| The dissertation undertakes two primary tasks. First, to unpack what it means to be committed to psychoanalysis. This involves owning up to psychoanalysis' irreducible pluralism (each school is composed of a theory of suffering, a theory of therapeutic action, and a theory of desirable end states, but what one school depicts as a desirable end state invariably matches another's theory of suffering) and the unavoidably perspectival character of psychoanalytic knowing (each perspective articulates a constellation of foci in its structure of attention; this renders inflation and deflation, exaggeration and distortion, and blindness and insight inextricably intermixed in psychoanalytic knowing). Further, this involves specifying the concept of an object, and so the form of objectivity, implied by psychoanalytic pluralism: psychic life is relatively, though unevenly, incohoate, partially pliable to interpretive constitution. Finally, this involves acknowledging that commitments to psychoanalysis are constitutively unsettled insofar as psychoanalysis cannot but seek universality because the efficacy of analytic listening and the broader cultural appeal of psychoanalysis requires that clinical and cultural phenomena are regarded as potential tokens of types, yet, for the same reasons, psychoanalysis cannot but attempt to attend to the emphatic singularity of material: psychoanalytic knowing is always bound up in a dialectic of universalization and particularization.;The second task is to give an account of the authority of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. The authority of psychoanalytic knowledge is pragmatic but not simply instrumental; such authority is predicated on success in delivering viable intermediary concepts and theories (universals to be particularized in practice) that make a genuine claim to insight but not about any one in particular. The authority of psychoanalytic practice is the authority of a form of life, best assessed by situating psychoanalysis as a form of practical reason to be evaluated in terms of its contributions to the successes, discoveries, and capacities integral to our pursuits of our good.;Ultimately, the dissertation seeks to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is a historical discourse of suffering and healing under conditions of modernity rather than a metaphysical discourse of universal truth and must be so due to the ontological indeterminacy of the psychic. |
