Trump in Perspective: A Point of View

 Part One: Trump and Western Civilization

I am going to differ with some colleagues in regard to narcissism. Narcissism is the most unconscious condition in psychical life. In relation to Trump’s condition I suggest considering ‘self deception’. Self deception is part of character formation and is done consciously and leads to all sorts of forms; one of them self aggrandizement. The self-deceived person believes in his deceptions. I think, from watching Trump on TV he is way deep in self deception, and enticed his supporter to do the same and self deceive themselves.  

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Because this posting is controversial and will raise many eyebrows and objecting voices I will start by specifying three underlying ideas that are the basis of my argument. Thus, if you disagree with them you could save your effort and time by not reading the posting:

1.     Psychoanalysis has no theory of social phenomena (group and historical). Applying the psychodynamics of the individual on society (treating it as an individual) is misleading. As we look for the intrapsychical in the individual we should be looking for intra-social dynamics in society. However, I will try show that there is a certain similarity between the two processes shortly.

2.     It is also erroneous to use the diagnosis of a historical character to explain the historical events that he might have created (not even with Hitler). Historical characters are just agents and tools conceived and amplified by the society to fulfill a historical objective. Hitler alone would not have gave birth to the European Union and Israel.

3.     This last idea is the very basis of my posting: There are two links between psychoanalysis and social theories, particularly Marxism: A. All psychical and historical phenomena are products of dialectical interactions and not results of haphazard dynamics (psychopathology is the outcome of impeding the natural course of a dialectical course, and wars are the result of impeding the natural course of social evolution). B. All phenomena-individual or social- are ‘determined’, their causes are embedded within them, But reaching that determinism happens in the individual’s event by analysing it, and by rebuilding the social or the historical event from the preceding events. They are similar but work in opposite directions. We analyse a dream to find out how it was unconsciously structured, and use a historical event to restructure and understand a previous historical episode. The historical event of the Versailles treaty restructures all the vents that led to WWII.

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When Trump withdraw from the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation followed by withdrawing from the Paris agreement the reaction was ominous: The US was withdrawing from the international scene- not just as its leader for the last seven decades- but as the most significant country in the world, as her politicians liked to call her. This is happening now under a false conviction that the US has no replacement in that role, therefore the whole world will get into disarray and be forced to accommodate her to remain its leader. This is a foundational conviction of few million Americans; conviction, which as we will see later is historically logical but politically illogical.

The actual problem is that lately- at least since the Soviet Union (then) created a communist government in Afghanistan in1971, the world entered a phase of disarray that had and still have unimaginable consequences. The most important consequence is the birth of ISIS, which is just the tail end of those consequences. The sequence of those events is the intrasocial structure of the current global disarray. It is important to consider them in any understanding of what is happening in the US now. But, it is not within my ability to do that properly and it is of no interest to psychoanalysts. However, we can say that after jumping few decades ahead of its present, the US people elected a black president of an impressive CV and a list of great achievements during his presidency. Yet history proved to pay no attention to the importance of individual political leaders.  Eight years later millions of the US citizens regressed mush more than anyone would have expected and elected the antithesis of Obama; a man with a very shameful CV and a list of four bankruptcies attesting to his incompetence, and more.

What could have interfered with the natural dialectical process of progress in the US to elect Trump? Reconstructing the vents that led to that drastic interfering in history is very interesting and vital, but it has to be done by historians of a certain background.  Because I am a psychoanalyst and speaking mainly to psychoanalysts I will concentrate on one idea: Is Trump really an oddity in historical terms or is he a logical choice for the moment? Remember, there is no chance for escaping historical determinism.

Trump’s shenanigans, especially when he caused the US to lose its long-accepted role as the leader of the world, even by its adversaries, reminded me of two books; one I read in the early 1960, and one I just finished few weeks ago. The first is a book written by a German philosopher (Spingler) which he published in 1922 (seventeen years before WWII; the other is by Richard Haass, published in 2017. The first is about “The Decline of the West” and the second is about the contemporary disarray of our world.

Spingler proposed that the history of humanity went through eight civilizations. Although his specification of those civilizations could be debated, his notion that civilisation moved from the east to the west in a consistent geographical sequence is easy to accept. According to him, and common sense, the Western Civilisation, which we are part of now, is the most recent and the one susceptible to decline. Although I do not remember his argument about its decline and what would replace it when this is done, it still kept me thinking about that issue. Nowadays when we see the world’s condition and a man like Trump becoming president of the leader nation of most of the world, one has to ask: is this the end of the Western Civilization (I do not mean that in terms physical destruction) or could this be the birth of the replacement of that civilizations?

To answer this complex question, I find some leading ideas in Haass’s book entitled “A World in Disarray”. As a political analyst, he gives a detailed reconstruction of the recent events that could give us an answer to the question: Is Trump the end of something or the beginning of something. I want to underline the fact that historical characters are not the initiator of change but merely products of change.

