ABSTRACT
Chapter 15, with its overt attention to the origins of thought and to psychoanalysis, helps us to understand a confusion between psychotherapy and philosophy. Other writers have reinforced Wieder’s themes of the importance of avoiding theory, prejudice, or presupposition in therapeutic work. Such intentions are common to Socratic, sceptical, hermeneutic and positivist traditions. However, as she indicates, there is a strand in analytic thinking which eschews pursuit of specific ends,
therapeutic or otherwise. According to it, the understanding that comes from analytic insight is an end in itself-an ethic laid bare in Szasz’s (1957) discussion of the ‘final aims’ of psychoanalysis. Analysis has not necessarily failed if a patient finds they either cannot adjust or cannot live-provided a certain recognition has taken place. Of course such a view sits uneasily with the original aims of psychoanalysis. It was conceived as a medical treatment, with definite goals. Psychoanalysis was also a product of modern culture, as it pursued objective, shared truths. Individual treatments were therefore valued for the evidence they afforded of universal processes, a motive that has sometimes competed with the drive to heal.
