Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Reason and Its Practical Dimension

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the scientific mind in its practical dimension. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, Bachelard deployed his own method to analyze the scientific unconscious, populated by epistemological obstacles inhibiting scientific cognition. As this article seeks to demonstrate, Bachelard’s psychoanalysis aims to purify, and thereby streamline the cognitive mind on two levels: individual and historical. Bachelard’s methodological experiment, transferring psychoanalysis into the spheres of the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science, turns out to be, at the same time, an instance of the architecture of a scientific mind, a polemic with cognitive realism and empiricism, and a postulate of analytical therapy in the field of cognition.