: for example, that humans have sensory experience; that humans abstract, which is equivalent to being able to make generalizations and also to form judgments of similarity; that humans use language; and that humans are interpersonal to some degree from the start of life. Humans, for the most part, develop neurologically, physiologically, emotionally, and psychologically along certain predictable and context-dependent paths.