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Psychoanalysis: A Form of Life?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Michael Brearley
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Extract

My aim in this paper is to consider the suggestion, made in an unpublished paper by Peter Hobson, a psychoanalytic colleague, that psychoanalysis is a form of life. Hobson is impressed by the peculiarity of psychoanalytic thinking, by its specialness, by the fact that its concepts are embedded in a system of practices and beliefs such that an outsider to all this may be unable to understand what the analyst says, whether to his patient or to another analyst. Hobson uses Wittgenstein's notion of a form of life to refer to this system of practices and beliefs, but he does not criticize or examine the notion itself.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 28 , March 1990 , pp. 151 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

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References

2 The author wishes to thank those who contributed to the discussion at the meeting of the Newcastle branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in May 1989; also Peter Hobson, Renford Bambrough and Ilham Dilman for their help.