Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (I)
Freud beings “Formulations,” not by directly stating the two principles announced by the title, but by drawing attention to a mark — perhaps the definitive mark — of neurosis:
“We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality…Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable — either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity. But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.” (218)
We may observe straightaway that Freud does not yet draw the qualitative distinction between neurosis and psychosis that will characterize his later thinking — certainly not in any tidy way. Here, in other words, while mental illness is implicitly plotted along a spectrum from mild to severe, it uniformly involves to some degree an alienation from reality. Later, though, Freud will distinguish sharply, not only between degree of alienation from reality, but between the direction or type of it. In particular, he will suggest that, whereas a neurosis entails an alienation from inner reality (a repression of unacceptable drive derivatives), a psychosis is defined by alienation from outer reality proper (a “denial” of intolerable events in, and features of, the world). (See e.g. the “Fetishism” essay from 1927.)
In any event, and leaving aside any internal differentiation of the “reality alienation” concept, Freud now connects this “disturbance” with “the fundamental determinants of neurosis” (218), that is, its aetiological preconditions. “By introducing the process of repression into the genesis of the neuroses we have been able to gain some insight into this connection” (218).
While Freud’s description here does not yet explicitly enunciate the “pleasure” and “reality” principles per se, it seems to intimate and even demand them. Consider how this first paragraph anticipates the piece’s greater themes: that our relation to reality, to “truth,” is precarious; that when this reality is painful, the neurotic can tolerate only so much of it; that, indeed, when the pain of frankly acknowledging this reality, some truth, surpasses the capacity to endure it, certain defenses are put into operation (denial, repression) that effectively relieve this pain — but at the price of contact with reality, with truth. In other words, there seem to be situations in which one may either maintain “pleasure,” or maintain a hold on “reality” — but not both. And the neurotic is essentially a person who, confronted with such a situation, decides in favor of the former, or sacrifices “reality” to the “pleasure principle.”
The neurotic situation, then, involves an impairment in one’s “reality” sense, “de la function du réel” (218), precisely when and because that reality conflicts with “pleasure.” And those “principles” named in the piece’s title, and their tendency to conflict with one another under conditions of strain — this entire picture is implied in Freud’s introductory conception of neurosis. Hence this conception motivates the remainder of the essay, which is just what Freud now tells us:
“And we are now confronted with the task of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics and of mankind in general to reality, and in this way of bringing the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of our theories” (218)
Now this description of our “task,” to the execution of which the essay is now dedicated, appears to contain several subtleties.
To begin with, we are considering, not merely the organism’s “relation…to reality” (neurotic or healthy, individual or collective), but rather the “development” of this relation. It goes without saying, for Freud, that the faculty of cognition — broadly, a respect for wish-independent reality and a capacity for truth-apt judgments concerning it — is something remarkable that must be derived from psychological pressures, motivations, and “principles” that antedate this faculty. Such a “relation to reality,” that is, has not always obtained. Nor, having first originated, has it remained in some fixed shaped. On the contrary, it has developed in ways Freud now proposes to reconstruct. (The program is “genealogical,” then, in a way that Nietzsche would recognize.)
Similarly, the second part of the quotation contains a deceptively simple distinction that a reader may easily overlook. The proper object of Freud’s essay is not “the real external world,” but rather “the psychological significance of the external world.” It is ostensibly this “significance” which “the structure of our theories” lack and ought to assimilate. I will not attempt to answer, but only flag some of the questions and ambiguities presented by this distinction, which touches the philosophical core of psychoanalysis. For Freud, science itself — of which psychoanalysis is one perfectly legitimate sector — has exclusively to do with reality. Hence it is, as we will shortly find, the most developed instantiation of the “reality principle.” Its activities and results have achieved the greatest possible autonomy vis-à-vis the pleasure principle. That is, it seeks and honors truth, whether or not the latter happens to “please” or “displease” the seeker. (Later, Freud will qualify this characterization somewhat.)
But if psychoanalysis is itself indeed a science, and therefore has “reality” as its object, we might naively ask: what type of “reality” is Freud examining, both in this piece and in the rest of his corpus? The distinction we emphasized above puts us on the scent. For if we are essentially interested here, not in “external reality” per se, but in its “psychological significance” for an organism in some kind of contact with it, then the term “reality” acquires an equivocal ring. What could “psychological significance” mean in this context? Plainly for Freud it constitutes one piece of reality — otherwise psychoanalysis qua science would not trouble itself with it. Is this “psychic reality,” the object of a clinical analysis, in which what matters is not the patient’s “material” reality — what “really is” the case — but only the “significance” he or she attaches to it?
