“Look into the Depths within Yourself and Find the Outside World”: The Contribution of Rudolf Steiner’s Monistic Philosophy to Psychoanalytic Conceptualization

This chapter 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 chapter 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 chapter 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 chapter examines the shared language that may emerge through the dialogue between the psychoanalytic theorizations of Klein, Winnicott, and Kohut, and the philosophy of Steiner.