Abstract

The essay explores how a burgeoning field called Science and Technology Studies can influence contemporary psychoanalysis. Both rely upon principles of interpretation, hierarchical modeling, the complex relations between the present and the past, the nature of nonlinear causality, and the ways in which unique events are readily but mistakenly cast as generalizations. Specific ways in which psychoanalysis can respond to comparisons with STS are discussed. The description and features of context provides crucial substance for this interdisciplinary dialogue. Context is the opening through which varying clusters of processes and phenomena appear at different times and under different circumstances. Context is an arbiter of what both the analytic dyad and the STS historian construe as objective, correct, or the way things really are.

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