ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has its own internal hard problem, and it is one that is entirely internal to the discipline of psychology. It is the challenge to integrate the phenomena of human separateness and commonality. At its heart, even beyond its therapeutic application, psychoanalysis is a form of inquiry, a disciplined technique developed as a specific tool for allowing exploration of the hidden parts of a mind at work. It is a tool for knowledge, a tool that makes possible a unique way of knowing. Whatever the desire to extend psychoanalytic knowledge, the analyst’s clinical participation in another’s introspective journey is always primarily in the service of that patient. As we know, psychoanalysis is not a spectator sport. The analyst has many differing ways of coming to understand. One is conscious attention to unfolding associations. An undesired consequence of work done in a clinical laboratory is the tendency of psychoanalysis to pathologize life.
