MAPPING ORDINARY IRRATIONALITY

The main concern of Part I is with the idea of explaining irrationality by positing a divided mind. Before getting on to that, however, it is necessary to set out the topic of irrationality as it figures in ordinary, pre-psychoanalytic thought. This will help to determine whether there is anything in ordinary psychology that invites such a manoeuvre.

There is a further reason for not simply starting the enquiry with a psychoanalytic case history. Psychoanalytic theory should not be made to seem to appear out of nowhere; as if it had evolved autonomously in response to problems of psychopathology whose existence can only ever be witnessed in the seclusion of the clinical hour. Looked at in that hermetic way, psychoanalytic theory is bound to seem forever strange, arbitrary and unpersuasive. A fundamental and central contention of this book is that, on the contrary, psychoanalytic theory lies in a direct line of descent from problems and strategies of explanation encountered and deployed in ordinary psychology – the form of explanation to which our everyday talk of people as believing, remembering, feeling and wanting commits us – and that it is with reference to these that its concepts should be understood and its claims to explanation measured.

It is consequently of prime importance to have a picture of the relation between ordinary psychology and irrational phenomena.