Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms

Epilogue – Sexuality and the Quarrel between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

231 epilogue – Sexuality and the Quarrel between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Eran Dorfman Who’s afraid of psychoanalysis? more than a century after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on Sexuality, the answer still seems to be: philosophers. Why is it so? although psychoanalysis was founded by Freud as a scientific and rational theory, its investigation has always focused on the irrational aspects of human life, whether their name was “the unconscious”, “sexuality”, “drives”, etc. This paradoxical meeting point of the rational and the irrational marks the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. and yet, if we look at it more closely, we will find that philosophy, too, is a rational enterprise which, sooner or later, meets the irrational aspect of reality. Philosophy acknowledges the realm of irrationality but remains suspicious of it. in what follows, i shall argue that it is this ambiguous attitude which leads to many of the hostilities and misunderstandings that exist between philosophy and psychoanalysis. it was Freud himself who compared the unconscious to the Kantian “thing in itself”. But for Kant, at least in his first Critique, the thing in itself is the limit of philosophy: it is beyond our reach, and therefore should, after its preliminary demarcation, be kept out of the philosophical investigation. Freud, on the other hand, takes the Kantian discovery as the starting point of his theory: Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical to what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. (Freud, 1915, p. 171) Freud admits that the unconscious cannot be reached as such, but, contrary to Kant, he adds that it cannot be set aside either, since it is the secret object of all conscious perceptions. Therefore, the entire psychoanalytical enterprise is devoted to seeking phenomenal and circumstantial evidences for what can never become evident itself. Whereas Kant’s project remained critical Figures_150810.indd 231 22/09/10 10:35 eran dorfman 232 and aimed to set the limits of human understanding by discovering its a priori conditions, Freud’s project, on the other hand, aimed to bypass these conditions by facilitating the entrance of unconscious material into the scope of conscious reflection. Both philosophy and psychoanalysis, then, acknowledge the existence of an irrational core within (human) reality, but they do not agree upon its bounds and effects within the phenomenal world. Psychoanalysis claims that the unconscious has a crucial influence upon the conscious sphere, such that it turns the structure of human understanding upside down. The Freudian discovery of what secretly motivates consciousness goes hand in hand with the wish to shake the traditional picture of the human being, and, interestingly, this wish corresponds to the very nature of the unconscious: it is a dynamic agency which does not acknowledge limits, and, therefore, needs a special theoretical and practical treatment. This leads us to a second difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy: the unconscious not only poses problems for theory, but has practical effects on human life and creates symptoms which psychoanalysis aims to cure. Psychoanalysis is thus a theory which, at the same time, is a therapeutic practice. Whereas philosophy has traditionally posed itself as a detached and remote reflection upon the world and the self, psychoanalysis is forced to constantly draw from clinical findings, engaging in a dialogue between the theory and the clinic. But Freudian psychoanalysis has not simply seen itself as a mere hybrid of thought and praxis. The dialogue which Freud initiated between the empirical world and its theorization soon led him to the notorious assertion that psychoanalysis is a new science: like the scientist, the psychoanalyst proposes a hypothetical theory, puts it to an empirical test, adjusts the theory to the results, goes back to the laboratory, and so forth. But can we justify Freud’s pretension to scientific status? most contemporary scholars would agree that psychoanalysis is not a science in the rigorous sense. every first year psychology student, for instance, reads in her textbook that no distinct scientific evidence is to be found for psychoanalytical hypotheses such as the oedipus complex, the Structural model or the Theory of drives.1 does this mean that one should dismiss the entire psychoanalytical enterprise, ban it from universities, and leave its treatment to non-academic psychoanalytical societies, as is more and more...