Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Subject
…………………………………………..
I am writing
these notes to put psychoanalysis and Freud in the context of their cultural
background. I am doing this to show that the birth of psychoanalysis is a
historical event that has a rational explanation; it is a natural product of the
work of a chain of great philosophers and thinkers who gave us the Western
Civilization. Freud genius did not come as a surprise. He came to find an
already paved way to the nature of the human subject. It took him more than
half a century of focussed attention to the core of the human phenomenon to
leave us the elements and component of a theory of that subject. Both the
incremental advancement of philosophy and its basic discovery of the duality of
the human subject, and Freud’s discovery of the hidden import of that duality
deserve admiration and appreciation. Yet, we psychoanalysts ended up
idealization both psychoanalysis and Freud. Idealizing psychoanalysis and Freud
is preventing us from truly appreciating them both, and preventing us from
going ahead to unfold their potentials further. We are just spellbound.
Idealizing
and idealization are features of the adolescents’ attempts at breaking away from
the simplistic identification with the parents,by looking for something
bigger, better, and maybe also more glamorous. But adolescence is also a stage
in development that has to come to an end one day. We must stop idealizing our
heritage, or recreating it -presumably- in new schools of psychoanalysis. We should
take the step to expound the potentials
of psychoanalysis to complete Freud’s project: a theory of the human subject.
----------------------------------------------
1. Idealizing
and Idealization in Psychoanalysis
Several
distinguished psychoanalysts of the old generation (even older than my
generation) have talked in the past about the phenomena of idealization in
psychoanalysis and underscored its undesirable effect on learning, training, practicing,
and even relationships between psychoanalyst in their societies and institutes.
Lately, in recent heated discussions of the issue of training, the subject of idealization
was brought back to attention, but without any practical solution to its
pernicious results. Following some of those debates made me shift my attention
from the impact of idealization on psychoanalysis to its causes, and maybe its
origin in psychoanalysis.
In every
profession, discipline, even musical enterprises, and any general human
activity we encounter people whose achievements brought them and justified some
distinction and idealization. Psychoanalysis is not different in that regard, but
in psychoanalysis, idealization is not clearly product of achievement. Personal
analysts and supervisors, whatever their competence, are idealized by the
candidates, who carry their idealization forever. Idealization in
psychoanalysis is a way of expressing loyalty, but it has another peculiar
attribute. Analysts act almost as if they do not know how to relate to each
other or to their elders outside some sort of shared idealization. They exchange
loyalties and idealizations, almost as if they are unable to live a life
without idealized figures in it. Loyalty and idealization are adolescent
phenomena. After identifying with the parents, as a means to acquiring an
identity, the adolescent turns around to find someone bigger, better, idealized
by others to identify with. Am I saying that psychoanalysts lack maturity? Yes,
I am saying that ‘not as insult’ but as phenomenon we inherited from our
predecessors. The history of psychoanalysis is a history of loyalties and
fights based on disagreements about loyalties and idealizations.
We have to remind ourselves that we have
learned from psychoanalysis that idealization originally belong to the realm of
defense mechanisms. Idealization is originally bestowing the most desirable qualities
on a person by projection, then repossessing them by introjection to make them
ours; thus, we become as great as our idol. We see that clearer in ideological
issue: Moslems bestow a remarkable amount of great qualities on the prophet
Mohammad, as a step to pronounce Moslems the best people earth, etc., on earth.
The most remarkable feature in idealization is in its negative form. too When
people see their enemies as ideally bad (by projection too) thus they become
the ideal best with little ‘shame’. The
mechanism of idealization would last longer, and distort reality most if the people
who are using it are a closed society. The closed society where idealization is
rife does not accept becoming open, because being special is a prerequisite for
idealization to work. And that is nature of the psychoanalytic community. We
are special people, who have ownership of something special, bequeathed on us
by an unusual man. We are the sons and daughters of an unusual man and we should maintain the belief in that
story (myth).
Freud knew about that trick early when he accepted
and blessed the secrete committee. However, because the committee had to
disband a new closed community had to replace it: it was the IPA supplied by the products of the
training system ( the system of institute training). Training has become a trap
for young people who want to learn psychoanalysis. It (as an authoritative establishment)
gives the candidates the message that they are special, because they will be
members of a special group of professionals, trained by special people (who
would check the validity of that), and will belong to that closed community,
which is the descendant the genius Freud. Idealizing Freud-and maybe few of his
disciples) is a must.
