Psychoanalysis and Human Values

Psychoanalysis can contribute quite a lot to the question of values and to a theory of ethics. While the first part of this presentation is focused on the impact psychoanalysis continues to exert on present day ethical theory, the second part discusses Erich Fromm's particular approach to psychoanalysis. Fromm was the first to reformulate in his psychoanalytic approach the idea of an ethic of the virtues. With his theory of character (and of social character) he made values an integral part of psychoanalytic theory. Hence, what matters most morally from a psychoanalytic stance is the quality of character orientation. Despite the fact that - in Fromm's own socio-psychoanalytic approach - man's character is the product of adaptation to the environment, morality for him is dictated by economic and social requirements - whatever common sense may tell us to the contrary. For Fromm there is an intrinsic primary tendency to growth in all human beings. Thus, morally good is whatever furthers the growth of our own powers by which we relate to the outside world and to ourselves in a loving, "sane" and creative way. The last section reflects some implications of Fromm's approach to understanding values as an integral part of psychoanalytic theory, and finally discusses whether the search for truth and human values is as obsolete as postmodern thinking claims.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Languages of trauma; towards a phenomenological response

In this article, I explore the possibilities of a phenomenological perspective on trauma in psychoanalytic practice. I highlight the problem of interpretations that universalise experiences of trauma, provide explanations in terms of ‘causes’ and assume particular processes/stages of ‘recovery’ from it. The notion of trauma challenges dichotomies of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ worlds. Traumatic experiences always have a context – that of the immediate relational circumstances of the individual suffering from the trauma, including the wider social/relational context, and the person’s history. I argue for an attunement to the language and specificity of the meanings, verbal and non-verbal, conscious and unconscious, of the client’s suffering within the analytical relationship. This requires the therapist to avoid ‘ready-made’ interpretations from psychoanalytic theory and to be open to the poiesis of the speech, which emerges between therapist and client. My discussion of my reading of the Chilean documentary film, Nostalgia for the Light, which focuses on the traumatic experiences of those who survived Pinochet’s military regime (1973–1989), highlights how diverse responses to trauma are. The originality of the language of the film calls on us as therapists to discover new ways of listening and speaking to our clients’ suffering.     

Dreaming woman: Image,place, and the aesthetics of exile

Looking closely at an Argentine dream interpretation column published in a popular women's magazine from 1948 to 1951, this article examines the role of the dream image in shaping psychoanalytic discourse on femininity and national identity. The column, ‘Psychoanalysis Will Help You,’ emerged during Juan Domingo Perón's first presidency, featuring verbal interpretations written under the pen name ‘Richard Rest,’ as well as surreal photomontages by Grete Stern, a German‐born, Bauhaus‐trained photographer living in exile since 1936. While the column's Jungian text encourages readers’ adaptation to the external reality of their social situation, Stern's droll images emphasize the disjuncture between subject and environment, exposing tensions between the experience of exile and the Peronist mission to consolidate an Argentine national identity. Experimenting formally with European avant‐garde techniques, Stern presents femininity and nation as conflictive imaginary configurations. This theme resurfaces at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where Nicola Costantino's multimedia installation Eva – Argentina: A Contemporary Metaphor was exhibited alongside Carl Jung's Red Book. Formal contrasts between Stern's use of photomontage, Costantino's projection technique, and Jung's theory of mandala symbolism indicate the divergent ways in which their artwork posits the therapeutic function of the dream image, as well as the role of aesthetic production in psychoanalytic care.     

Embodied female experience through the lens of imagination

Abstract: In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.     

The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (I)

The main source of evidence for psychoanalytic theory comes from the clinical situation. Yet recent empirical studies in verbal conditioning and the social psychology of persuasion indicate that psychoanalysts and therapists of other schools are speciously validating their own theories by unwittingly influencing their patients’ behavior. In the light of this evidence it is small wonder that psychoanalysts consistently ‘validate’ psychoanalytic theory in their clinical practice while therapists of other schools ‘validate’ their own theories in their clinical practice. Although Freud was not unaware of the problems of ‘suggestion’ and the conflicting evidence of rival schools of psychotherapy, he never met these problems successfully. Contemporary psychoanalysts have added little to Freud's original position. One recent attempt, by Fritz Schmidl, to formulate new criteria for the correctness of psychoanalytic clinical interpretations, does not completely escape the problem of suggestion and has new problems of its own.     

