The Logics of the Mental: On Carlos E. Caorsi, Ensayos de filosofía del psicoanálisis

Abstract

Psychoanalysis emerged, towards the end of the 19th century, as a scientific theory that attempts to explain the psychic apparatus and as a form of psychotherapy that is an application of it. Since then, its metapsychology and its intervention techniques have changed a lot, especially as a consequence of the permanent contrast with clinical evidence. In many cases, however, its epistemology and its philosophy of mind remain indebted to the theoretical assumptions with which it was born. That is doubly negative. On the one hand, because that nineteenth-century epistemology is usually committed to forms of physicalism and reductivism that are at least debatable and that have consequences regarding its conception of the mental. On the other hand, because it does not facilitate its integration with the current philosophy of mind. In this text I intend to review and comment on some of the theses of Carlos Caorsi’s book, in order to show the need for greater dialogue between psychoanalysis and philosophy, concentrating above all on the ontology of the mental that Freud could have presupposed and on Caorsi’s thesis on the logical systems that would underlie the psychic systems of the first Freudian topic.