ABSTRACT
A reasonable place to begin addressing the foundations of psychoanalysis might be with a discussion of the ‘basic concepts’ of the theory, as did Freud (1915b), and to then assess whether psychoanalytic theory is logically coherent and consonant with empirical ndings. However, these are not, in fact, the true foundations, since Freud embedded psychoanalytic theory within a particular worldview (see Freud, 1933a). If anything, this worldview is the logically prior foundation since the development of psychoanalytic theory is informed by these assumptions, any of which may be more or less implicit or explicit. Thus, while Rapaport and Gill (1959) rightly note that “[a]t some point in the development of every science, the assumptions on which it is built must be claried” (p. 153), rather than assessing the theory prior to assessing the assumptions, an alternative position is to question one’s assumptions rst. In fact, and as hinted at previously, many of the divisions underlying psychoanalytic pluralism are metaphysical in nature, and the logical starting point, then, for clarifying the foundations of psychoanalysis, is not with psychoanalytic theory per se but instead with addressing the metaphysical foundations of psychoanalysis.
