Freud, although knowledgeable about Western philosophical traditions, was ambivalent about the role of philosophy in psychoanalysis and claimed that philosophy had little influence on psychoanalysis. When Ernest Jones asked Freud how much philosophy he had read, Freud replied, “Very little. As a young man I felt a strong attraction toward speculation and ruthlessly checked it.”
Freud, in fact, had a classical education in philosophy, and there are numerous citations of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and others in his papers. Through his studies with Brentano, Freud was likely more knowledgeable about contemporary philosophy than he acknowledged.
In this age of the hegemony of neuroscience, of what use is philosophy to psychoanalysis? Philosophy, literally “love of wisdom,” connotes the love of exercising one's curiosity and intelligence. One definition of philosophy: That department of knowledge which deals with ultimate reality, or with the most general causes and principles of things.
What, then, is ultimate reality?
We generally see two very different activities under the name of philosophy. Both activities intersect with psychoanalysis, and both are represented in this special section. One is essentially rational, logical, and critical. Jim Hopkins, one of the panelists in our philosophy-and-psychoanalysis roundtable (see page 15), comes from the British psychoanalytic tradition. “Philosophy aims … at clarity of understanding and the demarcation of knowledge,” he wrote in Philosophical Essays on Freud in 1982. “A correct understanding of the nature of a theory may be required for judging how far explanations using that theory contribute to knowledge.” Hopkins sees two types of explanations for events: causes, which pertain to physical objects and are investigated through scientific laws, and reasons, which describe human beliefs and desires.
Psychoanalysis is concerned with beliefs and desires. Rather than a cause and effect, we have a network of reasons. Any particular action is derived from a combination of beliefs and desires. Thus, reasons have a causal role in producing actions, but not through predictive laws. Interpretations of psychological events would then be confirmed through coherence: Do other explanations of the same events confirm the first explanation? We try to fit the pattern of actions to a pattern of motives. The participants in our philosophy-and-psychoanalysis roundtable all generally adhere to the rational school.
The other general activity of philosophy is hostile to logical analysis, arriving at general conclusions by personal intuition. For example, Stanley Leavy (see below), a member of this camp, is strongly influenced by the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur. Though starting with Hopkins' distinction between motives and causes, Ricoeur emphasizes an historical or hermeneutic approach, that of interpretation.
How do philosophers link the intuitive/interpretative school of philosophy with psychoanalysis? Interpretation becomes the problem to be grappled with. On the one hand, interpretation involves a demystification of illusion, a tactic of suspicion as a battle against masks, a liquidation of idols. On the other hand, interpretation involves a vow of rigor and obedience, a restoration of meaning. Psychoanalysis must have faith in the truth of symbols. Leavy echoes Ricoeur: “Confronted by the unfamiliar or the unforeseen, we marvel, and then we interpret.”
Leavy points to the unexpected, anything that is redundant to factual communication — the decorative, the amplification, the embellishment, the explicative — as a focus of interpretation. Leavy in his article and the members of the philosophy study group all generally adhere to the intuitive/interpretive school.
Robert S. White, M.D., is a member of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University.