ABSTRACT
As a long-time practitioner of both psychoanalysis and psychiatry, I recently had the unhappy realization that each of these fields has changed—and, in my opinion, not for the better. Over the thirty years of my career, psychoanalysis has become more marginalized, and psychiatry has become medicalized. This has led to an uncomfortable puzzle. I found serious cause to wonder: Just what is it that constitutes psychology? Of what does it consist? And what level is the psychological level? Is there something in the study of the mind over and above, or even just different from, a more complete understanding of the brain? Or pursuing this question in an opposite direction, is there anything psychologically distinct from manifest behavior? 1 In other words, what is the ontology of the mental? What is the ontology of psychology?