However, all the confirmations of the harmful
system of believes we instilled in the candidates have not succeeded in curtailing
the older generation of analysts from encouraging idealization to even
themselves. However, when Freud and psychoanalysis
are put within their true background we will all realize that psychoanalysis
and Freud are preceded by great works of great thinkers and they could and
should be seen in that light. We will
see the real greatness of Freud and his discover with any idealization needed.
For reasons that have been
abundantly written about and discussed extensively, Freud was and still is held
in high esteem in psychoanalytic circles and to an extent in Western Culture as
whole (I use culture here instead of civilization because psychoanalysis is
more part of the culture of that
civilization, which is more encompassing
than just having a cultural content).
Regrettably, the idealization of Freud by professional psychoanalysts is based
on judging his creation of psychoanalysis as an act of personal genius and
making his contribution to Western Culture look like an unplanned accidental
act of a chance. Notwithstanding, Freud ‘psychoanalysis’ would lose its most
important value if it not seen within the more encompassing context of his
culture and not within the limited context of the genius of a person. For that reason,
it was viewed, from time to time, as an event that could be bypassed, or a
discovery that could be surpassed by better ones. Those attitudes prevailed
serval times over the years, both outside the filed of clinical psychoanalysis
and inside it, but eventually were corrected fast. The problem got complicated whenever
psychoanalysts espoused that attitude, because it meant that they did not
understand what Freud’s achievement really was. When analysts limit their
understanding of psychoanalysis to a moment of genius by Freud or what it
offered them clinically, this means they could not reach a true conception of
psychoanalysis as a founding part of the culture they live by and within. Roudinesco
(2016) rightly said that “From the onset, Freud sought to make it
[psychoanalysis]a full- fledged system of thought, one that could be conveyed
by a movement of which he could be not the leader but the master.” Missing
this point (even if Freud has encouraged that) made analysts see psychoanalysis
without or in isolation of its ‘comprehensive’ background; a gesture that
allowed them to maintained their contentment with idealizing its creator. In
other words, psychoanalysis separate from its background, which is the Western Culture
as whole, is just a bright discovery that was glaring sometime ago but needs
continuous polishing all the time. It will also mean that Freud was merely a
bright physician-thinker who showed some distinction in his time; it is enough
to declare our loyalty to him.
There are four questions to ask:
could psychoanalysis have been discovered in the Acadian or the Pharaonic
cultures? Why it did it not? Could some genius of the scholastic era have
discovered psychoanalysis in the thirteenth century? Why not?
The cultural
context of Psychoanalysis and Freud:
Western Civilization is the latest after
seven others that flourished before. It is also the only one that seems to
become universal and not limited the geographically like the other seven (Spengler,1932),
The cultures prior to the Western Culture had their own main preoccupation,
ranging from state building, order and law, religion and morality, even
thinking and logic. Those cultural efforts led-in a natural way- to the human
subject; the benefactor of the novel initiatives and the initiator of the ideas
inherent in their achievements and engendered their establishment. However,
there was a need for a bridge between civilizations that dealt for thousands of
years with the practical and material needs of its subjects. There was a very
significant cultural bridge between the old cultures and the Western one embedded
in the Greco-Roman culture. The Greco-Roman culture
could be considered the precursor of the Western culture. It was a period of very
extensive elaboration of mythology where the events looked like ‘history’ of
real events and peoples. The subject was embryonic in those myths and was
showing his identity in sly ways. Therefore, once the subject matured enough in
those myths and became the master (victim) of those remarkable events the
Western culture identified its subject matter. It was a wakeup call. Humans reached the point where they had to take a daring step toward
their own exitance. The Western culture turned its attention to the human subject. Without any helpful hints
from the former cultures to formulate rational questions about ourselves, and
with the heavy burden of previously specious religious notions about our
creation, Western thinkers approached the human subject from a very intelligent
angle: could we use the same attitude we take in understanding the things around
us in understanding ourselves? There was no instant answer but there was a
reaction that came from philosophy.
