RESEARCH PROJECT 1
Existentialism and psychoanalysis are typically thought of as polar opposites. Existentialist philosophy portrays us as radically free. Psychoanalysis is usually thought of as wedded to a deterministic drive theory. Existential therapy has been associated with a style of supportive interaction between therapist and client; in contrast, psychoanalysis has the caricature of a cold and detached relationship between doctor and patient. In fact, neither portrait holds up. However, existentialism can provide a defensible philosophical basis for psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic technique.

The paradigmatic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre presents his  existential psychoanalysis as a rival to the classical psychoanalysis of Freud. Charles Hanley prefers Freud to Sartre. Betty Cannon prefers Sartre to Freud. Irvin Yalom likes them both, and he synthesizes them in an intelligent way. The project explores Sartre's existential phenomenology, and critically analyzes classical psychoanalysis from an existential perspective including the doctrine of abstention as well as transference. It also explains classical psychoanalytic technique in terms of existentialist theory, and classical theory in light of Freud's hidden commitment to the thesis of intentionality, which is the idea that mental life is purposeful through and through.

A key problem with psychoanalytic theory is that it so routinely utilizes terminology which encourages us to think in terms of causality and the reifying of mental terminology that we treat human actions as if they were the passive consequences of psychological forces and the self as if it were a thing. For example, the language of "repressing mental contents" into "the unconscious" with various "defense mechanisms" can be better cast in terms of purposeful self-deception. The causal and mechanistic language of psychoanalysis gets tangled with a host of ideas left over from Descartes. The key idea notion here, taken from Gilbert Ryle's philosophical work into the nature of mind, is that what counts as "self" is "flexible" from one linguistic context to another. This provides a central thesis of the research and a key to reconciling psychoanalytic theory with an existentialist foundation. Additional sub-projects include criticism of the commitment of the various social sciences to a misplaced causal perspective.

Additional research questions concern the pivotal role Melanie Klein played in providing a link between the hydraulic-deterministic model and later relational models of analysis. An overall analysis of object relations theory is considered, including questions about the phantasy life of infants and both masculine and feminine perversions of sex roles.