ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis began as an implausible profession that sought to study human subjectivity through the lens of the natural sciences. For the first sixty-odd years of its existence, the theoretical underpinnings of analytic discourse were overwhelmingly positivistic and reductionistic. The protean properties of desire, the qualities and intensities of despair, rage, guilt, anxiety, and faith were all construed as the overt expression of specific quanta of sexual and aggressive energy circulating in a biological system, whose interactions with kindred systems were regulated by motives and mechanisms that are largely outside of domain of consciousness. The whole aim of psychoanalytic technique was to disclose the patient to him-or herself, by “making the unconscious conscious,” in the hope and expectation that becoming reacquainted with disowned or dissociated subjectivity would afford some leverage against symptoms by making the patient more “objective.” But the term “objectivity” had a peculiar meaning in this context, since the ultimate in “insight” was presumed to be the ability to transpose the experience of raw, irrational passions glimpsed or released in clinical work into this utterly impersonal, mechanistic frame of reference.