The gist of Haass’s book is world order, how it is reached and how it is lost. He argues that after a world’s crisis happens and resolved - mostly by war-, the victors reach agreements that decides the relationships amongst themselves and with the vanquished. He concludes from the beginning of his book that world’s order that was reached after signing the armistice of WWII and the surrender of Japan is now in disarray. The rest of the book makes an anatomy of the current situation showing how in every corner of the world this order is collapsing. This point of view validated Spengler’s idea of the collapse of the west. Yet, there are few things that points at a different picture. First, the nuclear deterrent is preventing any thought about solving the problem by war as used to happen before. Second, a significant part of the world does not believe much anymore in nationalism and leans toward globalization. Third, the globalization movement has gained independence of governmental control and governments are no longer able to decide anything about commitments and allegiances. (notice what Trump wants to take the US to). Everything now points at the birth of a new civilization that is going to replace the Western Civilization: a global civilization. Europe is showing that this civilization has been in the making for few decades (See Fisk: The European Dream). Obama as a politician was quite open and accepting in that new order (push for regional and international agreements). Contrary to Trump he wanted the West to link with the East not on Geopolitical basis but on trade cooperation. Trump revealed shameful ignorance of international affairs (intellectual) and wanted to undo all that progress which thw hole world is heading for.   

 The most amazing thing in this whole matter is how the world was already ready to moving from the primitive concept of Western Civilization to Global Civilization. The moment Trump renounced the US’s allegiance to regional alliances those alliances discounted the US, and in the same day showing that they were open for new alliances with China and give the hints that Russia will be next.  There is something of interest to even the already bored reader of this posting. We have works describing in detail the rise and fall of empires, nations, civilizations etc. But we cannot get from them the real feel of living the events of the fall of those institutions or the birth of the new ones. But here we are at the very moments of an old civilizations falling and a new one rising. It tells us something very significant about a possible psychoanalytic theory of social events.

In clinical psychoanalysis, we work through a pathological component for weeks and months without a comprehensive understanding of the matter, and unexpectedly a dream, a slip of the tongue, or a minor acting out would reveal the unconscious structure of that component and put the working through in frame. Analysis leads to the unconscious. In social events, we witness historical or social events and understand each separately but without being able to predict what they are leading to. Then comes an event and surprisingly all what we understood before takes a new meaning. All the events that were happening in the cold war took a new meaning as a surprise. All the events from Afghanistan in 1979 till now with the lection of Trump seems to be interconnected and nothing happened haphazardly. those events which made no sense when they happened could explain to us how after the election of Obama the US elected Trump. A psychoanalytic theory of social and historical events has to be about discovering “History’s unconscious”. It has to be a theory of getting meaning from historical events that could explain the historical characters, not visa versa. 

Trump and His Devotees.

Nine-elven was a major blow to the ‘insulated’ American pride because of the extent of damage it caused and its implicit message of the vulnerability of the country (not even in any war did the US lose a building). If we add to that the mild failures in Afghanistan and the major failure in Iraq we realize that a normal reaction to 9\11 was narcissistic rage that hit the whole population of the US, pro-war an anti war alike. Fortunately, and also unfortunately the recovery from this shock was quick and very impressive. In less than the eight years of Obama’s presidency the US recovered and improved its status.  The economy recovered completely, the country was moving ahead smoothly, Obama as a ‘cultured’ person sensed that the US has to be part of the larger world and he joined few important regional trade and economic organizations, gained the respect and confidence of most of the significant political entities. But the recovery was too to fast for a sizable section of the society to assimilate. Some people remained in their state of narcissistic rage being. Those people were prone to self deception for different reasons.

However, there is also a factor that exasperated the situation. Maybe as a stranger I was more attentive to it than the average American. After 9\11 American politicians and public figures never missed a chance to talk about the US as the greatest, the most powerful, the most democratic and the one with the highest values in the world. Even if that is true (which is not) it tempted people to deceive themselves by making their advantages an excuse to look down on others. The narcissistically enraged Americans found in Trump a perfect leader: he confirmed their sense of inferiority and promised them a total recovery.  Moreover, there was no ready leader on the other side to pull them from their despair and show them the actual strength of their country.

A theory of the human subject (the individual) acknowledges that everything in ‘man’s’ life always has two meanings: one obvious (conscious) and one hidden (unconscious). The unconscious one seeks a meaning and could become very vulnerable to self deception because of that need. In  crisis situations the leader with the exaggerated views of things and is able to -himself- to block critical judgment wins (Ghadaffy, Hitler, Trump). Therefore, if we put Trump in the context of the circumstances of his election we will see that what is important for us as psychoanalysts is not to give him a diagnosis but reach a proper diagnosis of the historical moment that gave him (his psychopathology) the power to win an election. We all have characters as we are our character. But some have orderly characters and some have character disorders.  

Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Subject

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3.The Subject and his Counterpart:

Discovering the duality of the subject was a breakthrough, because it became obvious and an accepted fact that the subject is not an ontological entity, but a fusion of what we could notice of him and something else that is only ‘indirectly’ assumed to be there. The subject embodies an active counterpart that it is unconscious to him, but displays its presence to the “other”, but only partially concealed and partially unfathomable. Thus, duality was a great leap in our view of the human subject but did not offer something of theoretical value, because it was understandable. Two things needed to be explored: are the dual components linked or they exist independent of each other? Whatever the answer is it is till of great importance to know how they coexist in the same subject.

