HEIDELBERG MATURATION: phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis

LABORATORY OF MODERN HUMANITIES

Abstract

This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching and relied primarily on phenomenology in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Lud- wig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology.

All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct ex- amples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psycho- analytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective.

The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience.