David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (I)
In this series I’ll comment on David Macleod Black’s recent Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective, in preparation for a book review. In this first entry, I’ll provide an overview of Black’s general concerns, before turning to a particular trope that appears to knit together the ten essays in his collection: the proposal that psychoanalysis requires a new philosophical “foundation,” in order to clarify and support its relation to ethics.
The Problem: An Overview
Black begins his stimulating book with a short introduction to its themes, which he inserts into a synoptic reconstruction of modern European intellectual history. From René Descartes through Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber to Sigmund Freud, the story is now familiar: modernity’s elevation of scientific rationality into the sole arbiter in matters of truth and untruth, reality and illusion — culminating in philosophical “positivism” — has had an implacably disenchanting effect on our relation to the world and to ourselves. (Black defines positivism as “the belief that only science and what can be logically derived from scientific findings can be the ground of truth” (9).)
More concretely, such a scientific Weltanschauung condemns as superstition — a subjective, anthropomorphic projection — anything that does not conform to its (impersonal, materialist, and quantifying) standards of reality, including ethical values and religious objects. Nor has psychoanalysis been spared from this trend; Freud himself embraced it.
Somewhat idiosyncratically, Black recruits Dante Alighieri (author of the Divine Comedy) and Emmanuel Levinas (French ethical philosopher), as the heroes of his account. These theoretical innovators, Black indicates, will help stem the disenchanting tide and “re-enchant” the world, restoring intrinsic integrity to the objects of ethical and religious experience, both within psychoanalysis and beyond.
Indeed, while Black’s nominal focus is the relation between ethics and psychoanalysis, he immediately suggests that such a program has importance well beyond that discipline. Not only should psychoanalysis be re-founded on some sort of Levinasian (or even Dantean) ethical construction, in order to secure its theoretical coherence; the future of organized human life depends upon some such re-founding. Most strikingly, throughout the essays Black frames “the gathering dangers of populism and the ever-enlarging threats to the earth’s climate and biodiversity” (2) as catastrophes emanating from this same positivistic deracination of our ethical “ground.”
(It was a missed opportunity, I think, that Black never engages with the most subtle critique of abstract “enlightenment rationality” and its self-undermining conatus, undertaken first by G.W.F Hegel and later by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In particular, I suspect that such an engagement might have allowed Black to avoid some of the stark, unmediated dualisms — e.g. between “scientific” and “ethical” objects — that ultimately define his account.)
A New Foundation?
Black suggests that, strictly speaking, the ten essays in his collection are “free standing” (1). They do not advance a single argument, nor do they restrict themselves to a single topic. On the contrary, the essays range materials as eclectic as the ontological standing of “internal objects” in the psychoanalytic literature (Chapter 2); the psychological pressures governing the origins and development of Buddhism (Chapter 4); recent publications by philosopher-analysts Jonathan Lear (Chapter 3) and Joel Whitebook (Chapter 7); the nature of “allegorical objects” and their function in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Chapters 5 and 6); and Levinas’ contributions to ethical and religious thinking (Chapters 8, 9, and 10). Readers who are interested in any of these topics may want to look at Black’s thoughtful, well-written pieces.
Nonetheless, there is an underlying continuity to the collection, inasmuch as the essays “circle somewhat obsessively around a few related themes” (1). And one of these themes, in particular, commands Black’s attention: “Central to them all is the thought that psychoanalysis, when Freud founded it, had no adequate philosophical base from which to consider the hugely important questions of ethics” (1). Black’s agenda follows from this perceived deficit: to supply to psychoanalysis its — missing or insufficient — “philosophical base,” so that it is finally equipped to address “important questions of ethics.”
There are undoubtedly other ways of characterizing the continuity of Psychoanalysis and Ethics, but Black’s own gloss is apt, and I will take my orientation from it in my commentary. The metaphor of a “base” here is hardly an aberration. Black recurrently, insistently raises the desideratum of a “foundation,” although the ingredients in his conception — what exactly is to ground, and what is to be grounded — vary considerably with the context. At times, in fact, this variation becomes a source of confusion — a problem I will begin to examine in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXVI)
We concluded the last entry by suggesting that the process of “individuation” involves two, mutually-defining ingredients: on the one hand, one differentiates from one’s early environment — that is, from spontaneously-absorbed parental “attitudes”; on the other hand, one incorporates one’s desires — especially those archaic drives originally repelled from consciousness. I call these ingredients “mutually-defining” because one differentiates from one’s early environment precisely through the incorporation of desires originally excluded by it.
This thought can be put negatively: a person who “incorporates” only those desires authorized by his parents, and who refuses to acknowledge, even to himself, the existence of any desires that radically violate their strictures — such a person has assuredly failed to “differentiate” himself. Conversely, a reliable measure of the metaphorical distance a person has travelled from his original parental environment — his “differentiation” — is whether, and to what degree, he can “feel” and recognize in himself the presence of even those desires that are incommensurable with his “core” parental identifications.
Such a story will apply to anyone potentially capable of the full range of human desires — that is, virtually everyone — since every realistically conceivable upbringing must involve a parent valuing some of the child’s desires, diminishing others, and denying altogether the existence of still others.
It does not follow, of course, that all newly-incorporated desires are for that reason morally endorsable, ought to be acted upon, or point in a “rational” direction for their bearer. (These additional predicates suggest processes of reflection we have not considered.) It does follow, however, that my newfound capacity to feel desires, formerly repressed or dissociated, that earlier in life would have violated my core identifications — this capacity demonstrates an enlargement of my “will” past the constricted borders fixed by early experience, hence a “differentiation” from it. Or again, in simpler terms: I achieve differentiation from my original environment whenever I accept desires in myself that, for one reason or another, my parents could not accept. In extending the range of desires discernible as expressions of myself, I have also transformed the “will” at my core. For I have “relaxed” my second-order desires (or anxiety, rather)) at least to the extent of re-admitting the banished first-order desires back into consciousness.
Something paradoxical clings to this process, though. For whatever differentiation form this environment I achieve will rest on a more fundamental identification, hence — at least in this area — a stubborn non-differentiation. Recall that the “I” originates above all from its identification with a specific parental trait: the attitude of loving responsiveness. This I will fail to constitute itself, to coordinate its emerging agencies, if it cannot assimilate this attitude. It must establish a minimally “benign” self-relation patterned after the parents’ relation to him- or herself.
Of course, the parent will invariably fail to embody the trait of loving responsiveness universally — either at all times or, more damagingly, vis-à-vis all possible expressions of infantile desire. So long as these failures are not gross, however, they do not impede development and may even assist it. (Some frustrations, proportionate and appropriately timed, are necessary for any infant’s healthy growth.) Further, even the best-intentioned parents are imperfect, with an unconscious life of their own, so that, though they may vigilantly attempt to “accept” and nourish the unrestricted range of the infant’s drives, many of their responses — the messages of disapproval, refusal, or denial communicated to the infant — are transmitted outside of their control because outside of their awareness. As a rule, parents are unconsciously unable to accept in the infant desires they cannot accept in themselves.
But if the infant’s experience is “good enough,” the basically loving attitude he has assimilated allows him to survive the parent’s imperfect embodiment of it; love has become the substance of his “core” self. And this, finally, is the unchanging, identificatory “anchor” which permits the self’s gradual differentiation from the parent. If I have indeed identified with this trait of loving responsiveness — a trait that, in the event, my parents were able to embody only imperfectly, such that some desires underwent repression — I am then in a position to extend its application to these same desires. That is, it is available to the child, in the course of normal development, to distribute this parent-inherited love to areas of mental functioning (inadmissible thoughts, wishes, fantasies) that his parents could not abide. In this respect, then, the ur-identification of love becomes an enduring condition of possibility for all subsequent non-identifications.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXV)
In our last discussion, we considered Lear’s argument that psychological freedom must consist in something beyond a mere “harmony” between first- and second-order desires. It is not enough, pace Harry Frankfurt, that my various first-order impulses have been “reformed” until they are expressions of my second-order “will,” because the latter — built up out of the I’s identifications — may itself simply reproduce some unelected, and potentially coercive, early environment. Paradigmatically, perhaps the adult’s “will” simply duplicates the will of the patients who shaped it in early childhood. And to compound the problem, as I suggested in the last entry: even someone who grows consciously into a stark repudiation of his original “identifications” may well still be unconsciously gripped by them.
Hence Lear’s critique left us with a question: how would we know when a “process of differentiation” has occurred, such that a particular adult will has not simply reproduced its early environment (positively or negatively)? What exactly does differentiation look like, in the concrete?
Intriguingly, to answer this question, the first place that Lear directs our attention is not to the “ideal-I” (ego-ideal), or any “boot strapping” procedure that could ensure our second-order desires are more than dogmatically-held reproductions of our parents’ wills. (A consideration of this possibility comes a bit later in Lear’s account, at 204-211.) Before that, we find initial orientation closer to home: namely, in our archaic mental functioning — precisely the substrate, frequently repelled from awareness, of our first-order desires.
