KAROL WOJTYŁA, EDITH STEIN, AND THE FOUNDATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.

The article examines the epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis through the perspectives of Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II), Edith Stein, and the early work of Sigmund Freud. It highlights Freud’s initial materialist ambitions to reduce psychological phenomena to bodily processes, which gave way to his discovery of the unconscious—a realm neither purely bodily nor fully spiritual. Drawing on phenomenology, particularly Edith Stein’s and Husserl’s work, the article argues for the methodological autonomy of psychology and psychoanalysis from natural sciences, emphasizing the role of formal and final causality in understanding human experience. Wojtyla’s philosophical anthropology is presented as integrating reason, emotion, and values, offering a framework that explains sublimation and the formation of subjectivity consistent with Thomistic thought on the soul as “forma corporis” (the form of the body). This approach suggests a foundation for psychoanalysis “iuxta propria principia” (according to its own principles), bridging clinical practice and philosophical insight without reducing psychoanalysis to positivist science. [Extracted from the article]