Look into The Depths within Yourself and Find the Outside World": The Contribution of Rudolf Steiner’s Monistic Philosophy to Psychoanalytic Conceptualization. In D. Lemberger (Ed.), Psychoanalytic Investigations in Philosophy; An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Current Existential Challenges

This paper presents a conceptual dialogue between Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and psychoanalytic thinking. Steiner (1861-1925) is mainly known as the founder of anthroposophy and the educational system based upon it, but the scope of his conceptual paradigm is much wider: The monism of his philosophical framework offers an alternative to the fissure – implied by Cartesian and Kantian dualism – between the human subject and the world. The paper argues that the dialogue between Steiner’s philosophy and psychoanalysis enriches both disciplines: it establishes a philosophical substrate for conceptualizing interpersonal processes that is lacking in psychoanalysis, while providing Steiner’s monistic framework with a substrate for therapeutic practice. In creating and examining this interdisciplinary dialogue, the paper uses methodological concepts that relate to the dialogical nature of interpretation and understanding: Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”; Wittgenstein’s “language-games”; and the concept of “worldview” (Weltanschauung) – as it is construed, differentially, by Wittgenstein and Steiner. Utilizing three concepts that represent different psychoanalytic schools – “projective identification,” “transitional space,” and “self-object”/“selfobject” – the paper examines the shared language that may emerge through the dialogue between the psychoanalytic theorizations of Klein, Winnicott and Kohut, and the philosophy of Steiner.