Psychoanalysis and the Workings of the Mind: An Essay in Honor of Fred Pine

ABSTRACT

This paper is a contribution to a special section in honor of Fred Pine. After briefly describing my personal relationship with Fred, I discuss some issues in which our perspectives converge. These issues include the pluralism of different psychoanalytic schools, the possibility of a unified psychoanalytic theory, the use of experience-near interpretation, and the importance of subjective experience. I then summarize a proposal for a revamping of some fundamental concepts and formulations of classical theory, including the concepts of unconscious mental contents and the dynamic unconscious, in order to render them more faithful to lived experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Pluralism
• ego psychology
• subjective experience
• interpretation
• corrective emotional experience
• unconscious mental contents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One can also describe this central tension in terms of person versus organism (Rubinstein [1977] 1997), hermeneutics versus science (Strenger 1989), clinical theory versus metapsychology (Gill and Holzman 1975), and personal versus subpersonal (Dennett 1991, 1997).

2. It is noteworthy that with the exception of Freud’s (1900) early reference to hunger in the context of describing the development of the reality principle, his discussion of the motivational significance of the pleasure principle is primarily concerned not with vital needs, but virtually always, with infantile instinctual wishes, drives, impulses, and desires that need to be repudiated and renounced.

3. The notion that we are lived by our id entails a confusion of levels of discourse. As noted above, whereas instinctual drives may exert a causal influence, the factors that motivate our actions are proximal desires, wants, and wishes.

4. It is worth noting that there is not a single entry in the Index to “unconscious” in the 1985 book. It is also worth noting that what some may view as a problematic lacuna in no way compromises the insights and value of Pine’s observations and formulations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morris Eagle

Morris N. Eagle, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Adelphi University School of Psychology and a Faculty member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) in Los Angeles He is a recipient of the Sigourney Award, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of the Board of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals. He is the author or editor of eight books, and author of more than 150 journal articles and chapters in edited books. His most recent book, Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology was published in 2022. His new book, titled Subjective Experience: Its Fate in Psychology, Psychoanalysis, & Psychoanalysis, will appear in 2024.