‘For Beauty is nothing but the barely endurable onset of Terror’: Outline of a general psychoanalytic aesthetics

Even close to 80 years after Freud's words that psychoanalysis “has scarcely anything to say about beauty” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, p. 82) the question of a specific psychoanalytic aesthetic is still faced with a deficit in theory. Since aesthetics is related to Aisthesis, the Greek word for ‘perception’, a psychoanalytic aesthetic can solely emerge from a psychoanalysis of perceptive structures. The term ‘kinaesthetic semantic’ is introduced in order to exemplify via music how perceptive experiences must be structured for them to be experienced as beautiful. The basic mechanisms – repetition of form (rhythm, unification) and seduction (deviation, surprise) – are defined. With the help of these mechanisms an intensive contact between perceiving object and kinetic subject, the physical self, is established. The intensive relatedness is a requirement for the creative process in art and also for psychic growth on the subject's level. The described basic mechanisms of the aesthetic process in music can also be encountered in painting and poetry. By the means of a self‐portrait by Bacon it will be examined how, in art, terror and traumatization are represented via targeted disorganization of beauty endowing mechanisms, hence finding an enabling form of confrontation and integration of fended contents.     

Alleviating love’s rage: Hegel on shame and sexual recognition

ABSTRACT

The paper reconstructs Hegel’s account of shame as a fundamental (‘existential’) affect. Qua spiritual, the human individual strives for self-determination; hence she is ashamed of the fact that, qua bodily or natural, she is weak, vulnerable, and needy – namely, externally determined. Hegel approves of two typical responses to shame: (1) Reduction – the individual struggles for honour in civil society by disciplining her activity, including hiding potentially shameful features from others. Here, shame is reduced but remains a psychological burden. (2) Within marriage, however, shame is alleviated – the individual reveals shameful features to her lover and is recognized as a bodily, needy and vulnerable creature. I discuss two modes in which such recognition is manifested. First, since love is an ‘immediate unity’ – rather than governed by a rigid normative code – the spouses are implicated in each other’s failures, and, moreover, can creatively modify the significance of features, expressing their ‘infinite uniqueness’ by conferring positive value on what counts (in civil society) as shameful. The second mode is sexual intimacy: lovers affirm each other’s bodies by bodily, habituated – and therefore trustworthy – means.     

Dissociation,the true self and the notion of the frozen baby

Abstract

The widespread ‘trauma talk’ that is prevalent in the social sciences, has, in recent years, become increasingly commonplace in psychoanalytic writings, especially in attachment theory and relational psychoanalysis. This paper examines dissociation, a key concept in ‘trauma theory’, in conjunction with the Winnicottian term ‘true self’, in the context of a particular discursive and theoretical combination of the two. This discursive formation is named ‘the frozen baby discourse’, and it is presented and analysed. A critique is offered of the way ‘true self’, understood as a humanistic concept, is often used together with dissociation, in order to create a theoretical construct that is far removed from Winnicottian theory. This paper begins by exploring definitional issues, both around dissociation and ‘true self’. It is subsequently argued that this contemporary usage of ‘true self’ in combination with dissociation has important implications for psychoanalytic practice.     

No Empathy for Empathy: An Existential Reading of Husserl’s Forgotten Question

ABSTRACT

Empathy is a term used to denote our experience of connecting or feeling with an Other. The term has been used both by psychologists and phenomenologists as a supplement for our biological capacity to understand an Other. In this paper I would like to challenge the possibility of such empathy. If empathy is employed to mean that we know another person’s feelings, then I argue that this is impossible. I argue that there is an equivocation in the use of the term ‘empathy’ which conditions the appropriation of the Other as we think that we know how the Other feels. To claim that we do know an Other’s feelings – or any kind of their intentional experience – means to appropriate their experience through our own. I will first reveal the equivocal use of the term ‘empathy’ and, then, I will explore Husserl’s use of the term. In Husserl, the understanding of an Other as empathy is only partial. I shall conclude by reiterating a thesis from philosophy of existence and feminist theory according to which to know another person comes from creating a community with them and not because we have a biological structure that can mirror each other’s feelings.     

