Psychotherapy as a Human Science

Reason, the Unconscious,and History: Kant, Hegel, and Marx

38 Reason,the Unconscious, and History Kant,Hegel,and Marx IMMANUEL KANT If Descartes ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, with its characteristic emphasis on reason, then Pascal, who dwelt on the mystery and power of the unconscious, prefigured the Romantic reaction against it. Wedged between the Enlightenment and Romantic movements was Immanuel Kant, who was born in 1724 in Königsberg, East Prussia, in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia. His parents were poor, uneducated followers of Pietism, a branch of Lutheranism. Fortunately, at the age of eight, Immanuel’s pastor gave him a free but thorough education in the classics, and in 1740 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg as a theology student, but quickly gravitated toward physics, mathematics , and the work of Isaac Newton. In 1755, Kant finished his formal education and assumed the position of lecturer at the University of Königsberg. During the early 1760s, his work was somewhat derivative, following faithfully in the footsteps of Christian Wolff, Leibniz’s leading expositor. However, in the 1760s, the ideas that made him famous erupted in startling profusion . In 1770, Kant was appointed professor to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, where he stayed until shortly before his death in 1804. It was during this period that he published his three critiques — the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). We cannot possibly do justice to Kant’s critical philosophy here. Suffice it to say that he admired the audacity of Diderot and the Enlightenment and adopted their motto: “Dare to know.” However, unlike Diderot and his contemporaries, Kant did not imagine that reason can fathom all the mysteries of the universe, and insisted that reason is not transparent , as Descartes imagined, but utterly opaque to itself. Indeed, Kant factored unconscious mental processes into the inner structure of the rational mind, saying that a significant part of our minds are unconscious — that consciousness itself is a product of unconscious mental operations that cannot be directly experienced, but only inferred or reconstructed ex post facto. This marked a radical departure from Cartesian rationalism, on the one hand, and from the naive empiricism of John Locke (1632–1704) and his followers, on the other. The Lockean account of learning stipulated that perception is a passive process in which external stimuli impinge directly on our sensory apparatus. Consciously experienced sensations then give rise to conscious processes of reflection, which then create simple ideas such as shape, color, number, solidity, which in due course give rise to complex ideas such as space, time, causality, and so on. In short, said Locke, the mind is a tabula rasa, or a blank slate, that passively accumulates sense impressions and then gradually renders them intelligible through the construction of an internal “picture” of the world. Ideas like space, time, and causality — the building blocks of natural scientific discourse — are not innate, intuitive, or simply present to consciousness , as rationalists insisted, but constructed through the association of ideas, which are acquired, in turn, from experience (Fancher 1996). At first glance, these epistemological debates have little bearing on theories of psychotherapy, until we remember that most systems of psychology are based on theories of “internal representations” of objects. The same is true for many theories of psychopathology and psychotherapy , though they emphasize internal representations of other people rather than the ways that we constitute our nonhuman environment . Depending on the particular school or orientation, these internal representations may be called imagos, archetypes, constructs, schemas, or “mental maps.” Regardless of what we call them, every Kant, Hegel, and Marx 39 40 Reason, the Unconscious, and History psychotherapist must grapple with the patient’s “inner” world, eventually . So, the question of where these representations come from is not an idle one, either from a theoretical or a therapeutic standpoint. In any case, Locke assumed that the process of constructing internal representations through the association of ideas is a conscious one, for the most part. He also assumed that the ideas of space, time, and causality are valid. David Hume (1711–1776), whom Kant also admired, radicalized Locke’s epistemology by proposing that the concept of causality need not refer to a real relationship between objects in the world. Nor is it an “innate idea,” as Descartes insisted. On the contrary, the concept of causality is a kind of...