Therapy and conflict. Between pragmatism and psychoanalysis. Introduction to the Symposium

The history of the relationship between pragmatism and psychoanalysis is both complex and fragmentary. On the pragmatist side, the engagement with Sigmund Freud’s thought – and with the psychoanalytic tradition more generally – tends to be cursory, nonlinear, and at times slightly adversarial. For instance, William James notoriously rejects the unconscious as a concept and develops a different theory of the subconscious. Similarly, Charles S. Peirce frequently refers to the unconscious dimension of the mind, although he does so without referring to psychoanalysis. By contrast, both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey discuss the commonalities and differences between their own perspectives and the psychoanalytic one, but they fall short of doing so in detail. On the psychoanalytic side, the encounters are even more infrequent, with the exception of the pragmatist imprint in Harry Stack Sullivan’s work and the extensive references to William James in Carl Gustav Jung’s work. In some cases, pragmatists have been (wrongfully) accused by psychoanalysts of defending a naive – or at least overly optimistic – picture of the human condition.