Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”

Abstract

The author discusses differences between what he calls epistemological psychoanalysis (having to do with knowing and understanding), for which Freud and Klein are principal authors, and ontological psychoanalysis (having to do with being and becoming), for which Winnicott and Bion are principal architects. Winnicott shifts the focus of psychoanalysis from the symbolic meaning of play to the experience of playing, and Bion shifts the focus from the symbolic meaning of dreams to the experience of dreaming in all of its forms. Epistemological psychoanalysis principally involves the work of arriving at understandings of unconscious meaning; by contrast, the goal of ontological psychoanalysis is that of allowing the patient the experience of creatively discovering meaning for himself, and in that state of being, becoming more fully alive.

Keywords:

• Ontological, epistemological, understanding, experiencing, being, becoming

Notes

1 Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to review the work of the many analytic thinkers who have contributed to the development of the ontological aspect of psychoanalysis, I will refer the reader to the work of a few of those authors: Balint (1992), Berman (2001), Civitarese (2010, 2016), Eshel (2004), Ferro (2011), Gabbard (2009), Greenberg (2016), Grinberg (1980), Grotstein (2000), Laing (1960), Levine (2016), Milner (1950), Searles (1986), Semrad and Day (1966), Stern et al. (1998), Sullivan (1962), Will (1968), and Williams (2019).

2 Freud (1926) was explicit in his instructions not to use “orotund Greek names” (p. 195) in translating psychoanalytic concepts, and instead “to keep [psychoanalytic concepts] in contact with the popular mode of thinking” (p. 195). Thus Das Ich is better translated as “the I” and Das Es as “the it.”

3 It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare what I am calling the ontological dimension of psychoanalysis and the rather diverse set of ideas grouped under the general heading “existential psychoanalysis.” Much of existential psychoanalysis is concerned with conscious awareness, intentionality, freedom, and responsibility, which are seen as inextricably linked (which undercuts the Freudian concepts of unconscious pressures and limitations of freedom). Major contributors to existential psychoanalysis include Ludwig Binswanger, Victor Frankl, Rollo May, Otto Rank, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Neither will I take up the philosophical underpinnings of ontology and epistemology. I am restricting myself to a general linkage of the former with being and becoming, and the latter with gaining knowledge and understanding.