And so on. I will return to these threads as our commentary proceeds.
David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (V)
A Coda
In the last entry I concluded a proper “review” of David Black’s Psychoanalysis and Ethics. Here I’d like to revisit a couple lines of thought intimated in the review that, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to develop.
Psychoanalysis, Science, Philosophy
I suspect that some distinction between “causes” and “ends” — between Aristotle’s “efficient” and “final” causes — would have greatly simplified Black’s account, though perhaps at some cost to its originality. For in a significant way, the question of “positivism’s” historical grip on psychoanalysis — the unambiguous antagonist in Black’s drama — is precisely the question of its uneasy relation to “ends,” to the irreducible place of teleology in human thought and behavior. Drawing this distinction would have brought Black’s ideas into the theoretical ambit established by Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas, both of whom attempt to reckon with the scientific, efficient-causal ambitions (and pretensions) of psychoanalysis, as compared (especially) to its clinical practice, which presupposes “hermeneutic" and “teleological” forms of of sense-making. A patient’s mental functioning and behavior in a given instance, still less his or her interpersonal integration with the analyst, is never simply caused by antecedent states of affairs, but is always also undertaken “for the sake of” some end. And at a higher level, clinical psychoanalysis itself, even when confined exclusively to interpretation, is unintelligible apart from certain “ends” toward which it is directed: above all, the improved self-awareness, functioning and freedom of the patient.
To be sure, Black himself refers to this distinction, almost in passing, in his review of Jonathan Lear’s work:
“This final cause [shared by diverse psychoanalytic traditions] is the patient’s “freedom”… [T]he recognition of an inherently ethical dimension to psychoanalysis…opens up the possibility that psychoanalysis could in the future found itself on a more coherent and stronger philosophical base than Freud himself, product of the late nineteenth century’s fascination with natural science, was able to give it” (39)
But apart from the single paragraph containing this passage, Black leaves this fundamental idea essentially undeveloped. Again, as I emphasized in the last few entries, the desideratum of a “philosophical base” introduces obscurities that Black never addresses directly. Yet whatever Black means with this metaphor, the project would surely have been advanced by some engagement with, for example, Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy, or the many other sophisticated treatments of psychoanalysis’s uneasy relation to science.
Some Notes on “Foundations”
Even the general “foundationalist” program, whatever its ultimate form — broadly, that some “x” must be grounded in some foundation, “y” — ought immediately to raise questions such as:
Does “x” require such a foundation? — do we feel a theoretical or practical “need” for it?
If we do feel such a need, then why? — what are we hoping to accomplish via such a foundation?
Is such a foundation possible?
As I rule, it seems, we must look for answers to such basic questions “between the lines” of Black’s argument.
In fact, this persistent advocacy of a philosophical and ethical “foundation” of psychoanalysis — one allegedly missing from Freud’s original picture but somehow demanded by it — suggests something Black seems to believe without stating openly. The belief is that psychoanalysis is not autonomous in its theory and practice, but is somehow parasitic upon something “extra analytic” it cannot provide from out of its own resources. But what sort of thing is philosophy, and especially those branches of philosophy called “phenomenology” and “ethics,” such that some more “empirical” theory or practice — say, psychoanalysis — stands in need of them?
Sometimes Black’s position seems to be that psychoanalysis has a weak foundation, and our task — with the assistance, perhaps, of Levinas — is to give it a stronger one. All sorts of unfortunate consequences evidently follow from our failure to deliver such a foundation.
At other times, Black suggests that the tradition of psychoanalysis — certainly the work of clinical analysis — is in fairly good shape. Hence we may, as a nearly pro forma gesture or academic exercise, choose to recognize and articulate the philosophical ethics long implicit in this tradition and its practice (particularly in so-called “object relations” psychoanalysis, Black’s favored school). But the analytic tradition itself, the mutual conduct of analyst and analysand, can get along fine without this articulation — it doesn’t require our reflections to do its “work” any more than birds require ornithology to build nests.
Ethics
Ironically, the book does not explicitly address the questions that its title, Psychoanalysis and Ethics, calls most urgently to this reader’s mind, namely: what is or ought to be our “psychoanalytic ethics?” (Or: what is an “ethical psychoanalysis?”)
On the one hand, what sort of ethical conception — values — are implied or demanded by a psychoanalytic understanding of the human condition? (39-40). Or again: what does psychoanalysis have to contribute to the wider ethical discourse? On the other hand, running in the opposite direction: how ought the practice of a clinical psychoanalysis itself to be conducted? — with which values in mind? What end or ends ought a clinician to help realize?
To my mind, many of the most interesting questions belonging to the “psychoanalysis and ethics” nexus arise just here. Ought analysis to have some sort of morally educative role? Does the goal of analysis — hence the job of an effective analyst — include the “improvement” of the patient in some robust moral sense? I imagine most working analysts would disclaim any such “patronizing” presumption. Few would say unreservedly that their “mandate" involves making the patient more virtuous, let alone that a successful analysis brings the patient around to the analyst’s own ethical or political vision. And yet something verging on this presumption may be discerned just beneath the surface of Black’s argument — and sometimes above the surface!
But I have always found that the moral “austerity” of Freud’s vision consists precisely in its non-moralizing substance. This sort of austerity is reflected, for instance, in the famous lines from the Ego and the Id: “[T]he normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows” (52). For both our immoral impulses (incestuous, murderous) and our moral condemnation of these impulses (in the form of punitive guilt feelings) are largely unconscious. As I suggested in the last entry, however, I occasionally suspect that this “unconscious” layer of mind is precisely what is missing from Black’s account.
David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (IV)
Concluding Comments — A Critique
In a certain sense, however, the steps of Black’s argument seem to run in nearly the opposite direction of the one I’ve recounted, and I want to conclude with a critical observation about this. We saw in the last entry that Descartes begins to mistrust his everyday opinions once he realizes they rest on a weak “foundation.” By contrast, Black, whose central concern is ethics, frequently appears to be arguing something like: ‘Our everyday ethical opinions — our values, intuitions, beliefs, and objects — are unsupported by a “positivist” foundation. Therefore a new foundation is needed, to restore legitimacy to these opinions.’ In other words, whereas Descartes (and Freud, incidentally) begin by throwing doubt on our “everyday opinions,” since they purportedly rest on unsound foundations, Black essentially begins by affirming our “everyday opinions” — broadly speaking, conventional ethical norms and experiences — and insisting that we build a new foundation to support and reinforce those opinions, since the old (and current) foundation does not.
Now, one may certainly appreciate the appeal of such a project. According to Black, the proposed “re-grounding,” if successful, will do human beings a lot of good, promote our individual and collective welfare, and so on. As I indicated at the beginning of this review, the stakes for Black could not be higher:
“[I]n the modern era, neither philosophy nor psychoanalysis has been able to furnish an adequate account of a basis for the compelling power of ethics to motivate decision, or to recognize the values without which humanity is unlikely to survive.” (11)
Or again, in one of the later essays dedicated to Levinas:
“In recent years, the crucial importance of ethical issues has been increasingly recognized both in psychoanalysis and elsewhere. The accelerating dangers in the public domain, to do with climate-change, AI, and mendacious populism have made the devastating consequences of a failure to discover a compelling basis for ethics ever more apparent.” (108)
But the appeal of a theoretical conclusion is no substitute for its feasibility, as surely Black would agree. Freud himself warns us not to mistake a wish for its realization: our need to believe something is no measure of its truth, but on the contrary calls the latter into question all the more insistently.
(For understandable reasons, Black himself takes an ambivalent attitude towards this skepticism, especially as regards Freud’s critique of religion. Black attempts to circumvent the disturbing consequences of this critique by distinguishing between religion-as-belief (that is, in religious objects of various sorts), and religion-as-institutional-support for “epiphantic” ethical experiences that are not themselves matters of “belief” at all. While Black acknowledges the potential “infantilism” of religion under the former description, he defends the legitimacy of the latter.)
Of course, this same Freud, who in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego notoriously proposed that fraternal love, sociability, and ethical ideals like justice and equality are “reaction formations” against more primitive attitudes of rivalry, envy, and hostility (66), would surely have some critical words for Black, too. But apart from the occasional dismissive comment (e.g. 20, 107-8), Black himself never really engages with the legacy of psychoanalysis in its challenge to our conventional ethical ideas.
