Premium
Containment and ‘rational health’: Moran and psychoanalysis
Author(s) -
Harcourt Edward
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/ejop.12316
Subject(s) - transparency (behavior) , psychoanalytic theory , norm (philosophy) , containment (computer programming) , psychology , epistemology , law and economics , positive economics , sociology , psychoanalysis , law , political science , economics , philosophy , computer science , programming language
The paper focuses on Richard Moran's account (in Authority and Estrangement ) of the distinction between attitudes that meet, and alternatively fail to meet, his transparency criterion for what he calls rational health, and compare this with the psychoanalytic distinction between contained and uncontained states of mind. On the face of it, Moran's distinction appears to be a useful theoretical deepening of the psychoanalytic distinction. On closer examination, however, it appears that (a) rational health is a more demanding standard than containment, so the rationally unhealthy contains much that is mentally (quite) healthy; and (b) more seriously, some states that meet the “transparency” condition are manifestly mentally unhealthy. So transparency needs to be supplemented by an independently understood notion of containment to approach a realistic norm of mental health/ill health.