ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 traces the disciplinary contours of Romantic metasubjectivity, establishing the Naturphilosophie of Schelling's First Outline as the metaphysical terrain on which to stage fundamental differences between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. Schelling's ambivalent Nature wants to regress to a zero-point of nonproduction, but its compulsion to create also marks a progressive yearning for the “absolute product,” the consummation of all possible creation. Schelling defines the actant as the non-molar combinatory force behind this production; actants (de)combine with each other to create natural products in ways which cannot be predicted or controlled. The chapter then reads Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and Jung's “The Border Zones of Exact Science” (1896) as “first outlines” of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, arguing that the latter more closely approximates Naturphilosophie than psychoanalysis. Freud's A Phylogenetic Fantasy (1915) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) grapple with the spectre of Jung after the Freud-Jung break, flirting with the pre-human but remaining entrenched in biologism. The chapter ends with a discussion of Jung's “Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology” (1931) and “Analytical Psychology and ‘Weltanschauung’” (1931), which ultimately cast analytical psychology as a Foucauldian counter-science destabilising disciplines and Weltanschauungen with the potential to excavate their epistemological bases.
