THE REBIRTH OF THE IDOLS: THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND THE NIETZSCHEAN UNCONSCIOUS3

The author explores how psychoanalysis mutates in its passing from the privacies of the session to the public spaces of academia, shifting away from enquiry into unfolding unconscious psychic processes guided by its method, and from the clinically based notions Freud and his diverse followers constructed, here called the ‘Freudian unconscious’. In postmodern intellectual contexts Freud's work fuels a ‘Nietzschean unconscious’, issuing from public lecterns in the protagonistic, self‐creating feats of a ‘psychoanalytic discourse’. The ideology of such mutation ishere traced from Nietzsche on to Heidegger and Kojave, and then to Lacan and Laplanche. It reflects the might of the ‘death of evidences’ and the Romantic penchant for the limit‐experience and the primacy accorded to the creative imagination. Discourse as revelation rests on a ‘paradox of the enunciation’ whereby the subject (author) of the statement is taken to be identical to the subject (matter) of the statement. Banishing the boundaries of illusion and evidence, and of self‐overcoming and insight, academic ‘psychoanalytic discourse’creates a ‘return of the idols’ in ‘theoretical’ narcissistic identification.     

The coming of history: Heidegger and Nietzsche against the present

Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche’s conceptions forgetting, memory, and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng), 1938–1940, wherein he sketches his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the light of his contemporaneous notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern for history and for “what has-been” (das Gewesene) as a thinking of the “coming” of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something arriving, as something that “comes” to us. This coming of history is an ontological determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming of history, I return to Nietzsche’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The concluding sections of Nietzsche’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the conclusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation.     

Heidegger’s Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Heidegger maintained that Nietzsche was a metaphysical thinker. What did he mean by that? Not that Nietzsche advanced purely theoretical doctrines that might be perfected or refuted by rational argument. Instead, he meant that Nietzsche’s thinking is a ‘representational thinking’ (vorstellendes Denken) that preserves a commitment to a conception of truth as correctness (Richtigkeit). Nietzsche’s apparent denials of the intelligibility of truth, Heidegger argues, are in fact expressions of our growing insensitivity to truth understood as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Nietzsche’s thinking is thus deeply attuned to metaphysics as Heidegger came to understand it in the late 1930s, namely as a forgetting of being (Seinsvergessnheit), beginning with Plato. His interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly the idea of eternal recurrence, changed less because he changed his mind about Nietzsche than because he reconceived the philosophical tradition since Plato as metaphysical, and so reframed his own project as an attempt to think beyond metaphysics.     

“Heidegger’s Biological Nietzsche”

Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche give prominent attention to the question of what he calls “Nietzsche’s Alleged Biologism”. This biologism is what has been labelled the official Nazi reading of Nietzsche. Yet, there is no single Nazi reading of Nietzsche. There were biologistic and non-biologistic Nazi readings of Nietzsche, as well as anti-Nietzschean Nazis such as Ernst Krieck who denied that his philosophy was either socialist, nationalist, or racial. I will show that Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is a critique of the so-called official Nazi reading of Nietzsche as biologistic. However, Heidegger is not merely replacing the Nazi biologistic reading with a metaphysical reading, for his metaphysical reading of Nietzsche is biological, in a distinct sense. Although I reject this metaphysical reading, Heidegger aids my project of constructing a non-naturalist, yet physical reading of Nietzsche in at least four ways: 1) he rejects the Nazi biologistic reading of Nietzsche; 2) he sets forth distinct notions of the biological and the physical akin to Nietzsche; 3) he argues against scientific naturalism in favour of an alternative mode of knowing; and 4) he recognises that rather than reducing everything to nature, Nietzsche anticipates him in intertwining more originary, dynamic notions of physis and techne.     

Machenschaft and Seynsgeschichte in the Black Notebooks: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s “Rediscovery” of the Greeks

ABSTRACT

One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including his “world-historical anti-Semitism,” his relation to war and politics, via Schmitt and Jünger, as well as machination/calculation but not less his Seynsgeschichte. Other questions include education and academic life in addition to Heidegger’s anxieties regarding the reception of Being and Time in the framework of his history of Beyng/Seyn. Refusing Nietzsche on the Greeks, especially Anaximander, Heidegger “plays out” typically bellicose interpretations of Will to Power, consummating the “abandonment of beings by being, the abandonment that gained sovereignty in the history of metaphysics.” If Heidegger’s Nietzsche thus suspiciously resembles the Nazi Nietzsche, reading the proliferation of editions bears out Heidegger’s claims for the backwards-working force of the Nachlaß.     

Dasein’s Shadow and the Moment of its Disappearance

In his 1937 lectures, Heidegger searches for Nietzsche’s initial thought of “the Moment”. This paper mimics Heidegger’s pursuit of Nietzsche’s Moment by tracing Heidegger’s own early arrival at the Moment in Being and Time, published 10 years prior to his lectures on Nietzsche. Both Zarathustra and Dasein are chased in and out of an authentic relationship with the Moment by their own shadows, which disappear at midday. Dasein’s shadow is the being that is always closest-at-hand, the being in whom I lose myself in everyday care. Dasein forgets itself in inauthentically securing its identity in that which it cares for and that which it is not, darkness. Yet Dasein also confronts its own finitude in its negative double as it witnesses the daily dwindling of its shadow—the everyday passing away of time.     

The Necessity of Thinking Historically – Heidegger After Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the turning that occurs within the work of Martin Heidegger. In particular it seeks to reveal it as a turning that takes place within the notion of history as it is elaborated by Heidegger in the difference between Nietzsche and Hölderlin, that is, in the difference between philosophy and poetizing. It locates the necessity for such a turning in Heidegger's dissatisfaction with his own thinking up to the early 1930s (as suggested in his Black Notebooks). In particular the paper focuses on Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche over the question of nihilism in the hope of drawing out the different approaches of each thinker in trying to think this problem historically, and how this confrontation helps move Heidegger's thought towards a more poietical way of thinking. The paper concludes that Heidegger, in seeking to distinguish his thought from that of Nietzsche's, not only owes a debt to Nietzsche but that Heidegger's non-public texts of the late 1930s and early 1940s are also formally indebted to him.     

The Apollonian Eye and the Dionysian Ear

A comparison of the aesthetic underpinnings of psychoanalytic praxis is undertaken using Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies. Drawing from Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Jung, and Stephen Mitchell as well as research and theory from the study of infant–parent interaction, the author offers a clinical case to illustrate a perspective that gives more emphasis to Dionysian forces in psychoanalytic activity than in traditional case reporting, thus illustrating the utility of such an expansion of underlying assumptions for psychoanalytic praxis. The perspective highlights the importance of attention to “faintly conscious stimuli” on nonsymbolized embodied registers of interaction for their significance in the communication of affective meanings.     

Narrative as a hermeneutical relationship to the unconscious

In this article, what seems to have been two central tenets in contemporary psychoanalytic narrative theory are challenged. The one—propounded by Roy Schafer—is that the goal of psychoanalytic work is to furnish the analysand with an alternative narrative. The other—propounded by Donald Spence—is that any story will do, if only it is coherent, consistent, persuasive and encompasses the known “facts”. Basing his critique of the mentioned standpoints on an intersubjective understanding of psychoanalytic work and a concept of interpreting inspired by the existential hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger, the author discusses the nature of the analytic dialogue and the role of transference together with the ethical basis of truth in the analytic project. Finally, it is indicated that there is a limit to analytic working-through, where the analysand's narrative activity must come to a halt and room be left for a resolve, where the analysand may undergo a fundamental transformation.     

Balthasar and the Eclipse of Nietzsche

This essay is about Hans Urs von Balthasar’s critical appropriation of Nietzsche as a prophetic and apocalyptic thinker whose thought presents a challenge to a tired European culture and a petrified form of Christianity. But it is also about a particular expiration date for this critical appropriation which can be dated to the 1940s. The bulk of the essay deals with two early texts of Balthasar in which Nietzsche is a dominant figure, that is, Balthasar’s dissertation, Geschichte des eschatologischen Problems in der modernen Literatur (1928) and Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939). The centrality of Nietzsche in these texts makes it all the more shocking that by the mid 1940s Balthasar’s engagement has essentially come to an end. The hypothesis put forward is not that the questions raised by Nietzsche have ceased to have pertinence, but that Heidegger, who had also from the beginning been an important figure for Balthasar, essentially takes over Nietzsche’s apocalyptic provocation and thereby eclipses him. Thereafter, Heidegger becomes not only the emblem of the best that Phenomenology can do, but also of a form of Nietzschianism that is more subtle and complex in its negotiations with Christianity and precisely for that reason more dangerous.     

Human Structure,Bildung and Freedom: Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Education

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - Philosophy since Nietzsche and Heidegger has been averse to essentialism and considered to be old-fashioned and outmoded in the mainstream flow...     

Facing the Lively Unity of Difference: Heidegger’s Thoughts on Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Eternal Return and the Self-Overcoming Power of Thinking

Human Studies - This article examines Heidegger’s thoughts on Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return and the self-overcoming power of thinking. Scholarly commentators argue that...     

What can we learn from psychoanalysis and prospective studies about chemically dependent patients?

