ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews the understanding of the nature of the human subject, and of the relation between the subject and its world. It discusses Melanie Klein's view that symbol-formation takes place in response to primitive anxiety. The book looks at a particularly rigorous attempt to spell out the philosophical consequences, provided by Marcia Cavell. The consistency and rigour of Cavell's philosophy of psychoanalysis has its origins in a powerful general theory of how the mind relates to the world, one which gives us a conception of the mind in strictly 'mentalistic' terms. Psychoanalysis has always had its philosophical champions, too, even if they have not, on the whole, been as loudly heard as the critics. The philosophers more sympathetic to psychoanalysis have recently rallied around a certain way of conceiving the relation of psychoanalysis to a philosophical view of the mind.