This, of course, overturns the traditional conception of freedom represented in Frankfurt’s view: the understandable preoccupation with dominating, from above, all unwelcome, unruly impulses until they accord with one’s autarchic “will.” These impulses, we might suppose, have no intrinsic authority; rather, their authority depends upon a will that (unilaterally) invests them with it. Yet Lear now suggests that psychological development in the direction of true autonomy — assisted, where stalled, by psychoanalysis — must emphasize something else: “It is crucial to the process of individuation that I incorporate this other mindedness [i.e. archaic mental functioning] as part of myself” (194). And again:
“Given the background condition of a good-enough world, a well-endowed human will by his very nature tend to individuate. Psychic health is achieved not by abolishing the It [Id], but by taking it up into the differentiated unity of the I” (196)
Why extend recognition to this mindedness, though? — that is, beyond the danger that, in refusing this recognition, archaic mind does not simply vanish but goes underground, finding “subterranean” channels for gratification? This danger would not in itself indicate the intrinsic value or authority of these desires — only their necessity for psychological functioning. What, after all, has this recognition and “incorporation” of our drives to do with our central problem: individuation as the differentiation from one’s early environment, particularly the “will” of one’s parents?
There is more than one approach to these concerns. A standard answer might be to say that there is manifestly no autonomy, or limited autonomy, in a self-occluded human being, or in a soul driven unaware by desires “behind its back.” One longstanding criterion of freedom is that I know why I behave as I do. If I do not understand my actions at all, or if I misunderstand them — believing, say, that they spring directly from my will, when in reality they are disguised expressions of wishes I do not consciously acknowledge — then my freedom is to that extent questionable.
But I want to explore another answer, one that is not explicit in Lear’s account but which can be constructed out of claims he does make. One’s “will” is initially a product of one’s identifications; an approximation of the parents’ attitude to oneself, as experienced and interpreted in infancy. Hence my relation to my desires recapitulates my parents’ relation to them: the desires they accepted and valued become crystallized part of my “core” self. These are the desires, in other words, which are subsequently felt as acceptable expression of my “will.”
By contrast, the desires the parents did not accept — because they provoked irritation, anger, or anxiety in the parent — become for me, minimally, the sorts of first-order desires I overrule in my actions and would like, if possible, to eradicate entirely; and, in more extreme cases, repressed desires that have been banished from awareness, so disturbing are they to the idealized, self-validating I have internalized from my parents.
But once we have accepted something like this picture, it is a short and natural step to the idea that
“differentiation” from one’s environment, i.e. from the “messages” one has pre-reflectively absorbed from parents (and other important figures), and
“incorporation” of one’s desires, especially in the form of those archaic drives repelled from consciousness,
are finally two faces of a single process named “individuation.”
I will develop this idea in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIV)
Having insisted, psychoanalytically, on the I’s derivation from its world — in Adorno’s words, “the preponderance of the object,” the subject’s radical dependence on the object — Lear now brings a critical perspective to the philosophical discussion of freedom.
Specifically, Lear critiques the account of free will famously developed by Harry Frankfurt, whose criterion of freedom is a certain “harmony of the soul.” On this view, I am “free” if and when my “first-order” and “second-order” desires “harmonize” — that is, when I have and act upon only those desires (impulses, inclinations, and the like) that I endorse, that I want to have and enact. When there is disharmony — for instance, a person is overcome by compelling first-order desires, say, nicotine cravings, that he or she does not want — there is no freedom. (I am in these sorts of situations unfree, in the sense that I do not recognize my impulses and the actions they precipitate as mine, as expressions of my will, but as instead somehow alien to that will.
In light of his forgoing reflections, Lear finds this conception of freedom incomplete — such a harmony of the soul is perhaps a necessary, but hardly a sufficient condition of a robustly free will. It is not enough that my first-order desires are brought into line with my second-order desires; those second-order desires must themselves possess certain qualities, if they are to constitute a free will. To motivate these additional qualities, Lear invites us to consider the following possiblity:
“Suppose…one’s values or “higher order” desires have been instilled in one in an unreflective, coercive way. Even if one is able to make one’s “lower order” desire march in step, there is a sense in which one’s whole harmonious will is an expression of enslavement to external coercive forces. One cannot tell what freedom a person enjoys just by considering the structure of his soul in this way.” (188)
Such a psychological possibility shows why harmony of the soul is not on its own sufficient: while both my desires and the behaviors that issue from them may indeed comport with my “will” — I feel and do precisely what, upon reflection, I want to feel and do — it is unclear whether or not that will is really mine at all. Thus the manner in which this will is assimilated, and later maintained, counts a great deal; an assimilation that is “coercive,” or even merely “unreflective,” would vitiate freedom.
Hence we cannot reliably determine whether a soul is free on the basis only of its “internal” harmony or disharmony, that is, without some knowledge of its “external” relations. If Lear’s earlier claim about psychoanalysis is correct, and the I emerges and develops by means of identifications, then we must suppose that every I’s “second order” desires — at least originally and for some time after — are internalizations, as an “ego ideal,” of the most important trait or traits in the infantile environment. This includes above all the parental attitude, loving or not, to oneself — specifically one’s drives, needs, or “first order” desires.