The contribution of German idealist metaphysics advanced the European culture in all its endeavours. Many thinkers joined the philosophers in advancing the modern western civilization as whole, and creating a general movement of enlightenment, which was most evident in France (1730–1800). It spread throughout Europe. It introduced two major enlightening notions to the issue of the subject’s duality, which allowed a shift in the attitude toward that duality. The first enlightenment was that the subject’s reason is his exclusive means of comprehending the world around him, and that it is his alone, although it may have some commonality with the reasoning of others. This means that if we are to understand anything about the dual existence of the subject, we have to find a way to ask him to explain it to us. But how can he deduce what is unconscious from consciousness? How can he transcend the consciousness of the self when the self is partly unconscious?

The second enlightenment was that the causes of events are inherent in the events themselves, and the affairs of the subject contain their explanations. Searching for external effects to explain the manifestation of the subject misleads and produce false explanations and comprehension of the human act. As Foucault underline, (1970) the rules of a game are part of the game itself and are not added to it from another source. Thus, the duality of the subject’s went through a major change in the age of enlightenment: the subject’s duality is longer accepted as a split within the subject with no comprehendible cause or possible natural bridging or potential resolution. It became a concept that stands for a partition that is a constituent of human nature, without which the subject would be an entity without quality, or ate best an entity with two different qualities. Thus, the subject has to have an-other lodged in him for both to be his self. That other is neither hidden, nor under, nor behind, but entwined with his other part. The other in the subject is a double that is neither expressing himself in the common language of communication nor making himself understood by any known means. Although the other is “there,” he does not seem to affect anything around him, and seems to be protected from being affected by external effects either. nevertheless, his presence is impossible to ignore because he is an integral part of everything the subject projects. Because the other was (is) not amenable to reflection, thus it is not material for ordinary thinking; it was denoted as the unconscious, the nominal, and the transcendental. The gap between the subject and his counterpart led to a gradual change in understanding that “Other”. The different philosophers who previously dealt with the counterpart as the Other in the subject named it differently. It was the hidden (Fichte), the subject in himself (Hegel), the alienated subject (Marx), the unconscious will (Schopenhauer), the implicit (Husserl), and the subject of reflection (Bergeson).

Laplanche (1997) said, “Western philosophy, which can be encompassed by the general term ‘philosophy of the subject,’ has always stumbled over the problem of the other. For it, the otherness of the external world has always appeared doubtful, problematic, having to be deduced solely from the evidence of subjectivity… Western culture and its philosophy is the culture of the “subject,” though its apparent interest has been in the subject as an object. The other in it is an object for the subject. However, the subject is an other to himself too (p. 653).

With the subject being a duality and the duality being antithetical nature a new concept- the counterpart- appeared to account for the puzzlement about duality. The counterpart is a concept that better suited the changes introduced by the two propositions of the Enlightenment. The counterpart meant that human duality is not the coexistence of an- other within the subject, but rather the self is a unity of an enwrapped antithesis. The proposition that the subject can rely on his subjective reasoning to learn was instrumental in creating a novel interest in the properties of human reasoning-its soundness, limitations, normalcy, and abnormality-and inadvertently led to curiosity about the function of the counterpart in that reasoning. Psychology was born as an independent science of reason (consciousness), and introspective endeavors moved gradually to the center of the studies in that field (Wundt, 1876). Introspection occupied a formal place in science, a place that had previously been the province of the transcendental ego. However, introspection did not provide any substantial additional insights into the nature of the counterpart. Understanding the counterpart posed a problem: the subject cannot be reached by introspection and the Other does not speak the same language the counterpart speaks.

The second proposition that causes are contained within their effects has changed the strategy of diagnosis in the field of psychopathology. In the beginning, mental disorders were ascribed to external causes such as bad spirits, evil eyes, the devil, or even to unexplainable causes such as God’s will. Pinel (1740–1826) broke the chains of the patients in the Salpêtrière hospital and refused to consider them victims of evil spirits. Hence, psychical disorders were considered diseases, i.e., their causes should be found within the diseases like all other medical conditions. Physicians resorted to treating the neuroses and psychoses as deficiencies or overabundances of certain biophysical elements. The advancements in “scientific” medicine based on research, anatomy, physiology, and some supportive branches put the unconscious firmly in the place of the counterpart. It took a very short time for the enlighten psychiatrists in France to discover hypnotism and reach the unconscious almost by accident; the accident of making a calculated hypothesis that it might be what characterizes the counterpart of the subject. The counterpart was not only unconscious but was the unconscious of that particular patient.

The Counterpart and the Particularity of Psychoanalysis:

Based on several details in the evolution of the concept of the counterpart I mean by the exitance of counterpart the emergence of antithetical poles from any of the attributes that constitute an evolving state in the human subject [I intend to revisit this idea later to shoe its validity from the analysts’ clinical work. The counterpart is an operational duality that allows the exploration of the issue at hand, as is the case of the mental function and its duality of conscious/unconscious. I want to highlight and underline something extremely Freudian in Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis:  did not, create a polarity of two attributes of different qualitative origins in any of his works for the duration of continued modifications of his theory, except for a short time when he suggested a polarity between the ego and the repressed [1920, p. 19], or when he used the conscious, as a certainty to prove the existence of the unconscious which was not yet considered then as a certainty (1915).

