Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. II. Intersubjectivity
Second Criterion: Intersubjectivity. We are reviewing Ricoeur’s four “criteria” of analytic reality. The second criterion, after “discursivity” or “say-ability” — the next “category” to which the analytic “object” must conform — is the other-directed, dialogical quality of desire. In Ricoeur’s words: “the analytic situation not only screens out what is sayable, but what is said to another” (54). Now, as with discursivity, at a certain level of generality, this second “criterion” wouldn’t distinguish analysis from any other domain of experience: anything “sayable” — the propositions of science no less than the communications of a patient — is by definition sayable to another. Language is simply the sort of thing that is (potentially) public, shareable, social.
For this reason, we should reiterate that “other-directness” is an attribute, not merely of the patient’s words, but of the “desire” that saturates those words. As we saw above, the patient’s many productions, assuming discursive form, are upon examination redolent of “desire.” But this is a desire, Ricoeur now adds, not for this or that thing (appearances notwithstanding), but for another, or more particularly, for the desire of the other. It is above all in the transference that we perceive “the relation to the other constitutive of the erotic demand” (55). As Ricoeur elaborates:
“Transference reveals the following constitutive feature of human desire: not only its power to be spoken about, to be brought to language, but also to be addressed to another; more precisely, it addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it. What is thereby sifted out from human experience is the intersubjective dimension of desire.” (55)
Ricoeur’s discussion here owes everything to Hegel’s treatment of “self-consciousness,” “desire,” and “recognition” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Alexandre Kojève interpreted and promulgated Hegel’s text in an influential series of lectures in Paris during the 1930s. These lectures, attended by French thinkers including Sartre, Beauvoir, and Lacan, became an inescapable point of reference for intellectual life in the continental tradition. Hegel’s Phenomenology, and more so Kojève’s idiosyncratic reading of it, form background necessary for grasping a formula such as “human desire…addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it.” (See Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire for the reception and intellectual post-history of Kojève’s lectures.)
I’ll present the basic idea in a compressed and schematic way. Biological, so-called animal desire — say, for nourishment — can be satisfied by a “thing” — for instance, a bit of foodstuff. Characteristically human desire, by contrast, requires another self — hence another desire — for its satisfaction. “Desire” thus implicitly acquires a more expansive meaning: not the thirst for a cup of water, but a “will” to determine what is the case generally, via recognition. This revision elicits the thin sense of normativity, of “ought,” belonging to the concept of desire. Accordingly, to say that “I desire the other’s desire” means something like: “I want the other to regard me — my desires, orientation, behavior, and way of valuing reality — in a certain way, namely, with approval, validation — as praiseworthy, legitimate, and the like. This is why, in this context and the discourse inspired by it, the terms “desire” and “recognition” — on the face of it bearing rather different meanings — become practically synonymous. To desire the other’s desire is to desire the other’s recognition: the validation that what I am, believe, will, and do is desirable, or is what I ought to be, believe, will, and do.
In its Hegelian origin, then, the idea that “human desire…addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it,” is rather broad. Once appropriated by psychoanalysis, though, this idea (unsurprisingly) receives an erotic twist. Psychoanalysis, as Ricoeur now conceives it, thematizes desire along these lines: the patient’s desire for another’s desire is, at is core, an erotic quest for another’s “recognition” which is itself no less erotic. Yet it conserves the Hegelian dimension, inasmuch as desire is still the desire for a kind of recognition, a wish that the other regard me (including my wishes) as “desirable,” valid, acceptable, and so on.
There is more to say about this aspect of desire, though. For the “sayable,” communication-inflecting desire of the patient is not merely “other-directed” in some generic sense. To count as analytic, it seems, this desire must
originate in the earliest, dialogical configurations — pre-Oedipal and Oedipal — from which it acquires its enduring cast, however unconscious; and
become concentrated on the person of the analyst, in that dimension and phase of the analysis designated “transference”
The “desire” that is drawn out in analysis and inflamed, especially, in the transference-neurosis, is stubbornly indexed to these early configurations. And this means that, unconsciously, the patient never renounced the “object” — the sort of unqualified, erotic recognition — it sought in that phase. It need hardly be said that the “recognition” demanded by the infant of, paradigmatically, the mother — a demand still lodged by the adult unconscious — contains a practical, bodily, and gratifying moment as well. (The mother demonstrates that she “recognizes” the child and his urges as good, legitimate, and lovable, precisely by ministering to them, “in the flesh.” Hans Loewald captures the “materiality” of this recognition vividly.)
Now this parent-indexed desire has of course been repressed; the patient in analysis is unaware of harboring any such desire. But just because this desire is unconscious — hence subjected to the primary process of plasticity, mobility, fungibility, and so on — it may gradually “attach” to the analyst and analytic situation. After all, from the unconscious standpoint of infantile wish, there is no difference between the original object (the mother’s desire) and its contemporary avatar (the analyst’s).
What matters, again, is that there is no way intelligibly to abstract from the other-directed “structure” of analytic desire. Just as “non-discursive” desire — hence non-semantic, meaningless, uninterpretable — is of no earthly concern to analysis, likewise, a desire that is not other-directed — that is not essentially a desire for recognition, for some validating attitude on the other’s part — would ultimately have no place in an analysis.
This restriction is of course perfectly compatible with the emergence of desires that appear as entirely lacking in intersubjective import: “innocuous” desires to sleep past an appointment, to eat during a session, to dispute a payment. While masquerading as mere “monological” impulses, such desires inevitably — on this conception of psychoanalysis — possess, more or less remote from awareness, an other-directed structure, that is, tacitly “implore” the other for some determinate type of recognition.
Again, as I emphasized in connection with the first criterion, we need not commit ourselves to the strong, ontological claim that all desire necessarily possesses this structure — though we might, eventually, like to defend such a position. It is enough for Ricoeur’s purposes that we acknowledge: to count and matter as analytic, to be admitted into an analysis, a desire must be so-constituted; while analysis is in principle indifferent to any “genus” or “level” of desire that lacks this dialogical valence.
In the next entry, I will discuss Ricoeur’s third “criterion.”