Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the Origins of Meaning: Pre-Reflective Intentionality in the Psychoanalytic View of the Mind (Critical Thinking in Philosophy)

Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of psychoanalysis and on considerations of the nature of psychoanalytic theory itself, this text aims to reveal new possibilities that psychoanalysis offers for an understanding of the mind and its relation to the world. David Snelling argues that the most consistent version of psychoanalytic theory is provided by the Kleinian school, and he shows that the claims made about the mind by this school - particularly claims about pre-linguistic mental representation require a radical philosophical treatment which entails a re-examination of an approach embedded in the work of certain continental thinkers, notably Heidegger and Hegel. The connections between philosophy and psychoanalysis represented in the book represent a departure. Linking Kleinian notions of an "inner world" of unconscious "phantasy" to philosophical conceptions of non-linguistic meaning whose significance for the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity has been hitherto overlooked, Snelling argues that psychoanalysis demands a significant place in our philosophical understanding of ourselves.