Psychoanalysis: A Form of Life?

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to consider the suggestion, made in an unpublished paper by Peter Hobson, a psychoanalytic colleague, that psychoanalysis is a form of life. Hobson is impressed by the peculiarity of psychoanalytic thinking, by its specialness, by the fact that its concepts are embedded in a system of practices and beliefs such that an outsider to all this may be unable to understand what the analyst says, whether to his patient or to another analyst. Hobson uses Wittgenstein's notion of a form of life to refer to this system of practices and beliefs, but he does not criticize or examine the notion itself.