Tamas Pataki's (2014) “Wish-fulfillment in philosophy and psychoanalysis”

Frontiers in Psychology

Andrew C. Sims¹ 

关键词: wish-fulfillment;    intention;    agency;    commonsense psychology;    mechanism;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01378

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Wish-fulfillment is a psychoanalytic concept that applies to situations in which some agent with a frustrated desire represents the world as he would like it to be—rather than as it actually is—and in this manner pacifies the desire. This substitution by the agent of his phantasy for a veridical view of what is going on with him and the external world has been thought by psychodynamic theorists since Freud to explain a wide range of phenomena: the content of dreams, psychiatric delusion, religious practices, and so on. In this book Tamas Pataki gives a theory of wish-fulfillment which is meant to unify and explain a range of phenomena that does justice to the original explanatory scope of the concept, from neurosis and delusion to art and religion. Pataki's book shows up against the background of a tradition in analytic philosophy that is generally sympathetic to psychoanalytic ways of thinking about mindedness, and which deploys its resources in order to (i) better understand the patterns of explanation that are given in clinical practice, and the concepts that those explanations employ; and (ii) outline the necessary conditions on any such explanation—to determine what the mind must be like, if psychoanalytic explanation is cogent. One discovery that issues from this kind of analysis is that psychoanalysis constitutes an extension of ordinary psychological explanation. This was first comprehensively argued by Wollheim (1971) and his colleague Hopkins (1982), with later extension and qualifications of that argument by Gardner (1993) and Lacewing (2012).

【 授权许可】

CC BY