The Practice of Wisdom: A Contribution to Clinical Philosophy

A general theory of treatment and cure of persons is proposed that might be called clinical philosophy, in contrast to clinical medicine, which concerns the treatment and cure of bodies.

Freud was more a philosopher than is apparent at first glance. He recognized that dreams were not the opposite of reality but transcended the distinction between reality and nonreality. In doing so, he discarded the distinction between truth and fiction and created a new reality that he called psychic reality. Thus the relationship between a psychoanalyst and an analysand can be regarded as a virtual one, it being really metaphorical and existing only within the context and in the service of the treatment.

Remembering is a repetition. Something happening in the present. If the memory is a thought, the thought remembered refers to something in the past that is not present, but when one remembers in the form of an emotion, one actually reexperiences that emotion in the present. These are so-called emotional memories. In the context of the psychoanalytic encounter, they are interpreted as transferences.