Simulation and Irrationality

Abstract

In this paper, I hope to show how a recent theory in the philosophy of mind concerning how we ‘read’ the minds of others—namely, Heal's version of simulation theory—is consistent with the view that the kind of understanding we bring to bear on the irrational is different in kind from the way we understand one another in the course of everyday life. I shall attempt to show that Heal's version of simulation theory (co-cognition) is to be favoured over its rival ‘theory theories’ in the light of its accommodation of deeply irrational mental states. I claim that simulation theory preserves an asymmetry of psychological explanation which is not similarly preserved by a theory theory account, and I argue that this preservation of asymmetry is an advantage of Heal's account.     

Clarifying value judgment: Principles of content and procedure

This contribution to the debate over Marx's theory of value gives an account of his concept of ‘abstract labour’. Contrary to Stanley Moore {Inquiry, Vol. 14 [1971]), Marx never abandons his early critique of the Hegelian ‘Concept'; for he gives a material basis to the conception of social labour as concretely universal. If, in analysing the commodity form of the product of labour, Marx characterizes the labour that forms the substance of value as ‘abstractly universal labour’, the priority of the abstract over the concrete at this point is not due to the influence of Hegel's Logic on Marx's work, but reflects the material process of abstraction occurring in commodity exchange. We show that Marx takes up a critical stance to this reality.     

L’écriture limite: Kristeva's Postmodern Feminist Ethics

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.     

Towards a theory of communicative competence

In this, the second of two articles outlining a theory of communicative competence, the author questions the ability of Chomsky's account of linguistic competence to fulfil the requirements of such a theory. ‘Linguistic competence’ for Chomsky means the mastery of an abstract system of rules, based on an innate language apparatus. The model by which communication is understood on this account contains three implicit assumptions, here called ‘monologism’, ‘a priorism’, and ‘elementarism’. The author offers an outline of a theory of communicative competence that is based on the negations of these assumptions. In opposing the first two assumptions he introduces distinctions, respectively, between semantic universals which process experiences and those that make such processing possible, and between semantic universals which precede all socialization and those that are linked to the conditions of potential socialization. Against elementarism, he argues that the semantic content of all possible natural languages does not consist of combinations of a finite number of meaning components. Differences in systems of classification preclude this, and such differences can be seen to infect all respects of intercultural comparison. Using the notion of ‘performative utterance’, the author elucidates the role of dialogue‐constitutive universals as part of the formal apparatus required of a”; speaker's capacity to communicate. He then notes what would be required of a general semantics based on a theory of communicative competence; and finally points out how this theory might be used for social analysis.     

Kierkegaard and Gift: The Problem with ‘Kenotic Love’ in Light of Kierkegaard's ‘Gift Theory’

In recent theology, kenosis has become a popular focal point around which to organize a concept of love. I locate one reason for such popularity in a response to the problematizing of love within postmodern theory. I then explore how Kierkegaard anticipates postmodern debates surrounding love and gift-theory while addressing significant questions differently, and within the context of a theology of creation. I argue that when his ‘gift theory’ and account of love are read in connection, far from defining love with a singular emphasis on kenotic ‘self-gift,’ Kierkegaard is seen to delineate a much broader vision of love which might inform our current context.     

Bulgakov's Account of Creation: Neglected Aspects,Critics and Contemporary Relevance

The article focuses on a central, yet neglected dimension of the ‘Sophia Debate’ in twentieth‐century Russian Orthodox theology: Bulgakov's panentheistic account of creation and its critique by Nikolai Lossky. Bulgakov understood the doctrine of creation to be negatively defined as creatio ex nihilo and positively defined as creatio ex Deo. Bulgakov's sophiology seeks to relate God and the world through the intermediate concept of Sophia, balancing an account of God's being in the world with an account of the world's eternal foundation in God. Lossky objected that Bulgakov's account underemphasizes novelty, contingency and the free character of creation. Lossky's objections notwithstanding, Bulgakov's version of panentheism – especially its trinitarian, antinomian and kenotic dimensions – finds significant points of contact with contemporary accounts of creation.