The discovery
of the “subject” in the Western Culture requires examining the progression of its
philosophical thinking, which in this particular culture started by something
physical (the Heliocentric theory of the ‘universe’ conception), in contrast
with the mythologies and spiritualities of its beginnings. That theory put the
human subject in a new perspective: his relative existence to every other
existence. Thus, the unique and privileged status as God’s favourite creation,
which he enjoyed before, was relegated to being relative to the rest of the
other ontological entities around him. Better, by relegating earth to only a
planet rotating the around a star revealed the human subject as an object of
inquiry like every thing else. However, we have to be careful in reviewing the
philosophical thinking of the culture about the subject, because we could
overlook a silent distorting influence in that matter. We tend to understand
relations, attributes, the implied and values not as they were perceived in the
past, but as they mean to us now.
During the
medieval era, the Western European subject had a communal sense of identity,
believing that people were entities that are the property of God and the
church. Medieval Western Europeans were unable to recognize or consider a
latent “something” in themselves, or a thinking subject within them, irrespective
of class or status. Their religious orientation and ethnic affiliations
functioned as a barrier between them and any possible subjectival (subjective)
knowledge, and also between them and their interiority. They had no sense of
subjectivity, or at least individuation was not crucial to their social
functioning. The subject was his ‘external entity’, belonged to, and with, the
other external entities. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe went
through great political, religious, and social changes, specifically a
renaissance of the Greek traditions of thinking. The subject was emancipated
from the feudal system, entered the system of the city and the state, and
became a citizen. West Europeans faced, for the first time, the autonomy of the
subject’s mind, and the responsibility that came with it. They also faced the
idea of being accountable for their acts, which was part of the subject
(subjectival) understanding of the world. It was demanded of them to use their
reason to know, rather than accepting religious dogmatized knowledge without
giving it their own seal of approval. They came from a world where everything
was understood (and understandable) and where the nature of things was there in
the words that denoted them to a changing world. Words that seemed to emanate
from the things they denoted and givens, were discovered to be a human option.
People could not believe anymore in the intrinsic link between words and
things, things and meanings. They had to rely less on finding truth (reality) in
the words spoken. They had to examine matters by themselves; not rely on the
word of God or the priest. They faced a new type of problem that demanded that
they find the semblance between things and their signs (words), and to reveal
the correct analogy between things, words, and meanings. The people of the
Renaissance had to make up their own minds and trust those who made up their own minds and their own judgment.
The subject had
become the only source of certainty about a world that emerged from the fog of
collectiveness. A shift of that nature led, in the sixteenth century, to the
problem of uncertainty and the quest for certainty: How could a subject believe
in his judgment? The subjectivity of the sixteenth century was that of a
subject who is equipped to examine the world in order to make certain of it. In
other words, the subject was faced with signs that spoke about something that
was supposed to be dormant in those signs. How could things mean what they
believed them to mean? How could the human subject deal with his doubt? In 1637
Descartes made doubt itself the evidence of and the reference to the existence
of “certainty.” The certain thing, in that case, was the doubting subject
himself, who showed his independence of his world. The subject had to deal with
that obscurity and make sure of his certainty. After several centuries of
examining the world around us for the first time as operating ontological
entities that have their separate qualifications and require separate examinations,
the human subject was eventually discovered as one of those ontological
entities that need examining. He was considered before from the religious and
scholastic points of view. It was unavoidable that he was going to be seen as
an existence that is radically distinguishable from the rest of the ontological
entities, because of his quality of consciousness, which existed only in part
in the other entities.
We can consider
Descartes the first thinker who opened to door for thinking, and thinking about
“Man” in particular as an object of thinking. Certainty in that regard seemed made
certainty about the human subject a problem? The problem and the issue in this
angle of looking at the human subject is a basic divide between thinker and
thinking: I think (awareness of my presence) attest to my being (I am). Descartes,
unintentionally, uncovered the impossibility of considering the human subject
an ontological entity: he is partially and entity (feeling, thinking, desiring,
etc.) and partially another entity of consciousness of his first entity. The Cartesian Cogito, the first
pronouncement of the exitance of the subject, revealed his implicit duality.
