Abstract

Psychoanalysis is traditionally concerned with how and why the past influences our lives through obtruding itself into the present. The precise nature of that influence has been much debated, and questions have been raised regarding the extent to which the past is explanatory and its recovery mutative, or whether, indeed, there is any genuine relationship between what happens in analysis and what happened in the past. ;This study responds to such concerns by examining the conceptualization of the past in psychoanalytic discourse. The argument is advanced that the psychoanalytic past is constructed in a variety of theoretical and practical contexts--and that there is therefore a plurality of psychoanalytic pasts, and that these pasts may be said to exhibit, with respect to one another, distinctive and divergent rationalities. Moreover, it is an important claim of this study that much confusion in psychoanalytic argument follows from the failure to recognize the conceptual complexity of the past, particularly the complexity that is engendered by the scientific, historical and practical constructions of the past. ;In advancing the argument that psychoanalytic understanding is more perspicuous when it acknowledges and exploits the multiple versions of the past at its disposal, this study also illustrates and supports the thesis of pluralism in psychoanalysis. According to that thesis, the exclusivist and totalist claims of hermeneutic and scientific psychoanalysis must be rejected, for the metatheoretical task is no longer to unify psychoanalysis into a homogeneous discourse, but rather to ascertain the conditions under which each mode of discourse is applicable and appropriate. ;In summary, this study is a nonempirical inquiry which offers an explication of the conceptual and presuppositional contexts of competing modes of psychoanalytic understanding. A pluralist model of psychoanalytic discourse is articulated and defended, and three versions of the psychoanalytic past are brought into view , and the relationships between or among them are explored and elucidated