By the end of the nineteenth century German Idealistic Metaphysics entered a phase of gradual decline, which led to the birth of the scientific method, both in physics and in the humanities. Freud’s thinking proves that it was a legitimate child of the German idealist metaphysics. His whole text is variations on the theme of duality, in every aspect of his formulations. Ricoeur (1970) said, “A reader familiar with Hegelianism [the philosophy of dialects] cannot but help noticing the constant use of opposition in the structure of Freud’s concepts [which are consistently dichotomous]. It is true that dichotomy is not necessarily a dialectic, and that in each instance the dichotomy has a different sense. But his [Freud’s] style of opposition is intimately involved in the birth of meaning; the dichotomy is already dialectical” (p. 475). The new polarity of the subject and his counterpart revealed a dialectical relationship between the subject’s positivistic status as a subject of study and his tendency to transcend the positivistic case  and undo it. The problem of the counterpart changed from a purely metaphysical problem to a problem that had to be sorted out first within a polarity of physical sciences and human sciences. Capturing the subject in positivist states was a dream of scientists, while facilitating his transcendence of being became a psychoanalytic and ethnological endeavor. Foucault (1970) made an important remark about that polarity when he said, “In relation to the ‘subject of sciences,’ psychoanalysis and ethnology are rather ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very subject who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human science” (p. 379). Western culture reached an impasse in regard to the nature of the subject and then in how to understand him. Psychology was promising some serious formulations of the laws behind the subject’s behavior, cognition, and emotions and provided some facts about those aspects. But the counterpart, although there was no denying of its existence, was not amenable to the same methods of psychological study. There was nothing promising on the horizon that could have guided the thinkers to something they might have used to cross the abyss or bridge the gap between the endeavors “metapsychology” because psychologists intended -even then-to go beyond empirical psychology that had to be founded on empirical finding. It is important to bring to attention something that psychoanalysis is suffering from nowadays. Somehow, analysts are treating the counterpart (the unconscious Other) the same way they treat consciousness; i.e. as positivistic entity, and they interpret the primary process as distortions of the secondary process. The unintentional neglect that the counterpart is not repressed consciousness makes them keep seeing, working, formulating psychical phenomena as if the subject is a duality of similar though conflicting psychical entities, while the counterpart forces the issue that psychoanalysis is analysis of a dialectical link between an object-tive and a sub-jective entities.

Another feature in Freud’s thinking-taken from Germain metaphysics is the place he gave to the process of mental representation of whatever is physical, in the mind. This notion is -for the meticulous thinker- the origin of duality in western thinking. The notion that representation creates ideas (see Fichte’s and Schopenhauer’s representations of the unconscious) has become very important in Freud’s classical theory of psychoanalysis (thing presentation and word presentation). In addition to notion of representation, the concept of the Ich as a structure was sometimes considered the antithesis of the subject’s positivistic identity and his transcendental counterpart.

The idea of making the counterpart speak to the subject or even to another in his surroundings was far from being a viable idea. Western culture was waiting for an intuition that would make the counterpart talk and define itself. It was time for a qualitative change in understanding the riddle of the subject. Which of the two scientific approaches was going to give Western culture the intuition that could make the counterpart talk and define itself? Was the answer going to come from the positivistic physical sciences, or was it still going to come from the human interpretative sciences? Einstein once said, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge, namely, in axioms, from which deductions are then made…Intuition is the necessary condition for discovery of such axioms” (cited in Calaprice, 2000, p. 287).

It was Freud’s destiny to get the intuition that made the counterpart talk, define itself, and still maintain its dual property as a subject of transcendence and an object of study. What I think is most curious, intriguing, and significant is that his intuition should have come from his work as a physician and psychotherapist buy it came from an unusual interest of his that was unrelated to his work. In other words, Freud was out there to discover a cure for the neurosis, which put him the camp of the nomothetic science of neurology and its medical application. Yet, when it came to him—the physician—from his interest (hobby) in dreams, which were not considered, in any way, a topic in the nomothetic sciences. Freud’s research and practice during the hypnosis period brought him close the splitting of consciousness and the formation of the unconscious source of psychoneuroses, the role of trauma and the notion of arrested affect associated with the repressed. He did not see in all that anything that could lead to a theory of psychoanalysis. But, he uncovered in the area of dreams, parapraxes and jokes a second and quite different language that the counterpart uses to speak in those three phenomena. Freud (1900) wrote of that intuition (in the preface to the third English edition of The Interpretation of Dreams), “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime” (p. XXVII).

He was impressed, for a short while, by the splitting of consciousness; he believed that hypnosis revealed that part of consciousness that had been repudiated and caused the pathological condition. However, we notice in his contributions in the Studies on Hysteria (1895b), compared with Breuer’s cases, that he was attentive and sensitive to the patients’ whole stories more than the direct links between the retrieved memories and the symptoms. He was also able to read more in the symptoms than what was manifestly expressed. In the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R., he commented on one of her symptoms by saying, “I could not help thinking that the patient had done nothing more or less than look for a symbolic expression of her painful thoughts and that she had found it in the intensification of her sufferings” (1895b, p. 152). He even presented a whole case (Katharina) in which he did not use hypnosis to reconstruct the patient’s sexual trauma and relied completely on a brief encounter with her. He mentioned in his presentation of the case history that “[it] is not so much an analysed case of hysteria as a case solved by guessing” (1895, p. 133; italics added).

