PARTITION

It is often thought that irrationality shows the mind to be partitioned, or divided into parts. This chapter and the next discuss the idea that this description of the irrational person is more than an eliminable metaphor.

This topic deserves detailed treatment, for two reasons. One is that partitive explanation offers itself as a unitary, general solution to the problem of explaining irrationality – a proposal that it is evidently important to evaluate. The other is that psychoanalytic explanation is widely thought – mostly by its critics – to be a form of partitive explanation.

Since the claim that irrationality is associated with partition is conceptual, it predates, and can be made out independently from, the specific claims of psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, it is Freud who provides the modern paradigm of such a form of explanation. Sartre's discussion of psychoanalysis in Being and nothingness assumes that Freudian explanation is partitive, and he goes on to charge Freud with conceptual confusion. I leave until Part II all questions about the accuracy of Sartre's reading of psychoanalytic theory, in order to discuss on its own terms the model of explanation that Sartre identifies as a target; even if that model does not ultimately provide a correct conceptualisation of Freud's thinking, it has powerful attractions, and deserves to be considered in its own right. Claims made on its behalf by Davidson and Pears are scrutinised in the next chapter.