(Even Immanuel Kant, that militantly deontological ethical thinker, was forced to concede our helplessness to know, in any given instance, whether our actions really have moral worth, or whether they’ve (perhaps unconsciously) been tainted by sensual inclination and self-love. Hence it is ironic that Black enlists Kant (23) as a philosophical ancestor to Levinasian, “apodictic” ethical experience. Substitute Levinas’s “face of the other” for Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” and one gains a sense both of Black’s objection to the Freudian vision and of Freud’s probable rejoinder to it. In either case, someone propounding a view about the mainspring of ethics or religion appeals to apodictic, first-personal, “phenomenological” experience. Yet the skeptic may always reply: ‘I’ve experienced no such thing.’)
Whatever its merits, the result is surely a domestication of psychoanalysis. Black’s position is evidently that, understood aright, psychoanalytic ideas are none-too-disturbing to our ethical (and religious) assumptions, concerns, and needs. It is rather as though, following Freud’s claim that his “science” — alongside Copernicus and Darwin — has dealt a devastating blow to our narcissistic self-regard, and that our relation to ethical reality is not what it seems, Black emerges to assure us that all is not lost — that, indeed, with a few renovations to our philosophical “foundations,” we will find this relation intact, after all.
Undoubtedly Black would claim — and does (38) — that Freud simply got things wrong here. But his account, as far as I can make out, presupposes, rather than demonstrates, Freud’s error. My own intuition is that precisely the thinker most viscerally repelled by Freud’s critique, as Black appears to be, ought also to be the most wary about this repulsion. One may list all the negative, even catastrophic consequences for human beings following from our failure to “found” or “deduce” our values. Such a situation makes an alternative appealing, indeed, materially and mortally urgent. But it does not in the slightest touch the truth or untruth of that alternative. And a vision that seems to offer the very “consolation” Freud explicitly denied to his teaching should perforce fall under the same suspicions he voiced.
David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (III)
Descartes and the Meaning of Foundations
We concluded the last discussion with a question: what is the meaning, for Black, of a philosophical “foundation?” As I suggested, it is both surprising and frustrating that he never addresses this question directly, since the trope pervades virtually every essay in the collection. And I examined a particular instance of this language — again, one of countless instances — to illustrate some of the puzzles and ambiguities it raises: “With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in philosophy” (18).
In fact, the drift of Black’s argument suggests that the quoted sentence misrepresents his considered critique. The latter concerns, not the “base [of psychoanalysis] in medicine and the natural sciences,” but rather the problematic relation of psychoanalysis with the “scientific Weltanschauung” (9), “the nineteenth century materialist conception of science” (9), or the philosophy of “positivism,” which for Black “involved accepting materialism and rationality, and rejecting metaphysics, idealism, and religion” (9).”
With these clarifications in place, we may revise Black’s sentence into something like the following: ‘With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in philosophical positivism, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in the philosophy of phenomenology.’
Very well. But now, again, we confront the more serious question: what precisely could it mean for something, X, — say, psychoanalysis — to “stand” on the “base” of something else, Y, — say, phenomenology? The metaphor has a distinguished philosophical pedigree, suggesting that, in much the way that
a building “rests” upon a sound “foundation” and collapses in the absence (or upon the destruction) of the latter; similarly,
certain of our ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and practices “rest” upon some underlying philosophical conception, and enjoy only so much legitimacy as that conception imparts to them.
Perhaps the best-known instance of this metaphor, at least in the modern era, appears at the opening of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy:
“It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences…[I]t will not be requisite that I should examine each [opinion] in particular, which would be an endless undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I shall only in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions rested” (45-46)
Students of the Meditations will recall that Descartes’ initial “foundation” — those “principles upon which all my former opinions rested” — is a version of empiricism, or the view that the most “certain” knowledge is won from the deliverances of the senses. The Meditations, though, which document Descartes’ experiments in “radical doubt,” demonstrate that knowledge derived from sense-experience is invariably doubtful. (After all, the knower might always be hallucinating, or dreaming, or demonically possessed, or otherwise deceived by his or her senses.) It follows for Descartes that the empiricist “foundation” — the principle that the senses are the most trustworthy — is shaky. More specifically, his claim is that opinions resting upon such a foundation — for example, my “opinion” that I am really sitting here at my desk, rather than deep in a dream-state — are equally shaky, that is, untrustworthy.