This step led him to make a very valuable distinction between the manifest and the latent, which replaced the futile cause/effect dichotomy and overcame the limitations of the split of consciousness and the formation of an unconscious content. Freud ignored the significance of the discernment of the manifest/latent connection until he got the intuition that it is the psychoneurosis that does the splitting of consciousness and not the splitting of consciousness that causes the neurosis. In other words, what had been considered the cause of the psychoneuroses was found to be, in fact, its effect. Freud was not in any way prepared, trained, or advised to think about what was to come after the hypnosis stage. But it should be emphasized that the medical preoccupation with the limitations of the transcendence of consciousness-the way consciousness could become sick, its failure to keep the unconscious under control, and the derangement of the mind-led to studying the counterpart in a way quite different from the philosophers’ approach.

Freud realised very early that there no conscious events that does not have an unconscious counterpart. Therefor, psychoanalysis has to be considered not a theory of psychotherapy or psychopathology, but a theory of the human subject who is a formation of antitheses that are responsible for his sickness and health. This is not a different way of saying things; it is saying different things about the subject.

Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Subject

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2.The Background of Psychoanalytic Thinking

As expected, most psychoanalysts considered the effort to locate psychoanalysis within the Western Culture waist of time, and irrelevant to their work. In fact, this belief is embedded in another more significantly misleading: psychoanalysis is an applied technique of psychotherapy that has ‘sort’ of a theory of psychopathology, and likely has some useful input for other areas of the humanities.  Thus, all one only needs to learn its theory of psychopathology and the technicalities of practicing it as psychotherapy. Consequently, psychoanalysis wold look at as an entity in its own right, and could (should) be learned in specialized institutes, and the graduates form closed communities of people of a kind. At best, those communities open their doors very narrowly to allow a little knowledge to seep out, but always protect psychoanalysis from being contaminated by foreign -none analytic- ideas or ideologies. The result of this common belief -as we all acknowledge by now- is a steady deterioration of psychoanalysis itself, declination of its status that was once of a highly-admired enterprise, and an obvious drop of interest in its restoration. Although psychoanalysis is not suffering from this progressive condition equally in every part of the world, there is no denying, though, that it is happening universally creating a global crisis.

The general trend in contemporary psychoanalysis is to keep correcting or improving its current bad condition, and ignore the call for making the necessary changes that address the causes of the crisis. Albeit that all attempts at correcting psychoanalysis have failed, there is vehement reluctance to even look at our resistance to change. I believe this reluctance comes from four sources that when actualized in unison they become irrational objections to change. They are: 1.change is an implicit admission that psychoanalysis is not perfect as we keep claiming, 2.unlike all other epistemologies it does not need revision  from time to time, 3.we do not know what changes to be introduced and how to to do them, 4. and what will psychoanalysis be like if we change it? I am not underling the fear of the major disagreement amongst us if we decided to make changes to what we hardly already agree on now. Those four issues are a result of psychoanalysis being treated by us as an epistemology without any roots or links with anything that came before or came after. 

The simple and direct reason to locate psychoanalysis within its western culture’s framework is to reveal that it is essentially linked with other active elements of that culture, therefore it should be been evolving and progressing with those elements. I firmly believe that those links would show that psychoanalysis is still as important as it has always been to the culture as whole, not only to its practitioners. Accepting this point of view puts the practicing psychoanalyst in a bind: deny its links it has with the rest of the culture, thus let it die while the culture keeps renewing itself, or widen his knowledge to include in his learning none-clinical literature keep it developing it with the rest of the culture. Up till now, learning what is not clinical has not been of significance in analytic training, and there is no conscious concern about how our future will look like, as an isolated epistemology. Moreover, instead of seeing Freud as major link in a significant chain of thinkers, he idealized as an isolated lonely genius who does not belong to anything or anywhere in the past or in his time. He is deprived of  his status as a main contributor to a major culture.

I want to frame this idea as a central question in my attempt at approaching the theory of the human “subject”: Is Freud a link in a chain of interlinked thinkers and philosophers, or a link without a chain or any other attachment that could locate his place in his culture?

My immediate answer right away is that Freud is an important link in a chain of great thinkers who led him to where to started contributing to his culture. His link connects psychoanalysis to other links, despite analysts’ admitting that hesitantly or giving it a lip service. Freud’s link has been and is open for many other chains of idiographic sciences. Those chains should be recognized in order to connect psychoanalysis to its culture and give it a serious push toward a theory of the human subject, which is the only possible and real future for it.

