Psychoanalysis: A Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

This study explores the theoretical intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis with consideration of the hermeneutic-interpretive tradition and the phenomenology of consciousness as the theoretical and practical foundation for psychoanalysis. This paper places emphasis on key contemporary psychoanalytic models, namely relational theory and intersubjective systems theory (IST), and examines these theories in light of Freudian and philosophical contributions from the classical canon. This research also considers how the intersubjectivists established a novel conceptual language to present an explanatory theory of the phenomenology of psychoanalysis. IST thus attempts to eschew the metapsychological language present in Freudian theory by employing an abstract lexicon. A basic assumption of this study is that a genuine science of human experience implies a phenomenological approach to lived experience, which culminates in consciousness. Therefore, in its purest form, psychology as a human science is to have its basis in the phenomenology of consciousness. John Searle stated, “The study of the mind is the study of consciousness in much the same sense that biology is the study of life” (1992, p. 227). Although it may seem obvious that conscious and unconscious processes constitute the unique domain of inquiry in psychoanalysis as a science of human experience, this awareness has been a slow dawning, demonstrated by the paucity of theory on how consciousness is altered in the process of therapeutic change.