In the remainder of the Meditations, Descartes attempts to justify his own, alternative “foundation,” one constituted by rationalist principles. On this view, our only “indubitable” knowledge is based upon self-conscious reasoning, paradigmatically the cogito’s certainty that “I think, therefore I am,” the sort of knowledge that cannot be coherently doubted, since it is built from “clear and distinct ideas.” For Descartes, only knowledge that rests on this foundation — rather than the old, empiricist one — is finally trustworthy.
We may leave aside the question of whether or not Descartes’ project succeeds. My purpose with this detour was only to illustrate one clear and compelling use of the “foundation” metaphor. It is tempting to construe Black’s own use of the foundations idiom in just this way. On such a reading, when he writes that psychoanalysis “needs to be stood on a different philosophical foundation, a phenomenological base” (3), he would be telling us that (traditional) psychoanalytic ideas and beliefs are uncertain and flimsy, inasmuch as their traditional “foundation” — positivism — is itself uncertain and flimsy. (For example: the foundation of positivism might not support our suppositions concerning either the existence or the attributes of “internal objects.”)
By contrast, a more robust or “solid” foundation — phenomenology, phenomenological ethics, and so on — might succeed in “supporting” psychoanalytic ideas where the old foundation failed. If the traditional ideas are supported by this new “base,” so much the better. (In Descartes’ account, we can — ultimately — found our commonsense beliefs about sense experience on his new, rationalist “foundation.”) On the other hand, having established a new, phenomenological foundation, perhaps we’ll discover that traditional psychoanalytic ideas cannot be supported —hence they must be abandoned, revised, or replaced by ideas that can rest atop the new foundation. (For Black, such “new ideas” seem to include [phenomenologically-secured] “allegorical objects,” “ethical” objects,” “religious objects,” and the like.)
Yet the remainder of the passage we’ve been examining complicates this reading. After telling us that psychoanalysis ought to rest on the foundation, not of positivism, but of phenomenology, Black continues:
“To say this is in no way to disrespect science, but to recognize that the “phenomenological” nature of the internal world makes it a different sort of thing from the shared objective world that science describes so successfully — not a replacement of it…but different from it and requiring a different approach to language if we are to grasp it appropriately” (18)
With this qualification, Black’s “foundations” proposal begins to sound like a simple plea for ontological pluralism. On this view, some object-domains (say, those comprising subatomic particles and black holes) demand one kind of foundation — precisely something akin to positivism. Other domains (those of “internal objects,” and similar items) demand another foundation — one described as phenomenological, ethical, and so on. But once foundations are multiplied in this way, the metaphor loses much of its power. Moreover, I’m far from certain that Black would accept this amendment concerning a “plurality” of foundations. For at other times (e.g. 10, 126, 141), he also suggests that phenomenology ought to be the foundation of both psychoanalysis and every other standpoint — very much including the natural sciences.
David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (II)
Among David Black’s many preoccupations in his collection of essays, one ranks highest — namely, “the thought that psychoanalysis, when Freud founded it, had no adequate philosophical base from which to consider the hugely important questions of ethics” (1). This criticism naturally implies a task: to supply to psychoanalysis an adequate philosophical “base,” so positioning it to address “important questions of ethics.”
Yet as I began to suggest in the last entry, the meaning of philosophical “foundations” — particularly vis-à-vis psychoanalysis — is itself hardly obvious, and Black’s use of the phrase is not terribly clarifying. Indeed, in the Introduction alone, in the space of just a few pages, we find the following handful of passages, all of which contain variations on the metaphor of “foundations”:
“Levinas[’s]… phenomenology, the prioritizing of direct experience over theoretical understanding, allowed him to make an important move: he declared that ethics was “first philosophy,” that ethical insight, derived from a perception of “the other” in all his or her alterity, recognized something that was prior to “ontologies” such as those that underpin the natural sciences.” (2-3, my italics)
“[M]y own earlier writings…were still impeded by the over-valuation of science in the Freudian tradition…I think now that that tradition needs to be stood on a different philosophical foundation, a phenomenological base.” (3, my italics)
“What Levinas meant by ethics is something rather different from what concerned Aristotle. Levinas is concerned with something deeper, which provides the necessary perspective from which “Aristotelian” virtues and ethical decisions can be addressed.” (4, my italics)
“[T]he initial standpoint of psychoanalysis on the base of natural science (as understood at the end of the nineteenth century) rendered the nature of internal objects…impossible to address adequately. More recently, a more phenomenological approach and, particularly, the thinking of American psychoanalysts…have opened up new possibilities.” (4, my italics)
“[My essay] discusses the “different legacy” for psychoanalysis that [Jonathan] Lear describes, deriving from the thought of Hans Loewald and enabling psychoanalysis to be set on a more secure philosophical basis than that of Freud’s understanding of science.” (5, my italics)
Given the obvious significance of this metaphor for Black, and its appearance in virtually every essay, it is regrettable that he never examines it directly. This lacuna is especially remarkable, since so much of philosophy in the last century is avowedly anti-foundationalist in its ambitions. Unfortunately, Black writes as though he is either unaware of, or indifferent to, any potential objections to his capitalization on this metaphor.
