Abstract

Psychoanalysis regards many previously inexplicable phenomena as wish?fulfilments, which have meaning inasmuch as they express the person's wishes or affects. This might appear to make such psychoanalytic explanations rather like ordinary explanations of conduct and to enlarge the area of intentional and possibly that of responsible behavior. But a critique of these psychoanalytic accounts will show that they are very unlike accounts in terms of ordinary notions of fulfilling or expressing wishes and that the psychoanalytic concept of wish?fulfilment differs sufficiently from the ordinary one for it to be difficult to determine how to test psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning wish?fulfilment by merely considering the way in which we assess claims utilizing the ordinary notion. In fact, such a critique will show that for a certain type of claim regarding wish?fulfilments, psychoanalysts have not indicated ways of confirming or disconfirming such claims ? in the sense that they have not shown how to find any evidence which would support these claims to a higher degree than contrary or contradictory claims. After offering the first part of this critique, which is a comparison of psychoanalytic and ordinary notions of fulfilling and expressing wishes, some considerations concerning a second part of the critique are presented regarding the connection between the construct of psychic energy and that of wish?fulfilment