The Witnesses of Desire

Varia
Freud, Dewey, Mead and the Contested Relevance of Sociology of Psychoanalysis
By Jean-Baptiste Lamarche
English

Countless contemporaries have turned to psychoanalysis to provide one another with accounts of their actions. Yet, many researchers are reluctant to consider this practice as a social phenomenon. Following in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud, they think of psychoanalysis as the fruit of a discovery on the fringes of the social sphere, in a self-observation freed of the critical demands of others. Ultimately, this picture of asocial psychoanalysis is based on a Cartesian conception of the relationship to oneself, as this relationship is described as preceding any communication with others. However, as John Dewey and George H. Mead showed, self-observation, far from preceding communication with others, derives from it. The comparison of critiques of Descartes’ theory of the mind, by Freud on the one hand and by Dewey and Mead on the other, not only affords a better understanding of their distinctive features but also enables us—by showing that the mute avowal of desire in psychoanalytical soliloquy is an integral part of the coordination that partners of social actions accomplish by naming their desires—to replace the asocial conception of psychoanalysis with a more realistic understanding.

Keywords

  • coordination
  • Freud (Sigmund)
  • introspection
  • mentalism
  • pragmatism
  • psychoanalysis
  • repression (theory of)
  • vocabularies of motives
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