A Small Addition to the Previous Posting

Psychoanalysts and Philosophy:

This is an important topic because examining it closely reveals several important points that are usually ignored, because the important topic itself is rarely addressed. Psychoanalysts were mostly from the medical professions and the rest of them liked to be considered part of the majority. Mentioning philosophy in the psychoanalytic milieu was frowned at, specifically in the Anglo societies and institutes. Basically, because philosophy was not, and still is not, a popular subject in the regular Anglo school curricula (Canada, USA, and some other nationalities). Yet it is basic in Latin and other peoples’ schools. Thus, philosophy was a term that is badly misconceived. To the uninitiated it’s speculative thinking and arguable ‘useless’ topics of no consequence in a profession of particular aims of achieving tangible results, not just enjoyment of the abstract. Philosophy to the uninitiated is a pleasant way of thinking and talking for better thinking.  I hardly know any psychoanalytic center that brought out the most important characteristic of psychoanalysis which is the profession of dealing with the human subject (not his neuroses) and learning about human heritage. As a profession it is a unique method of exploring and discovering the obvious and the unobvious about the human subject. As human heritage it is the tail end of a long human chain of inclination to learn about ourselves: psychoanalysis is the latest connect in the chain of discovering the subject. That is why whether we are human scientists or physician we are all philosophers/psychoanalysts. I should think or be interested in the place the cogito in our theory of the unconscious.

A modest request in any training center is to spend a trimester studying what happened when thinkers like Kant showed us much to learned amount our minds (and our patients indirectly) thinking about ideas (idealism) instead of the objects of those ideas [when Freud thought about the dream instead of dreaming]. There is no medical thinking about guilt feelings but there is a lot of thinking about guilt as a human phenomenon. A better example is Kohut’s institution about ‘mirroring’, which was a breakthrough to the totally ignored duality of the subject in Ego Psychology. For lack of philosophical background, he used mirroring to explain banal issue in transference and identifications. Philosophy trains the analyst what and how to think about his discoveries about his patient while working with him about the repressed. Moreover, philosophical thinking is of unusual significance how the analyst Formulate and structures his interpretations and make sensible reconstruction of the material gathered over many sessions. Philosophy, as it was for the great thinkers, is the better and higher form of looking at and in the mundane. This is the difference philosophy makes in psychoanalysis.