Peirce, Semiotics, and Psychoanalysis

"The ideas of Peirce... illuminate matters at the center of contemporary psychoanalysis -- the coherence of the human subject, the role of language in the generation of meaning, the question of truth, the nature of intersubjectivity, the structure of dialogue, the ongoing obscurity of unconscious processes, the ethical link between speech and action, the relation of the individual to the community." -- from the Preface

The slow and steady rise of the reputation of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) has coincided with a greater appreciation for his work in semiotics. Once thought to be primarily a logician and pragmatist, he is now internationally honored as a pioneer theorist about how minds think with signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. Peirce's ideas about semiotics provide exactly the kind of representational theory that Freud's system lacks, proposing a thorough recasting of psychoanalytic thinking which rejoins idea and affect, self and other, thought and action, meaning and matter, inside and outside. The essays in this collection provide an introduction to Peirce and explore different implications of Peirce's theory of representation for psychoanalytic practice as well as for philosophical reflection.

John Muller is Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center. He is coeditor of The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (also available from Johns Hopkins University Press) and the author of Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce, and Lacan. Joseph Brent is the author of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.