The Cartesian duality
in the seventeenth century represented a major step toward a gradual
discovering of the subject and the eventual facing of an impasse: something is
missing in this duality and without it the search stops dead. It is important
to underline two points that are likely to be missed in a condensed review of
Western thought about the subject’s duality: (a) The philosophers who thought
about this duality were not, at the time, cognizant that their significant
insights were links in a developmental chain leading to a major very important
puzzlement. Their insights were incremental advancements toward an impasse that
required a new intuition about the link between antithetical elements in that
duality. The duality of the subject seemed, at first glance, an ill-advised
notion, yet, it came as a natural result of finding out the fused identity with
its consciousness. Duality was fruitful and a necessary approach (method) to
studying the puzzling natur of human subject. The current anti-dualistic views
build their arguments on the arguments that were previously identified and
considered without solution. Yet, they were very revealing arguments used by
Damasio (1994) later to support his view of the duality of subject as the way
to approach him.
The subject moved from the
certainty of the unity of signs and things to the semblance between intent and
its meaning. He had to find a connection between the given sign and what to
figure out about it. He had to interpret the world where he found himself in its
centre. Foucault (1970) expressed the new demand on the subject this way: “To
know must therefore be to interpret: to find a way from the visible mark to that
which is being said and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken
speech, dormant within things” (p. 32). The seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed radical changes in the quest for certainty. Language too
was about to receive a blow that would move it from being the tool of certainty
to being, in itself, a subject of doubt. It became clear that language acted
like a veil between the subject and the world. The signs were linguistic
representations of things, which in turn had presence only in language; things
to the subject were simply and only representations. The sign, the word, could
be close to or distant from the thing it represented, just as the link between
a word and the thing it denoted was found to be arbitrary; yet that
arbitrariness did not increase or decrease the value of the sign. The sign
combined two aspects: the thing it connotes and represent that thing; its
nature was to stimulate the first by means of the second. “Language is simply
the representation of words” (Foucault, 1970, p. 209).
In the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, duality became the
attribute and the foundation of thought. In the late eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth, the link between the representation (the signifier)
and the represented (the signified) became probable, possible, arguable and arbitraray; thinkers challenged
previously established knowledge and refused categorical thinking. Knowledge
was no longer there in the representation but was located instead in its
reconstructed interpretation. The gradual awareness of the linguistic veil
between the subject and nature (even human nature) pushed the frontier of
knowledge to the nature of the link between the signified and signifier.
Awareness of the relationship between representation and the represented that
interprets it presented the thinkers of the time with a very challenging
problem. Meaning, which is implicitly
dormant in that separateness, emerged as the essence of knowledge. Thus, it
was concluded that representation also hides, camouflages, and deceives. The
world, in which language conceals as much as it reveals, had become an arena
for dissembled meanings that demanded unveiling, without which the
representation remained silent (speechless). However, the gap between the
representation and the represented was thought to be bridgeable by deduction; logical
answers to reasonable questions. understanding. Still, meaning proved to be
elusive and shifting in the best deductive thinking.
In the
nineteenth century, a major change happened when it was realized that it was
not enough to use the act of interpretation to remove obscurity; we have to
deconstruct the way obscurity was constructed in the first place, in order to
uncover the meaning of the interpretation. Two major shifts evolved: (a) a
search for the way the representation is linked to what it represents and (b)
the treatment of language as a subject of investigation and not just the tool
of investigation. The represented was no longer considered naturally linked to
its representation; it was no longer assumed that words and things are
organically connected. The main feature of that period was the gradual shift
from interpreting the representation to deconstructing it, as the act that
leads to finding meanings. This shift coincided with a rebellion against
“reason” (neoclassicism) and the birth of the romantic movement. Interpretations
became conjectural certainties, certainties of transient nature. A new type of
doubt emerged: it was not a doubt about the subject’s reason, but doubt that
reason alone is enough to reach understanding. The romantics were intrigued by
the way feelings and emotions could make people subjective, unreasonable, and
neglectful of physical reality, yet interestingly, in spite of all that, truer
to themselves, so long as they let their emotionality and its reconstructive
power interpret the world of signs. The duality between representation and the
represented moved from outside to inside, becoming an internal duality between
a rational subject and an irrational subject, between the subject who
contributed meaning to the world and the subject who was self-deceptive and
lost this meaning.
The Cartesian Cogito released
the Genie from its captivity. It came out as a long-denied duality that demands
recognition. It was not a manageable Genie;
it required a great deal of effort to tame it.My next part of this post (in two weeks) will be From the Duality of the subject to the Counterpart
No comments:
Post a Comment