Editorial

I

Even if Freud himself was hesitant to admit, philosophy is one of the important disciplines for psychoanalysis. Philosophers work with very much the same questions as analysts, concerning personal integrity, self-awareness, freedom, and ethics, among others. And interestingly, in both disciplines there is no single approach that could supply definitive answer to the fundamental questions and a plurality of possible approaches prevails. In both there is always space for further questions, reflections and perspectives. Presumably this is so because the problems in both fields are of the kind that they only rarely allow reaching definitive answers or solutions.

Philosophers work with conceptual problems that exceed the limits of our knowledge. The answers to those questions are more or less convincing depending how well they are argued. Philosophers work with concepts and theories, illustrating their ideas with empirical examples. Psychoanalysis in contrast is an empirical discipline. Its heart is the process between the analyst and the analysand, which then may be elucidated, reflected and perhaps justified with various concepts and theoretical approaches. Psychoanalysis is a very particular empirical discipline, however, because the dynamic unconscious, which is at the core of its research object, cannot be perceived directly, nor captured by any single theoretical approach. Thus psychoanalysts too work with questions that exceed the limits of our knowledge and that for this reason do not allow unequivocal solutions.

II

Philosophy has always come up in plural, as a multitude of approaches, and this is true of the contemporary philosophy more than ever. Different approaches open different perspectives and different kinds of answers to the problems at hand, and each of the approaches is built on conceptual conditions of certain kind. One possible and very general distinction is the following: first, there are those philosophical approaches that are closer to everyday experience as well as to human sciences interpreting that experience, and second there are those approaches that opt instead for natural scientific knowledge of the world. Time and again the principal disputes in philosophy concern the question, which one of the two pictures of the world, scientific or everyday picture, should be given priority. This is essentially the dispute about whether scientific naturalism should be taken to be true or not.

When everyday experience and human sciences are given priority, as is the case in phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches, then philosophical reflection concerns in the first place the experiential, cultural and historical conditions of understanding, knowing and acting. Philosophy reflects these conditions systematically, yet without distancing itself radically from its objects. When natural scientific approach is given primacy, then philosophical reflection concerns in the first place the logical form and conceptual conditions of scientific knowing that are universal and valid independent of cultural and historical conditions. Whereas in everyday experience and in human sciences the knowing subject is always embedded in the same web of meanings, practices and institutions as are the objects of knowing and understanding, in natural scientific approach the relation to the object of research is methodically controlled in a way that is supposed to guarantee distance and strong objectivity.

In all its forms, however, be it naturalist or not, philosophy is committed to presenting connections of some sort between the two pictures. Thus philosophers attempt to convey what the world ultimately is for us. And it is exactly this mediating function of philosophy, I think, that makes it particularly relevant for psychoanalysis. For psychoanalytic thinking is committed as well to connecting one way or another the clinical experience with scientific and theoretical explanations of the experience.

III

A subtle and important discussion of these questions is to be found in the doctoral thesis of Torberg Foss (2009), a former editor-in-chief of our journal. His key question concerns the relations between particular clinical cases and general concepts. Foss argues that psychoanalysis is committed to particular experience of a clinical process between two personal minds in a way that makes it very difficult both to generalise inductively from the experiences and to verify or falsify general concepts and theories with the experience. Yet, he maintains, psychoanalysis is not an idiographic discipline committed purely to the individual. Instead he argues for a different kind of generality that emerges from the particular as presented in the case reports.

Throughout his monograph, Foss uses philosophical concepts and theories in spelling out his subtle views on psychoanalysis. In the first part, Grünbaum’s well-known critique is questioned as being based on a standard model of scientific theory-construction and testing that misses the specificity of psychoanalytic research situation. In the second part, Foss goes deep into the issues concerning causality and causal reasoning in psychoanalysis, again spelling out his points by taking sides with principal philosophical views on explaining and understanding human action and psychic phenomena. The disjunction of causal explanation of natural events and understanding of intentional action is too simple, because psychoanalysts are particularly interested in motives and reason that escape rationality. Some sort of causality seems to prevail in the meaningful human life, but it is very difficult to capture this theoretically. In everyday sense making we do allude to causes and psychoanalysis extends this as it focuses on individual dispositions to repeatedly act in a way that cause too much suffering. In the analysis, these dispositions are perceived in the transference.

In the third part, Foss enters into a dialogue with Wittgenstein who criticises Freud’s scientific ambitions for general explanations. There is point in this criticism that Foss takes seriously, trying to spell out the specific form of generality that the psychoanalyst should be committed to in their discussions of the individual cases. This takes him into the exchange between Wittgenstein and Frazer, as well as to Goethe’s reflections on Urpflanze during his trip to Italy.

Goethe’s wavering reminds us of Freud’s never-ending doubts of the reality of the primal scene – the Urszene: was it a memory or a phantasy, did it incontrovertibly take place in the life of each individual or was it more part of the history of the species? Both were occupied with how something universal or constant can be perceived. (p. 179)

Foss closes his study by defending the idea that psychoanalytic generality emerges from close study of particular cases and attempts to learn from them how to work with questions that seem to have similar features. Again he does this in a thoughtful dialogue with a number of philosophers.

IV

It would be possible to enter into a dialogue with Foss concerning some of his claims, but this is not my purpose here. With the foregoing I just want to illustrate how significant philosophical thinking can be for psychoanalysis. The point is not that analysts should follow philosophers in their own thinking, but rather that even though philosophy is a different kind of discipline that works with its problems in another way, a dialogue with philosophers may be indispensable for the articulation of psychoanalytic ideas.

This being the case, Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review will also in the coming numbers publish texts that make use of philosophical ideas in articulating thoughts that are psychoanalytically relevant. The core of psychoanalysis is the clinical process, the cases, the particular, and we certainly want to stay close to the particular. Thus we invite papers of all kind that discuss questions of our clinical work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.