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Phenomenology as a philosophy and as a methodological approach to the investigation of human experience is seldom explicitly connected with the psychoanalytic experience and understanding of the mind. Very few papers in the PEP Archive are concerned with this connection.
One reason for this may of course be a result of the present orientation of the PEP Archive towards English and American psychoanalytic journals in which continental philosophy exists almost incognito, or as a not-really-relevant entrance to psychoanalysis, or is “discovered” with many decades of delay. Probably a similar archive encompassing German and French journals would give us another picture of the psychoanalytic ‘landscape’.
However, the lack of the phenomenological approach may also be the result of a conscious or unconscious neglect on the side of the psychoanalytic communities who in their theoretical reflections may underestimate phenomenological aspects in the understanding of patients'/analysands' experience of their being-in-the-world and their verbal and non-verbal expression of this experience.
Finally, the restricted interest may originate in a genuine difference between the Weltanschauung of psychoanalysis and the philosophy of phenomenology. Even though Freud attended the lectures of Brentano (1838-1917), and Brentano had some views on the concept of ‘the Unconscious’, Freud seemingly never pursued any interest in the phenomenological line of philosophy. Neither did the majority of his followers, except for some, mostly German-and French-speaking analysts, and lately, with the appearance of the school of self-psychology, also some analysts whose aim was to keep the theory close to the analysands' immediate experience of the Self, and less bound to metapsychological models.
Two Swedish books recently appeared in which the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology is the essence of their content. Their relationship towards psychoanalysis is, however, radically different. Th