Psychoanalysis and the tragic sense of life

Abstract

In this paper, psychoanalysis is compared to a phenomenological theory of tragedy in which tragedy is understood as a mode of viewing life that insists on a balance being maintained between human striving for rational understanding and the acceptance of certain irreducibly irrational elements of human experience. Many of the underlying assumptions of psychoanalysis are found to correspond closely to those of the tragic vision of life: the commitment to the search for truth and the understanding of individual experience, paired with a recognition of the inherent limitations of that search and the inevitable relativity of those truths; the belief in the possibility and importance of meaningful individual action without any avoidance of the powerfully determining influence of personal history, prehistory, and intrapsychic structure; the focus on the irreversibly forward flow of time, and the resultant reality of loss that is an absolute dimension of the very process of living. These issues are explored with particular attention to the roles of transference, repressed endopsychic structure, and termination within the psychoanalytic process.