Towards a New Kind of Semantic Normativity

Abstract

Hannah Ginsborg has recently offered a new account of normativity, according to which normative attitudes are essential to the meaningful use of language. The kind of normativity she has in mind –– not semantic but ‘primitive’ — is supposed to help us to avoid the pitfalls of both non-reductionist and reductive dispositionalist theories of meaning. For, according to her, it enables us both to account for meaning in non-semantic terms, which non-reductionism cannot do, and to make room for the normativity of meaning, which reductive dispositionalism cannot do. I argue that the main problem with Ginsborg’s account is that it fails to say what makes it possible for expressions to be governed by conditions of correct application to begin with. I do believe, however, that normative attitudes are essential to meaning, but they have to be thought of as fully semantic. And I suggest that conditions of correct application can be present only when those attitudes are present.     

The state,the institution,and the patient: A three-way collison at the crossroads as a hospital fights closure

This paper recounts the story of a National Health Service hospital which was almost closed for financial reasons in 1990. After a political campaign carried out in the full glare of publicity, the Hospital was reprieved. The account is based on the author's conversations with members of staff. The story of the staff, the patients, the Hospital, and the political struggle are woven together by common themes which are highlighted by reference to the Oedipus myth.     

An Exactification of the Monoid of Primitive Recursive Functions

We study the monoid of primitive recursive functions and investigate a onestep construction of a kind of exact completion, which resembles that of the familiar category of modest sets, except that the partial equivalence relations which serve as objects are recursively enumerable. As usual, these constructions involve the splitting of symmetric idempotents.     

A body with chronic fatigue syndrome as a battleground for the fight to separate from the mother

I describe the therapy of a 20-year-old woman who believed that her difficulties in concentrating and remembering were caused by her 'ME' (Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS). She had been fathered by a man who never left his own wife. Work with her dreams revealed a within-body drama in which she was locked in an unspeakable fight to the death with her mother. Her symptoms improved after parallels between a dream and an accident showed her own self-destructive hand in her story. Another dream, reflecting her first 'incestuous' affair, showed her search for her original father-self as someone separate from mother, and a later affair provided a between-body drama, helping her to own the arrogant and abject traits she had before seen only as her mother's. I show how we worked in the area of Winnicott's first 'primitive agony' as experienced by a somatizing patient, stuck in a too-close destructive relationship with her mother-body. I discuss how analytical work can be done with the primitive affects and conflicts against which the ME symptoms may be defending.     

The latency complex: the dead hand of anti‐development

It is common knowledge that the same phenomena can be viewed in a variety of ways. This paper considers the implications of a constellation observed in some adult patients who have increasingly reminded the author of some of the children of latency age with whom he has also worked. In the literature these patients may also have been thought about in terms of ‘defences of the self’ (Fordham), patients who are ‘difficult to reach’ (Joseph), ‘psychic retreats’ (Steiner), and those who make ‘attacks on linking’ (Bion). They may equally be considered in terms of schizoid, narcissistic or borderline personalities, or as showing features on the autistic spectrum, such as mindlessness and extreme obsessionality. Writers such as Helene Deutsch with her concept of an ‘as‐if personality’, Winnicott with his ‘false self’, and Rosenfeld, discussing the split‐off parts of the personality in narcissistic patients, have also offered much to think about in their consideration of some of these phenomena. This paper proposes yet another vertex – the author's own imaginative conjecture – that is by no means mutually exclusive of any of these others.     

The logic of turmoil: some epistemological and clinical considerations on emotional experience and the infinite

The idea of the infinite has its origins in the very beginnings of western philosophy and was developed significantly by modern philosophers such as Galileo and Leibniz. Freud discovered the Unconscious which does not respect the laws of classical logic, flouting its fundamental principle of non-contradiction. This opened the way to a new epistemology in which classical logic coexists with an aberrant logic of infinite affects. Matte Blanco reorganized this Freudian revolution in logic and introduced the concept of bi-logic, which is an intermingling of symmetric and Aristotelic logics. The authors explore some epistemological and clinical aspects of the functioning of the deep unconscious where the emergence of infinity threatens to overwhelm the containing function of thought, connecting this topic to some of Bion's propositions. They then suggest that bodily experiences can be considered a prime source of the logic of turmoil, and link a psychoanalytic consideration of the infinite to the mind-body relation. Emotional catastrophe is seen both as a defect-a breakdown of the unfolding function which translates unconscious material into conscious experience-and as the consequence of affective bodily pressures. These pressures function in turn as symmetrizing or infinitizing operators. Two clinical vignettes are presented to exemplify the hypotheses.     

The fear of love: the denial of self in relationship

This paper explores the fear of love and relationship which develops when a child has experienced parents who cannot tolerate emotional separation and so attempt to retain perfect contingency with their infant, long after the infant needs to begin to separate and individuate. The child is a 'self-object' for the parents, who depend on the responses of others, including their own child, to maintain a sense of their own identity. The impact of this demand for 'reverse parenting' on the child's development is explored and clinical work with an adult patient whose history reflects this process is described.     

The self in transformation: the passage from a two- to a three-dimensional internal world

This paper seeks to describe some of the steps in the process of transformation from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional inner world as experienced by a patient who had essentially used up her remaining vital resources. An important hurdle had first to be crossed when the analyst was required to demonstrate her capacity to survive with her in a two-dimensional claustrum, in a solitary confinement. Here, an oppositional defensive system had been created in which positive and negative personifications of vital but withdrawn energies ensured that she was locked within an interior world that sought to bar entry to anyone else, and where the possibility of the transformation of her self was disallowed. The patient had to accept the risk of breaching the system of self-defence before the analyst was allowed a mutual position within her interior world. A series of dreams tracks this transformation internally and in relation to the analyst.     

Response to ‘Containment lost’ by Andrew Briggs

This is a response to Andrew Briggs’ paper presented to the ACP Conference in June 2017. Briggs’ paper, sobering, pessimistic and challenging, looks at the emotional pressures on child psychotherapists in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) as a result of the imposition of the internal market in the NHS. He posits that this has caused the loss of organisational containment, not just for child psychotherapists, but for all those clinicians who work in CAMHS. Briggs writes that this loss of containment is evident in clinicians’ experience of meaninglessness in their work and that this meaninglessness may lead to the despair of the death instinct. For Briggs, this goes along with the loss of professional identity as a once favoured discipline. He compares this fall from grace to Satan’s as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. If, as he suggests, there has been a strong sense of being the favoured discipline, then maybe a dependence had grown in the profession whereby this loss now feels like a terrible abandonment. The author of this response sees hope amidst the despondency being forced upon workers in the NHS and makes the case for us to engage and resist in a number of practical ways.