A prelude to psychoanalysis:

Western culture started with its subject being alive but not really extant; an object and agent of knowledge but not emoted or humanly definable. The reason was an underdeveloped sense of separation from his physical world (social infantilism). With the evolution of the subject the he acquired a sense of being outside the world around him; the subject of the Cogito. Ultimately, the culture advanced to form the principal question a culture of its nature and calibre had to pose and puzzle about: what about the subject's sense of existence and his awareness of “being within a culture, yet not part of it”'? What does it mean that the subject has an existence? When we look back at the Cartesian Cogito we realize that the first step taken to acknowledging the subject’s existence was by underlining his duality (a thinker and the thinker of thinking). This might sound, today a frivolous question because we are so familiar with the manifestations of the subject to wonder about his existence. Nonetheless, the question would mean something if acknowledge that the subject was the creator of his knowledge, and also able to realize that he was the precipitator of his ignorance, because his ignorance became a key to unlock that secret. Positing the problem that way confronted the thinkers and the philosophers with a puzzling subject: he was more than the object of the scholastic philosophy of the pre-Descartes times; he was both an item of nature and a transcendental awareness of nature itself, that is, his knowledge of it. The subject had an “exteriority” that turned him into an object of empirical presence, but his transcendence of his empirical existence pointed to a stubborn “interiority” that always transcended his empiricism.

The subject’s duality changed from “I think, therefore I am” to “I am, even when I am not thinking.” Foucault (1970), in response to this shift in the concept of the subject, said, “The cogito will not therefore be the sudden and illuminating discovery that all thought is thought, but the constantly renewed interrogation as to how thought can reside elsewhere than here, and yet so very close to itself: how it can be in the form of non-thinking” (p. 324). As we will see later, the problem was not the separateness of two modes of the subject’s existence expressed in a duality, but rather finding the solution that would sustain the subject’s duality in spite of his duality that could make him stranger to himself. The question was where is the link between the poles of this dual existence? The reason for not coming up with the an answer- from the beginning- was that scholastic philosophy, which dominated the emerging western culture from the twelfth century to the seventeenth century was not interested in the human subject as such, but in his mind and empirical existence (a trend that some analysts keep alive by striving to turn psychical events into empirical facts). Scholastic philosophy was overwhelmed by the richness of the empirical subject that was then-for the first time – a participant in solving his empirical existence.

After an admirable effort by the scholastic thinker to account for the subject’s empirical attributes, philosophers, and German philanderers in particular, turned around to look at the interiority of the subject. A brief account of the efforts of the thinkers and philosophers in revealing the human subject is a very valuable step-by-step guide to the final discovery of the duality of the conscious\unconscious, which was Freud’s lot in life to explicate and work on to give us psychoanalysis. Without reviewing that effort, it would be impossible to understand, and appreciate Freud's half-century of efforts to discover the unconscious. Without reviewing the philosophical background of psychoanalysis, it will look as if Freud has stumbled over psychoanalysis and its birth was just a stroke of luck. The most important and clear issue in that account is that those philosophers discovered most of the features of Freud’s unconscious and even called them unconscious but stopped one step before discovering it as we know it now and it was Freud’s work that took it over that stumbling step.

After Descartes’ initial stab at the barrier between scholastic philosophy and the exploration of the subject’s interiority, philosophers began a great trek toward the core of the subject’s duality. Spinoza’s (1632–1677) thinking was influenced by the Cartesian difficulty in regard to the issue of causality, which resulted from the separating the predicate of existence from its attributives in the Cogito. Thus, Spinoza founded his philosophy on the single and only substance that has the basis and the multiplicity of attributes that constitute the reality in which we live (nature or God). His monotheism had one system that underlay the reality of everything but still had two attributes: thought and extension [material and not-material]. In that sense, the subject was both mind and body but in unison. Damasio (2003) put it this way: “The reference to a single substance [in Spinoza] serves the purpose of claiming mind as inseparable from body. Both created, somehow, from the same cloth. The reference to two attributes, mind and body, acknowledged another duality the distinction of two kinds of phenomena, a formulation that preserves an entirely sensible ‘aspect’ dualism, but rejects substance dualism” (p. 209). Spinoza had the notion that the mind contained the capacity to perceive facts but could also perceive its perception (apperception) or become conscious of its own capacity; a more elaborate way of putting the cogito in a different mode of duality of the subject. He specified a third duality based on the previous one: cause and reason. Perception dealt with the world and led to uncovering its causes, while apperception dealt with the reason of things (its grammar!). This dualism reflected a fourth duality: even though brain and mind were inseparable, they were two distinct entities, physical and psychological. In spite of Spinoza’s monotheism, he resorted to the notion of attributes to account for the perceptible dual nature of the subject. Spinoza, in spite of his basic premise was insightful of the impossibility of dealing with any subjective attribute without having its double in perspective.

 Leibniz (1646–1716) developed a theory of a world composed of units, self-contained centres of force of which everything is formed. He called those units “Monads.” Each Monad was perceptive and desiring, and the subject was constituted of those dualities. In those dualities, perception was geared toward facts and was distinguished from apperception, or the awareness of perception and the reasoning of the perceived. Therefore, the truth of a fact referred to the principle of sufficient reason (nothing takes place without a reason). This principle was a passive quality of the mind and just mirrored the factual world around it. Truth of reason, on the other hand, referred to the principle of identity, which stipulated that a thing could not also be its opposite. This principle was innate and an active attribute of the mind (apperception). Leibniz’s conception of the dynamics of perception and apperception put the duality of the subject in a context of polarities that are qualitatively disconnected but connected hierarchically (quantitatively). Monads were organized in a hierarchy in which the Monad of the soul, for instance, was above that of the body and exerted control over it. His theory led to a concept of unconsciousness that was closer to the desiring aspect of the Monads, which did not abide by reason. The unconscious in that definition could return in other states of consciousness, like in the form of dreams, for instance. Leibniz’s philosophy, though monotheistic in form, was dualistic in substance.

