Question Has philosophy learned anything from psychoanalysis? Kal

Accepted:
November 2, 2015

Comments

The quick answer is that

The quick answer is that 'analytic' philosophy has not, but 'continental' philosophy has. Almost all the major figures in continental philosophy after Husserl engaged with psychoanalytic thinking - Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and the French feminist school of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva. So continental philosophy as a discipline tends to work with and from an awareness of psychoanalytic thinking, and this has an effect on a very wide range of issues (language, ethics, gender, mind, politics...)

Analytic philosophy has been more sceptical about the truth of the psychoanalytic model of the mind, and engaged far more with cognitive, and more recently social, psychology. It has only begun to deal with the unconscious mind through these empirical theories. There are exceptions; Richard Wollheim and Jonathan Lear have written widely on psychoanalysis, and a number of writers in ethics, e.g. Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt, Richard Moran, John Cottingham, David Velleman, and Edward Harcourt have argued for a psychoanalytically informed account of moral psychology and self-knowledge (as have I). But even among those sympathetic to psychoanalysis, the range of issues on which psychoanalytic thought is brought to bear has been relatively limited.

Question Has philosophy learned anything from psychoanalysis? Kal Accepted:November 2, 2015

Question Has philosophy learned anything from psychoanalysis? Kal

Accepted:
November 2, 2015