Unconscious and Game Theory

What is it about?

The paper compares psychoanalysis and non-cooperative game theory and asks if the concepts used in game theory are compatible with and add to the knowledge about human thinking and human actions provided by psychoanalysis. We propose a common and novel ground in which this interdisciplinary comparison can be articulated: both game theory and the unconscious posit a Law. Our main result is that the law of satisfaction describing the Freudian unconscious and the law of strategic interaction implied by game theory are not simply incompatible but in frontal opposition to each other; they create a crossroad at which the imputable individual has the possibility to choose either one law or the other.

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