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There is something paradoxical in the present-day and well-established notion that an intensified dialogue with neurobiology and experimental development-psychology would constitute the foremost possibility for psychoanalysis to increase its scientific knowledge. Thus, I welcome the initiative that begins in the present issue of the The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review – to encourage psychoanalysts, as an alternative, to reflect upon their own knowledge on the basis of philosophical texts and theories.
The primary reason, if I am right in my assumption, for viewing philosophy as a more suitable dialogue partner when it comes to the development of the theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis, is the fact that psychoanalysis, ever since Freud’s days, thematizes the psychic phenomena – emotions, drives, fantasies, etc. – not as features or abilities that humans happen to possess (and whose function and development would then be possible to investigate by way of experimental methods), but as constitutive of our way of experiencing, understanding and conceptualizing ourselves, our lives and our world. The psychic phenomena imparts the form of our way of experiencing and comporting ourselves. And this applies not least to the phenomena that Andersson emphasizes in his text about Walter Benjamin – remembrance, time and history. We may safely state, with Andersson: “Remembrance tells us not only of our relationship with the past, but of how we experience our situation as bodily and social beings in the world”.
Already in Freud’s first theories on the birth of psychic life, these phenomena play a central part. In The interpretation of dreams, Freud (1900, p. 567) states: “nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work”. What we encounter here is an insight into essences (Wesenshau) rather than an empirical observation: contrary to a mechanical apparatus, a psychic apparatus essentially presupposes an impetus, that is of motivational rather than causal char