The Foundations Of Psychoanalysis And Liberal Naturalism : The Freudian Unconscious And The Manifest Image

Freud famously had scientific ambitions for psychoanalysis, which he saw as a developing natural science of the mind, with the aim to explain a variety of mental phenomena including psychological symptoms, and also jokes, slips of the tongue, and the content of dreams. Awareness can be seen as a straightforward phenomenon that all of the reader experience directly and without complication. It is challenging to try and discover anything manifest in a theory that is ridden with obscure terminology, much of which seems to postulate hidden entities or processes. The basic experience of free association, without vocalising it, is readily available to ordinary introspective experience. The humiliation by her ex-husband and her unreciprocated love of her old friend are imaginatively connected. The psychoanalytic situation imposes the strange condition whereby one is meant to give voice to the everyday flow of imaginative associations.

© 2022 selection and editorial matter Mario De Caro and David Macarthur; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.