Commentary on "Primitive Mental Processes"

Hinshelwood’s paper vividly presents a number of issues that should be of interest to philosophers (who are not generally renowned for taking a serious interest in Kleinian theory or psychotherapy—a notable exception being Gardner 1993). There are important reasons why they should be, and Hinshelwood mentions two of these explicitly: first, it is far from clear that the person, as traditionally conceived (in, for instance, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Strawson, Dennett, etc.) has any great claim to be in possession of a sound grasp of the nature and extent of his or her autonomy and self-responsibility, and second, that the lack of understanding about the degree to which one exercises control over oneself or exercises an influence over others behooves us all to take special care in the formulation of our arguments justifying what kind of person we are, and for our experienced-as-willed acts.

Nowhere is this more pressing than when considering the ethical responsibility of the psychotherapist, but this should not distract us from taking heed of the ethical implications for us all: if delineating the boundaries of the person (or the self as I would prefer to call it) is a far from straightforward matter, and if the processes involved in generating and sustaining a self-conception at both conscious and unconscious levels are dynamic and responsive to both the demands of the individual’s deep and superficial psychic dispositions and also to those of the interpersonal environment, then a considerable degree of caution is called for when considering how we should parcel out “responsibility” for behavior, actions, and acts.

Let me first deal with the (not unimportant) matter of the ideological commitments that so often accompany any application of Kleinian theory, and which are (probably rightly) regarded with suspicion by those of a skeptical bent. These ideological commitments most often take the form of (simply assumed) theoretical dogmas or non-negotiable “truths.” While the charge of ideological commitments is usually made by those who are hostile to an ideological or theoretical perspective, it is something that cannot be ignored by those (like myself) who find in either perspective much that is valuable. The problem arises with psychoanalytic perspectives as a result of the theoretically fundamental notion that the individual is in principle motivated by processes (and mental contents) that are not easily accessible to the conscious mind. This notion is sometimes accompanied by a complementary claim that unconscious memories and experiences remain unconsciously known—a claim that is notoriously difficult to cash out as a set of propositions capable of refutation—which seems to qualify that claim as an ideological commitment on these grounds alone!

When adopted as doctrinal truths (i.e., non-negotiable and non-revisable) ideological commitments such as these quite rightly attract skeptical suspicion. For example, Freud and his successors have garnered a justifiable reputation for using arguments drawing on the claim of a universal and inherent disposition to self-deception as a means of constructing a world-view that is then applied indiscriminately. While it is true that Freud succumbed to the temptation to enlarge the scope of his analysis of the human psyche into a device for social and cultural explanation (in this he was perhaps responding to the success Jung enjoyed in offering cultural explanations), and others subsequently took this enterprise further (e.g., Fromm, Habermas), this tendency for psychoanalytic theory to be pressed into service for purposes other than that for which it was originally conceived should not blind us to its power as a source of insights into the nature of the struggle each individual has in attempting to come to terms with the challenge of autonomy and responsibility.

From a philosophical point of view, we are free to disregard certain presuppositions and theoretical tenets while exploring others, provided we take care to insulate the insights we derive from contamination with what we wish to avoid. Hinshelwood is to be congratulated in adopting a highly focused view of both his subject-matter and the...