Wish-fulfilment in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

'At times Pataki takes his argument into very difficult terrain, which presents a challenge to someone, like this reviewer, with little formal philosophical training. This book will appeal more to the philosophers than the psychoanalysts, and yet I think there are real potential rewards for the psychoanalyst willing to make the effort to follow Pataki’s argument. Not the least of these rewards is an opportunity to strengthen one’s ‘conceptual analysis muscle’, in the course of the exercise! ... Pataki has attempted an interpenetration of psychoanalytic and philosophical understandings without deterioration on either side, and in this I think he has largely succeeded.' - Paul Schimmel in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2015 'some of the richest material in the book comes when Pataki is demonstrating the explanatory payoffs of his theory of wish-fulfillment. Indeed, one of the benefits of Pataki's account is that it can illuminate a much wider range of phenomena than is possible if wish-fulfillment is deflated to be a purely causal phenomenon. In the second half of the book Pataki goes on to apply his theory to delusion and self-deception, the psychological origins of religious belief, creative writing, and the insanity defense in jurisprudence. Indeed, it may be that the light that Pataki's theory is able to cast on a wide range of psychological and cultural phenomena leads the reader to bite the bullet and accept that agency goes much deeper than we have traditionally thought to be the case. In any case, this is a deep and interesting book, and although it is in some ways unfashionable in the context of the contemporary literature it is nonetheless quite compelling in the way it presents the case for the centrality of wish-fulfillment in human mindedness.' - Andrew C. Sims, Deakin University, Australia, in Frontiers in Psychology, November 2014