But so long as my ontological core — my idealized self-conception or second-order desires — are simple precipitates of this early experience in an unchosen environment, I am in a crucial respect not free. For even if I succeed in “shaping” myself and my life pattern, such that my daily inclinations comport with my “will,” that is, my basic self-conception — nevertheless, why call this will mine, rather than the will of my parents’, or more accturately, my childishly-distorted perception and assimilation of their will? What if my attitude to my first-order desires is still — well into adulthood — a rough approximation of my parents’ attitude to these same desires, which initially it unquestionably was? Of such a will, we might say that it is “free” of internal impulses that would encumber its higher-order self-determination; but we cannot plausibly say (at least without additional knowledge) that it is free of its environment.
“Since the human soul is a psychological achievement, a response to and differentiation from the world, the fundamental issue cannot be merely internal harmony, but whether one has made one’s soul one’s own.” (188)
It follows that, from Lear’s perspective, even a harmonious soul — perhaps, after a point, especially a harmonious soul — lacks the all-important quality of “self-ownership,” inasmuch as it cannot or will not reflectively make itself its own.
This achievement of self-ownership, reminiscent of Kant’s account in “What is Enlightenment?” and by no means a “given” in normal development, is essentially what Lear seems to mean by “individuation.” And we cannot know whether a soul has individuated, has achieved or even attempted self-ownership, until we have a sense of its reflective distance from the unelected identifications of its origin. The qualifier “reflective” is important: someone who grows into a stark repudiation of his original identifications may well still be unconsciously gripped by them, meaning no genuine distance has yet been reached. For a soul to qualify as self-possessed and so really “free,” then, “a process of differentiation must have occurred so that there is a point in distinguishing the person from the environment” (188).
But how will we know when such a “process of differentiation” has occurred? Indeed, what exactly does such differentiation look like, in the concrete? I will take up these questions in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIII)
A Quibble
Lear continues his criticism of subjectivism, now extended to embrace the central tendency of modern philosophy. For such a view is implicit in all attempts to know the “self” in abstraction from its history and, by extension, the “world” in which that history unfolds.
Hegel famously critiques this subjectivistic tendency in Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Each essentially supposes — as an unexamined “presupposition” — that the faculty-of-knowing, cognition, may somehow be examined, viz. “known,” in advance of knowing-proper — that is, of the nominal “objects” both of metaphysics and natural science. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit suggests that this subjectivistic standpoint has a particular history, one that sprung logically out of the collapse of other standpoints. Moreover, Hegel claims this development of the soul’s “structure” is inseparable from a parallel development of the wider social world.
Now, my friendly criticism of Lear’s book thus far is that it scants this history-of-a-world as relevant to his “history-of-an-I.” One would not imagine, from his language of “good-enough” environments — ones that either do or do not provision the conditions of I-hood, that are either lovable or not — that, in the West, the structure of the self has radically changed since Ancient Greece. (A commonplace in the modern humanities is that the “individual” — its peculiar reflective, conscientious structure — really appeared only in the modern era.)
To be sure, Lear’s account is not obviously incompatible with this enlargement of focus. He might argue, as he periodically hints in the Introduction and this concluding chapter, that it is only in the modern ear that
I’s emerge that are explicitly committed to the values of self-reflection, individuation, and free self-determination, precisely because it is only now that
a sufficiently loving and lovable, “good enough” world (on a culture-wide scale) has crystallized to condition this “I”
In other words, only now is there a social-cultural-political “environment” offering this range of lovable identificatory objects (values, traits, capacities, myths…), and not merely “parental figures,” who are often enough simply ambassadors of this wider environment, unreflectively transmitting its substance to the next generation.
Hence we might begin with an “I-history,” both empirical and transcendental: both the development of a particular, concrete person, from infancy to adulthood, in a particularly family, in a particular time and place; and the universal structure of the “I,” construed (in Hegel’s words) as a shape-of-consciousness. But we would then “restore” this I-history to its proper context of “world-history” — again, at empirical and transcendental levels of analysis.
If Lear is prepared to go this far, however, I would also ask that he correct another impression his book has made on this reader: namely that the “histories” in question are to be plotted on some kind of a continuum (even a quantitative one — Lear’s ostensible opponent!) running from lesser to greater lovability, from worse to “good-enough” to best worlds. For this conception blurs and weakens the “logic” of these histories and the more differentiated transformations undergone by both “I” and “world.”
Naturally, Lear might complain that I am unfairly critiquing him for not being Hegel — for failing to develop his argument in directions that are far removed from his task in this book. But my point is that Lear’s book itself, implicitly, already gestures in just these directions, without, however, acknowledging the implications.