What is it about?

The article discusses the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, and modern neuroscience research on the frontal lobe. Psychoanalysis has generally attempted to introduce something new (something unthought) to philosophy and neuroscience, however upon intervening with a new form of understanding, each respective subject reveals itself to have contained what is radical to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, in other words, conditions other subjects to presuppose the negation of psychoanalysis.

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Why is it important?

The opposition and cooperation between psychoanalysis and philosophy has been the subject of much debate. The entry of psychoanalysis into neuroscience is however a more recent phenomenon. The psychoanalysis-philosophy relation remains 'unresolved', and has migrated into a neuroscience-psychoanalysis which is promising but heavily limited. This article forced readers to see the formal logical similarity of the effect of psychoanalysis on other disciplines. If we introduce the radically irreducible component of psychoanalysis to other subjects, we learn more about said subjects than simply negating them.

Perspectives

Psychoanalysis is the study of the paradoxes constitutive of everyday life: in a slip of the tongue or in an inappropriate laugh we find reflected certain ontological presuppositions for the social subject. The philosophies of Hegel and Schelling do precisely this - they ground contradiction and fleeting contingencies in rigorous logical systems which frame the metaphysical necessity of contradiction. Perhaps we will come to see such a determining power of paradox in neuroscience too.

Rafael Holmberg
University College London

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This page is a summary of: The failed interventions of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and neuroscience as a proxy intervention to psychoanalysis and philosophy., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, October 2023, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000261.
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