Kant (1724–1804), as he himself stated, was the Copernicus of philosophy. He shifted the duality of the subject’s world into a duality in the subject’s mind. In other words, he did not accept that the world imposed on the subject a dual approach to perceiving it; rather, he believed that the subject’s mind was capable of only a two-stage approach to reality. In his theory, the human subject was endowed with “sensibility,” a passive and receptive quality of the mind, which was affected by things as they are. Sensibility generated intuition, which was an active quality of the mind. Intuition begot the understanding of what was sensibly perceived. Intuition in turn was a product of “a priori” categories in the mind that configured the domain of objects into a domain of concepts, thus engendering thought. Knowledge did not conform to the domain of objects; rather, it was the objects that conformed to sensibility and the categories innately utilized in forming those categories, concepts, and thought. Sensibility and understanding were the limits of our interpretation of our world and the reason that we could not perceive “things in themselves” but only things as they appeared to us. Kant introduced the concept of imagination (which transcends perception) as the compromise between sensibility and understanding. It provided the synthetic categories of causality, reality, reciprocity, etc. It allowed perception to become thought, thought to become understanding, and understanding to become judgment. His view was that natural sciences deal only with the appearance of things and do not yield any knowledge of things in themselves.

Fichte (1762–1814) thought that Kant did not explain the link between sensation and understanding and did not expound on the derivatives of the innate categories that organized our knowledge. However, he took Kant’s notion of I think as the datum of experience and embarked on a very novel metaphysical trip into duality. He stated that both the world and I were strangers to us, though it was the I that apprehended both the external (the non-I) and the mental states (the I). The I that apprehended the mental states did that transcendentally and not by taking the mental as an object of its action, because the I was not a thing or a substance. It was an activity of self-positing that existed in self-awareness but was continually in a dialectical engagement with the non-I (the antithesis), a dialectical negation to affirm the existence of each of them. A second duality was born: that the I has to negate itself in order to become the synthesis of that duality. The most important outcome of the dialectics of the I was Fichte’s expansion of the issue of understanding. He considered the I’s understanding to be geared toward causality because causality was an internal understanding, while reason was external (note his reversal of Spinoza’s formulation).

Hegel’s (1770–1831) approach to comprehending the subject was more straightforward and penetrating. He considered the entire history of Man’s intellectual development a continuous effort of the mind to know itself. He perceived knowledge as a process that is dialectical. At any stage of its progression it unravels the ignorance that needed to be removed by virtue of that knowledge. Thus, a kind of new knowledge emerges as a synthesis of previous knowledges and the ignorance that constituted its antithesis. Nothingness becomes the antithesis of being and forces the mind to discover itself. This dialectical motion produced rationality, which is the equivalent of reality, therefore making anything real intrinsically rational. Hegel’s philosophy was an examination of the subject’s mind and its natural way of knowing, and it was, at the same time, the natural way of knowing the subject’s mind.

Fichte and Hegel’s dialectics were not helpful in analysing the  duality of the subject. There was no clue to which of the representation or the represented constituted the thesis, so we could constitute a clear polarity of thesis/antithesis that would permit further analysis. Even the notion of the link as a synthesis did not lead to anything of value, because it contained nothing more than elements of both the represented and the representation. However, this time the subject took centre stage once again; this time as the location of that link. The subject turned out to be the creator of the link and the one who should discover it. His success or even his failure in discovering that link meant an effort to discovering his “self.” The previous dualities between the subject and nature gave way to a duality between a subject’s reason and his emotions. The subject alone was to unlock that puzzling secret. The subject who was supposed to know had become the object of that knowledge, and the process thus came to a gradual halt. The subject had become a subject and an object of knowledge, both waiting for someone to find a way to introduce them to each other and unlock that impasse.

Schelling (1775–1854) took the opposite position from Kant’s view of where duality existed. He was of the opinion that duality is a quality inherent in nature, because nature effectuated and expressed itself according to the law of “polarities,” or as pairs of opposite though complementary forces. He talked about the unconscious in the context of a process that strives toward its negation. Thus, he posited it in the context of a duality with consciousness. He considered the whole nature of life a teleological advancement toward consciousness, thus the unconscious, in his consideration, was a manifested finality that is a teleological advancement toward consciousness. It is not clear whether he meant that nature has that quality of unconsciousness or he conceived of nature as the unconscious state of the human mind that strives toward consciousness (see Hegel).

Schopenhauer (1788–1860) viewed the world as a representation of the way the principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz) is applied in the four root areas of thinking: the physical world we perceive; judgment or the logical sphere, where truth lies; spatial and temporal intuitions (mathematics); motivation and will. Comprehending the laws of causality led him to understand their conceptual representation (Vorstellogen), which was secondary to abstraction. Schopenhauer distinguished between the thing (the phenomenal) and the thing-in-itself (the noumenal). He applied that duality to the subject and came to the conclusion that the nature of the nominal subject is unconscious, and that his unconscious was a storehouse of motivations and desires, while the phenomenal Subject was conscious, even if only of part of himself. Thus, the unconscious was reflective of the subject’s truth and will. Schopenhauer’s unconscious was very much the antecedent of Freud’s id (a reservoir of the instincts).

