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Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 79-81



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Emerging From Determinism



Keywords
Freud, positivism, Lacan, intention

Lacan has been ignored by philosophers (in the Anglo-American tradition) partly because he was always antipathetic to positivism and pragmatism, and drew on continental phenomenology instead. Psychoanalysis was forged in the Vienna where logical positivism also had its roots in the early twentieth century. After the diaspora in the late 1930s, due to the Nazi annexation of Austria, psychoanalysis then coalesced with American pragmatism to produce a psychoanalytic trend that became extremely mechanistic. The positivist view of reality led to the mechanisms of the ego being thought of as entities you could bark your shins on.

American psychoanalysis derived from, and elaborated, Viennese "ego-psychology," regarding the unconscious as determined biologically, a set of drives and brain functions. It makes psychoanalysis in effect a biology. As a result, the conscious mind was a "determined" epiphenomenon through which the determining unconscious could influence psychology. This is a crass, mechanistic view that distorted the development of psychoanalysis in America—although recently that naivety has deservedly succumbed. The aberration has been breaking down since the 1970s (see Fromm 1971), although it is now desperately trying to survive through mating with the new neuroscience promoted in the American "decade of the brain" (the 1990s).

Freud was himself nonphilosophical. Indeed, he might almost have been said to be antiphilosophical. He doubted

. . . as to which of the countless philosophical systems, should be accepted [by the psychoanalyst], since they all seem to rest on an equally insecure basis. It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself.
(Freud 1921/1955, 270)

Freud is claiming that philosophy should grow from psychoanalysis. As a result, psychoanalysts have mostly neglected philosophy. A further result of this lack of philosophical inquiry is that philosophers have felt justified in neglecting psychoanalysis, including its great achievement—namely, the discovery of the unconscious mind with its nonrational rules of operation that spawn irrationality, self-deception, and akrasia, and its profound implications for a very different view of reality. The unconscious is very difficult for a philosophy predicated on the enlightenment view of man as consciously rational.1 Unless such philosophies open up to a view of irrationality as the essence of humanity, they remain impervious to psychoanalysis, and indeed impervious to a comprehensive view of the human mind.

Because of the antiphilosophical bias of analysts, nobody seemed to notice that psychoanalysis in fact does rest on strong implicit philosophical [End Page 79] assumptions about reality. Freud himself was formed as a nineteenth-century scientist basing his worldview on materialist conceptions of the laws of nature. However, Freud's raw material for his research (the human mind, its experience, its pleasures, and its pains) drove him, kicking and screaming in the opposite direction toward a romantic perception. As a matter of fact, despite the scientism in his work, Freud did adore German romantic literature, from Goethe onward.

Because of the implicit philosophical assumptions of a positivist kind, one problem that Freud ducked was this: How does an intentional person emerge from biologically determined brain functioning?

Lacan and Freud's Romanticism

For most psychoanalysts—American, British, or Continental—the ambiguity in Freud is not addressed.2 It is to Lacan's credit that he exposed the philosophical divide most explicitly, between positivism and romanticism. He took possession of the reluctant Freud for the nonpositivist mode. Lacan confronted and castigated American psychoanalysis because it married into the family of American rationalism; it became committed to pragmatism, positivism, and adaptationism, and thereby accentuated psychic determinism. American positivism was a bête noir for Lacan, who confronted that ambiguity in terms that virtually construct it as an American–French conflict. Lacan's Freud is a purloined one, claiming him for French philosophy. This has made him difficult for both Anglo-American philosophers and Anglo-American psychoanalysts.

In fact, Freud's "romanticism" was not invisible—even to Freud. It was literally...

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