ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the relations between commonsense psychology, the clinical vocabulary of psychotherapists, and that of neuroscience. It looks at the different kinds or levels of explanation. Personal level explanations operate with psychological terms like remembering, thinking, recognizing, feeling, desiring, believing, and knowing. The praxis of psychotherapy is bound to the concepts of commonsense psychology or "folk psychology", through which the therapist and the patient are used to express their feelings and ideas. Functions are at the core of both evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis: Darwin revealed the evolutionary functions of the traits of species, and Sigmund Freud the repressive functions of ideas, disorders, and acts. Psychoanalysis is known for emphasizing the significance of early years of development, and putting matters into the historical context means simply that current matters are connected to an analysand's earlier experiences and conditions of life.