As these quotations from the Introduction indicate, though, the metaphor easily becomes slippery: sometimes it is natural science that has, or requires, a “foundation” in philosophy (“…‘ontologies’ such as those that underpin the natural sciences”); sometimes it is psychoanalysis more narrowly that must be grounded in a “prior” phenomenological ethics — an ethics, moreover, that needn’t be sought in the precincts of analytic experience, but may be provided by (extra-analytic) ethical intuitions; sometimes another institution or tradition is at issue, as is announced in the title of the final essay, “Levinas’ Re-basing of Religion”; and at still other times, Black’s words suggest that ethics itself — norms, ideals, values — must be “grounded” at a deeper level of “ethical” experience or analysis than we’ve hitherto appreciated.
To be clear, I am not saying that these discrete foundationalist programs are inconsistent with one another, or even that they are separable in practice. (Perhaps upon examination we will find that each “foundation” somehow demands or presupposes the others.) I am saying, however, that Black is far from clear that he is advocating different sorts of programs, at different times, let alone clear about how these might add up to something more than their sum. And insofar as the central, organizing metaphor of Black’s project is so imprecise, I’ve had difficulty coming to an assessment of it.
An Illustration
To get some sense of the (unacknowledged) complexity into which this metaphor plunges the reader, consider the following, quite representative passage, from Chapter 2:
“With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in philosophy…To say this is in no way to disrespect science, but to recognize that the “phenomenological” nature of the internal world makes it a different sort of thing from the shared objective world that science describes so successfully — not a replacement of it…but different from it and requiring a different approach to language if we are to grasp it appropriately.” (18)
What exactly is Black suggesting in this passage? Let us consider it closely. To begin with the first sentence: Freudian psychoanalysis, we are told, had “its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences,” rather than “stand[ing] on a richer and more complex base in philosophy,” as Loewald’s thinking putatively allows.
But is this a sound characterization of psychoanalysis’s original “base” — that is, in “medicine and the natural sciences” — even according to Black’s own conception? In fact, throughout the essays, Black oscillates in his critique between two different objects:
science — 19th century or otherwise; and
scientistic philosophy — announced by terms like “positivist,” “materialist,” and (more tendentiously) “reductive”
While the passage above flags the “initial base” of psychoanalysis “in medicine and the natural sciences,” Black also claims things like, “the elimination of subjecthood in favor of objectivities…followed from Freud’s adoption of the standpoint of reductive materialism” (15, my italics). This picture is also reflected in passages like the following:
“The tradition within philosophy that gives “science” the central place as our model for knowledge and for the process of acquiring knowledge has valorized certain philosophical modes — ontology, epistemology — at the expense of ethics.” (20, my italics)
At such moments, Black’s objection is not that Freudian psychoanalysis was founded on science, but that it was founded precisely on an inadequate philosophy: the “scientific Weltanschauung” (9), or “the nineteenth century materialist conception of science” (9); or again, “the ‘materialism’ that was an unquestioned metaphysical assumption in Freud’s scientific milieu” (107). And this, indeed, seems to be Black’s considered view. Hence the ostensible “foundation” of psychoanalysis was never “science” per se, but rather the philosophy of “positivism,” which (on this account) “involved accepting materialism and rationality, and rejecting metaphysics, idealism, and religion” (9). (I’ll pass over without comment Black’s questionable proposal here that “rationality” is something to contrast with “metaphysics, idealism, and religion.”)
Once these clarifications are in view, however, we must turn back to the more significant question about the meaning of philosophical “foundations,” generally speaking, and as well as the meaning it holds for Black, in particular.
I will discuss these questions in the next entry.