The Ego, Vulnerability, & the Circumscription of Reason

 
 

The following passages are from John Cottingham’s, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reasons and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I find them utterly persuasive on all counts and thus believe these propositions spell out at least one way we might take seriously the slogan that “the personal is political.” As such, they should be axiomatic to any Left-inspired emancipatory project. 

“The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to loss, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence [dukkha] as the Buddhists have it. And unless moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [‘spiritual exercises’ as found, for example, among the Stoics and monastic and mystical traditions] that enables us to come to terms with it.”

“Before we can begin on the project of seeing how we should live, we first have to embark on the task of trying to understand ourselves. That much, at least, is fully in accord with a long classical tradition stretching from the famous injunction at Delphi right down to Pope’s Essay on Man: “Know then thyself.” But what is new is the insistence that the process has to begin with an attempt to come to terms with the darker side of our nature—the side which is not revealed by simple introspection and rational weighing of ‘what on balance we most want,’ but which will be grasped only at the end of a long process of recovery, rehabilitating those parts of the self which are initially submerged beneath the level of ordinary everyday awareness.”

“The problem of mastering, or at least accommodating, the passions was seen in both Greek and in early modern ethics as absolutely central to philosophy’s goal of teaching us how to live. But the solutions offered by both of these earlier systems were defective in important respects, and…the defects only begin to be remedied with the development of the unconscious—the notion that important parts of the self are not fully transparent to the deliberations of reason.”

Cottingham turns, rightly I think, to psychoanalytic theory to transcend (aufheben) the Enlightenment trajectory (with Greek pedigree) of a purely ratiocentric philosophy and ethics, endeavoring “to uncover the seeds of an approach which comes to terms with the incapacity of controlling reason to settle the conditions for human well-being, while at the same time not abandoning the values of systematic analysis and rational reflection [which are, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalytic theory and practice].”  

For further reading, see here (this list has since been updated and I can send it along upon request).

Image: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch at the Freud Museum in London.

Addendum: As part of my reply to Chris Bertram’s comment, I’m including a short list of fairly sophisticated philosophical and psychological examinations of Freudian (and, importantly, post-Freudian) ideas. I also recommend one attempt to read more than a few of the titles I gathered together in the first three sections of the bibliography linked to above. 

• Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. 
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Cavell, Marcia. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Cavell, Marcia. Becoming a Subject: Reflections in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Deigh, John. The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud and Human Nature. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud and the Mind. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
• Edelson, Marshall. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 
• Gardner, Sebastian. Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Hinshelwood, R.D. Clinical Klein: From Theory to Practice. New York: Basic Books,1994.
• Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
• Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Lear, Jonathan. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Lear, Jonathan. Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. New York: Other Press, 2003.
• Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Levine, Michael P., ed. The Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Levy, Donald. Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
• Modell, Arnold H. Other Times, Other Realities: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• O’Neill, John, ed. Freud and the Passions. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
• Robinson, Paul. Freud and His Critics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
• Rudnytsky, Peter L. Freud and Oedipus. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
• Sayers, Janet. Freud’s Art: Psychoanalysis Retold. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Schafer, Roy. Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Tauber, Alfred I. Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• Wallerstein, Robert S. The Talking Cures: The Psychoanalyses and the Psychotherapies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
• Wallwork, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Ethics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
• Whitebrook, Joel. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
• Wollheim, Richard. The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Wolheim, Richard and James Hopkins, eds. Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge,  UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Chris,

It is true that Freud saw psychoanalysis as vindicated by his psychological theory(ies) (and in keeping with the image of science in his day), and as THAT kind of science (along the lines, say, of how Grunbaum understood and critiqued some Freudian 'theories'), I think it has indeed been discredited. But insofar as we might imagine a "science of subjectivity" in less positivistic terms, including a role for it as part of a program of askesis in Cottingham's sense, I think there's much to be said for psychoanalysis. Analytic philosophers of the "ordinary language" bent were rather dismissive of Freudian ideas, but fresh appraisals of psychoanalytic theory and practice have been underway for some time now and I think they suggest the undeniable value of a "neo-Freudian" take on psychoanalytic theory and the therapeutic significance of psychoanalytic practice.

I will add a list of representative titles (culled from the bibliography I linked to above) to the post anon. It remains, I think, a matter of careful discernment of what is living and what is dead in the Freudian corpus, analogous to what the 'analytical Marxists'--and a few outside that virtuous circle--have done with the works of Marx.

[Chris Bertram]

Hmm. I can see why vulnerability and the idea that we are not transparent to ourselves are important, but I don't see why I should accept more than those generalities and embrace psychoanalytic theory specifically. It looks pretty discredited to me as a scientific theory (which is what Freud himself took it to be).