ABSTRACT
Defining psychoanalysis as free-associative praxis suggests the extent to which this discipline is not to be determined or justified in terms of an epistemology (subjectivistic, objectivistic, or hermeneutic), but rather be appreciated as an ontoethical praxis. This thesis empowers the rediscovery of psychoanalysis and challenges the uses and misuses that contemporary ‘neuropsychoanalysts’ have typically made of Spinoza’s ‘dual-aspect monism.’ It is then argued that Freud’s notion of ‘psychic energy,’ which has historically been ignored or misconstrued by his followers, should be considered ontologically as akin to Spinoza’s notion of the ‘substance’ underlying both the material and the immaterial realities that we can come to know (or as initiating a triple-aspect monism). Psychic energy cannot be purely endogenous (as Freud, in the tradition of Helmholtz, wished to insist). Rather, as indigenous cosmologies worldwide have intimated or intuited, it is pervasively both/and yet neither/nor in the sense of possible relations of ontological (non)identicality between ‘body’ and ‘mind.’ The hegemony of analytico-referential epistemologies throughout the modern era in North Atlantic cultures would seem to have prevented appreciation of this distinctive approach to mind-body issues.
