ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents an epistemological and ontological discourse concerning the understanding of human mental processes, and it aims toward a definitive thesis on the dialectics of knowing and being in this work of psychological understanding. It shows that the individual's psychic reality, the life historical passage of experience and understanding, is both potentiality and positionality within the totality of a society or culture's semiotic practices: both "project" and "product". The chapter concerns issues of subject, "object", being, and method in psychological knowledge. What this work reconfronts are questions pertaining to all psychology and, for that matter, to all human sciences. Yet much of its focus is on the understanding of unconscious mental contents, on the question of knowing and being in Freud's psychology. To set the stage for this inquiry, the book reexamines ideas about reality, representation, subject, and science.
