Psychoanalytic Introspection, between Descartes, Dewey, and Mead

Abstract

Although multitudes of contemporaries use psychoanalysis to explain their actions to one another, we hardly manage to discern a social phenomenon in the widespread recourse to this analytical idiom. For we have grown accustomed to the asocial image of psychoanalysis articulated by S. Freud: it would be born in a radical self-observation, by an individual who discovers her repressed desires by freeing herself from the expectations of others. This image ultimately has its roots in a Cartesian conception of the relationship to oneself, according to which it precedes any relationship to others. However, this hypothesis has been the subject of sharp criticism by J. Dewey and G. H. Mead, who argue that the relationship with oneself develops through interactions with social partners. The confrontation of their “emergent” theory of the mind with the one implicit in the asocial theory of psychoanalysis enables us, by placing the analytical soliloquy in the context of the interaction in which it emerges, to replace this asocial conception (which in the end is nothing but a hypostasis of this soliloquy) with a more realistic approach of psychoanalysis.[1]

Keywords:

• Emergent Theory of the Mind Keyword: Emergent Theory of the Mind
• Introspection Keyword: Introspection
• Mentalist Theory of the Mind Keyword: Mentalist Theory of the Mind
• Sociology of Psychoanalysis Keyword: Sociology of Psychoanalysis
• Vocabularies of Motive Keyword: Vocabularies of Motive

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Rights: In Copyright