Despite the common occurrence of drug abusers in the psychoanalytic clinic, contemporary literature on the subject, particularly among publications in the IJP, is sparse. This paper aims to review the most important psychoanalytic contributions on drug dependency in the past 100 years, then attempts to compare their postulations to the findings ofpertinent prospective studies. In these patients, a persistent symbiotic object relationship is found, which ties them to narcissistic functioning, where drug use is viewed in the light of both pleasure without object and omnipotently controlled need. The author also discusses the possible contribution of the mother and father in the genesis of this condition, focusing on the compromise of the paternal function as the deciding factor. The theoretical and technical implications of this approach are illustrated by clinical material.     

Psychoanalytic Ideals,New Technologies,and the Expropriations of the Corporate Self: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Hartman

Seligman admires Stephen Hartman's ability to enter and empathize with the emerging psychosocial ambience of the new social media while maintaining his focus as a psychoanalytic clinician and theorist. He then delineates how the new modes of constructing what constitutes “reality” and the aesthetics of subjectivity may mark a departure from ideals of authenticity and privacy, which are at the center of the psychoanalytic project. Finally, he worries that these shifts are linked to an overall concentration of corporate power and ownership of media and other ideological apparatuses supporting an alienated, fetishized culture of consumption and market-minded vacuity.     

Recent developments in the technical approaches of English-language psychoanalytic schools

This paper summarizes developments in the major approaches to psychoanalytic technique derived from the ego psychology, Kleinian, British independent, self psychology, intersubjectivist, and interpersonal schools over the past fifty years. The author proposes that two major contemporary currents may be differentiated from each other, namely, the psychoanalytic "mainstream"--derived from contemporary Kleinian, contemporary Freudian, and British independent sources, and the "intersubjectivist-interpersonal-self psychology" current. In significant contrast to these two major currents within the English-language psychoanalytic approaches, the French psychoanalytic school has evolved a unique third approach to analytic technique. The author proposes that these three currents constitute the dominant trends regarding technique in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. The paper concludes with a brief outline of the characteristics of each of these technical approaches.     

Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice

There are many different views of conflict in contemporary psychoanalysis, each with its own technical implications. After reviewing the psychoanalytic origins of the concept of conflict, the author discusses the diverse positions of four North American conflict theorists, each of whom offers a different view of the location of conflict both in the mind of the patient and in the material of the clinical hour. The role of conflict in the work of several relational psychoanalysts is then examined. A tentative approach toward integration is proposed.     

Faith in doubt in the end

At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead.” However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche. Instead, they see the death of God as Hegel did, as a moment in a transition to a new way of talking and thinking about God or the Absolute. Their faith in God or the Absolute is not in doubt in the end. We argue that if one hears and thinks Nietzsche’s word “God is dead”—along with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy-then faith in the end is in doubt. Any affirmation or profession of faith is questionable; there is no promise that all conflicts will be resolved and that all will be saved and forgiven. Nietzsche’s saying that “God is dead” calls for thinking and questioning; it calls not for faith, but faith in doubt.     

Authenticity and Heidegger's Antigone

Sophocles' Antigone is the only individual whom Heidegger names as authentic. But the usual interpretations of Heidegger's ‘authenticity’ (as being-towards-death, taking responsibility for norms, world-historical creation, and a neo-Aristotelian phronēsis) either do not apply to Antigone or do not capture what Heidegger finds significant about her. By working through these failures, I develop an interpretation of Heideggerian authenticity that is adequate to his Antigone. The crucial step is accurately identifying the finitude to which Antigone authentically relates: what Heidegger calls ‘uncanniness' (Unheimlichkeit). I argue that uncanniness names being's presencing through self-withdrawal and that Antigone stands authentically towards this in her responsiveness to the call of being and her reticence at the end of explanation. In conclusion, I consider Sophocles' own creative act, which bequeathed to the West an understanding of being and a vision of how to relate to it authentically. I argue that Sophocles' status as a world-historical creator does not provide a competing picture of authenticity but must itself be understood as responsive and reticent.     

Alienating identifications and the psychoanalytic process1

The transmission of psychic life from one generation to the next can result in unconscious, alienating identifications when the parents have not been able to elaborate a process of mourning for their own childhoods. In this article, the author describes the nature of these identifications, constructed around insufficiently symbolized experiences, as revealed during the psychoanalytic process. These unconscious, alienating identifications raise some arduous technical problems for the psychoanalyst as they lead the patient to carry out complex enactments that erase the normal transference markers. The psychoanalyst may then be tempted to resort to pejorative theoretical concepts, such as the death drive. And yet, unknown to the analysand, the insufficiently symbolized psychic elements contain a potential for transformation that may lead to reconstructions and dis‐alienating interpretations. The author distinguishes between alienating identifications and fantasies of identification when the latter transiently appear during the psychoanalytic process. These identification fantasies symbolically register the emotional experience undergone during the analytic sessions and contribute to the integration of insufficiently symbolized psychic elements. These theoretical considerations are fully illustrated by the clinical report of some analytic sessions.