ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to address themes can be approached through an issue in the current philosophical debate about the nature of psychoanalysis. There is a trend in contemporary thinking about psychoanalysis which sees it as an extension of commonsense psychology. Commonsense and clinical psycho-analytic assumptions are, like all our attributions of motivating mental states and candidates for revision. The structure of a good commonsense-psychological account will be a narrative one. The picture of psychoanalysis as rooted in commonsense psychology is essentially right. The thesis that psychoanalysis is an extension of commonsense psychology can accommodate the rationalising, linguistic nature of commonsense psychology without the further commitment to the idea that third-person attribution is definitive of mind. The chapter suggests that Melanie Kleinian theory, properly understood, overcomes the limitations of Freudian and Marcia Cavellian construals of psychoanalysis. Freud sees linguistic thought as preceded by imagistic thinking.
