If philosophy is to carry out its task of clarification of the possibilities of
attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible thinking and living, then
it also needs to be aware of the forces that can subvert it, lest it be deflected
from its goal by irrational factors working in its own shadows.
—Eugene Webb

Introductory material

  • Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception. University of California Press, 2000.

  • Jonathan Lear, Freud. Routledge, 2015.

Further resources

  • St. Augustine, Confessions.

  • Richard Chessick, “The Silence of Socrates,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 58.4 (2004), pp. 406-419. Online.

  • J. M. Heaton, “Insight in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3.2 (1972), pp. 135-145.

  • Eliot Dole Hutchinson, “The Nature of Insight,” Psychiatry 77.3 (2014), pp. 215-229.

  • Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

  • Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living. Notre Dame Press, 2020.

  • Jonathan Lear, Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Harvard University Press, 2017.

  • _____, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Harvard University Press, 1999.

  • _____, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. Routledge, 2018.

  • _____, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1999.

  • Bernard Lonergan. Insight: An Essay in Human Understanding. University of Toronto Press, 1992.

  • _____, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight. University of Toronto Press, 1990.

  • Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge, 2004.

  • Donna Orange, Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies. Routledge, 2010.

  • Plato, Complete Works. Hackett, 1997. Especially Gorgias, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Charmides, and Alcibiades I.

  • Eric Voeglin, “Reason: The Classical Experience,” The Southern Review 10.2 (1974), pp. 237-264.

Depth Therapy & Philosophy