Von Hartmann (1842–1906) tried to find the common ground between Schopenhauer and Kant. He agreed with Schopenhauer that the ultimate reality of the subject was unconscious, but he did not agree that it was “blind” will. Von Hartmann regarded the unconscious as having two coordinated functions: will and idea. Will was unable to produce any teleological processes and was accountable for the sense of existence of the that, or the world, while idea was incapable of objectifying the world and accounted for the what of the world, or the nature of that world. He suggested that the end of telos is the liberation of the idea from servitude under the will. Therefore, it becomes possible to advance toward consciousness.

In the nineteenth century, the metaphysics of German idealism were matured enough to start declining. However, exhausted it looked, it succeeded in leading to the point where the subject’s perception of himself as an object of consciousness, and his consciousness of his consciousness, revealed an intrinsic and definite gap, if not an abyss in those dualities. This gap, demanded bridging. Metaphysics in general and the issue of the subject’s duality were facing unavoidable shifts due to a general acceptance and assimilation of the ‘subject’s duality’. One of the most prominent of those shifts was Marx’s (1818–1883) dialectical materialism and what he referred to as turning Hegel’s dialectics downside up. He was critical of Hegel’s notion that reality is a product of ideas, which made the thought process an independent act of the spirit (mind). Marx’s penetrating insights into the limitations of Hegel’s idealism emphasized that the subject’s consciousness and his being were determined by the material social conditions he lives. Marx was the only philosopher yet who linked the subject’s duality with social reality. He explained consciousness as a reflection of inter-social  dynamics that initiates awareness on a social scale. His inter-social dynamics related awareness to interaction with between the subject and his society, i.e., not in vacuum.

Although Marx meant the subject as a constituent of his society-not an ontological entity- he was the first philosopher who indirectly (unconsciously) raises the issue of the intrapsychical structure of the individual. In Marxism, the subject is an entity that is moulded by its society, thus whatever the subject is, his ‘potentials’ will be arranged according to the demands put on him from his society in order to join and fit in it. The subject is the elaboration of the workings of the social forces. This conception is the underpinning of Freud’s exploration of role of the interfamilial dynamics in ‘making the subject’.

German metaphysical idealism led to a subject that, first of all, is not an ontological entity but a phenomenon of being and becoming. It also established his dual property as his basic condition and not a matter of opinion or choice. Thus, the subject emerged from all those philosophical endeavours a phenomenon of existence and not merely an empirical entity.  The phenomenologists and the existentialists (e.g., Husserl and Heidegger, 1889–1976) considered the subject’s duality an existential dilemma. There is no escaping from the fact of the non-singularity of the subject, but the subject is a singularity that is of being-in-the world. The dilemma of comprehending the dual existence of the subject is the gap between the constituents of his duality. The essence of the dilemma was a gap, which is very much the essence of his existence, because the subject’s consciousness and whatever was not yet in his consciousness (Foucault called it the unthought) are together his existence. In other words, duality stood for a schism in the subject that gave him a bi-existence. The most that could be done with this dilemma came from the notion that bi-existence in the world introduced the concept of the counterpart. The subject is himself and a counterpart of himself. But what is the counterpart? Is it different from Schelling’s unconscious or Schopenhauer’s? Yes, it is different, as we will see a bit later.

This very brief -almost hasty- exposition of the dealings of the thinkers with the issue of the human subject highlights points of interest that relate from near or afar to issues that were examined in a ‘psychoanalytic’ way by Freud, in his 53 years of working on the human subject. Freud is a product of that philosophical heritage (he thought of becoming himself a philosopher.  Every philosopher in the chain of Western philosophy uncovered and aspect of what is human in the human subject. They reached the point where duality has to be “meaningful”. Duality had to find its explanation not in philosophy but outside its sphere, i.e., virtue is not only a religious demand but is also a social value. The phenomenologist and the existentialists revised the concept of duality to become a concept of subject and his counterpart. But, they could not make the counterpart speak to its complementary part.  Freud was there and managed to make the counterpart speak to us, and tell us who he is, better who are we.

Psychoanalysis was then born; the subject and his counterpart learned to speak and listen to each other. 

Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Subject

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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.

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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. Idealization and idealizing are difficult to sustain for a long time after the passing of the idealized person, unless, some basic change is introduced to that person’s identity to give it a none-human quality. Religious characters acquire those features after their death, therefore they become immortals. We use this adjective sometimes and in certain situations just to emphasize the greatness of the person we mention. But, we cannot bestow on Freud the attribute of immortality as we use it with Buda. Nevertheless, analysts idealize Freud and psychoanalysis in a peculiar way. He is not immortal but is not just a great thinker like Schopenhauer. We think of as the creator of a unique “thing called psychoanalysis” which was completed by him as a total discovery. Although I would hear many who deny that and agree that psychoanalysis has a place for improvement, Freud and psychoanalysis are seen as above and beyond the “event” of its birth of psychoanalysis.

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