Dear Colleagues,
I apologize for being absent from the discussion; I am in the last stages of editing a collection of essays in Jung’s Red Book, as well as having to attend a meeting in Zurich and my time has not been my own.
To resume participation, however, I would like to take up the question that has been raised first by Dr. Leupnitz regarding the relation of psychoanalysis to the natural sciences versus the human sciences, particularly the hermeneutical tradition. As it happens, my first serious introduction to the study of psychoanalysis came by way of reading Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy, which placed hermeneutics at the center of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Of course the question of whether psychoanalysis could be subsumed to the larger enterprise of hermeneutics in general—for whom Gadamer would be very important, as Dr. Prall points out—became a topic of controversy in philosophical commentary on psychoanalysis, particularly in the work of Adolf Grünbaum. I should probably say at this point that my own work on psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or Jungian, was for the first 20 years—1971 to 1991—entirely in the realm of philosophy and the history of ideas (I took my Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University, writing on the conflict between Freud and Jung). I was finally persuaded to take up clinical work in 1991, but the philosophical and historical issues continued to dominate my scholarly work. In the late 90s, however, my work became increasingly focused on cognitive science, complex dynamic systems theory and neuroscience in relation to Jung’s theories, but to the larger psychoanalytic field as well. The upshot of this is that I think the question of how psychoanalysis relates to both the Geisteswissenshaften and the Naturwissenshaften is important, but also difficult to unpack.
Historically, both Freud and Jung were keen to align their theorizing with the larger scientific community, at least in part. Freud’s followers, however, encountered a problem in keeping to Freud’s original scientific objectives brought on by his own over reliance on mid-19th Century scientific propositions that were being discarded wholesale by the 1920s and 30s. The best sources on this are Patricia Kitcher’s Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Kitcher, 1995) and Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (Sulloway, 1979). Due to Freud’s heavy reliance on Lamarckian evolutionary theory as well as other now forgotten ideas having to do with language and anthropology, Kitcher argues, his followers were compelled after his death to avoid detailed discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and these sciences, and the metapsychology faded into the background. One could argue, I imagine, that this is in part the point where a more hermeneutical reading of psychoanalysis came to the fore. Jung, being 20 years Freud’s junior was not in quite such a difficult position because he was better situated to base his theorizing on the new and developing trends in the sciences. Additionally, his early work on the word association test was, for its time, statistically rigorous and widely recognized within the developing experimental community. He also tended to make generalizations about the possible evolutionary foundations of things like the theory of archetypes that left room for creative interpretations as the field developed. Thus there has been for some time an active effort among some Jungians to bring Jung into conformity with such movements as evolutionary psychology. At the same time, however, what we can call the hermeneutical reading of Jung is widespread, and probably dominant in the tradition.
The more recent, and more interesting developments in efforts to bring psychoanalysis of all stripes within the frame of the sciences of mind, of course, has involved the movement toward cognitive science, neuroscience and complex dynamic systems. I have been working with these issues for the last 15 years, and a number of Freudian oriented psychoanalysts, such as Robert Galatzer-Levi (Galatzer-Levy & Quinodoz, 2004) have as well. Neuroscience is being invoked by a number of researchers to try and validate one or another of the major theoretical claims made by either Freud or Jung, although I have not yet seen serious efforts to underwrite Lacan or even Klein in this way—although such efforts may exist. This last point, however, raises an issue that I think is worth addressing in our discussion. If one takes Klein, for example, my reading of developmental neuroscience as we now have it largely eliminates the neural possibility of very early fantasies of the complexity Klein proposed. By the same token I am reasonably certain that we can now understand phenomena like the transference, counter transference and projective identification largely through the workings of the mirror neuron system. Similarly, I would suggest that much of what one finds in Lacan’s theorizing about signs and language more generally is at best highly problematic, as the linguistic theories on which he relies have come to be questioned by more recent developments. To be fair, I can also say that a number of Jung’s best-known theoretical constructs are equally subject to questioning based on developments in neuroscience and related fields.
I am going over this territory because I believe it throws a light on the part of our discussion that has to do with the possibility of any claim to empirical foundations for psychoanalytic theory. I take Dr. Prall’s comment that “To accept, for instance, the Kleinian version of the early Oedipus does not only imply a shift in dates; it appears to demand a ‘conversion’ also in terms of ideas which are clearly on the level of meta-psychology. And meta-psychology is not only beyond psychology, it is beyond anything—and here I believe I am in agreement with Dr. Bernardi—that is accessible to empirical research” (Prall Comment one page 2). I take it that is in part why Dr. Prall characterizes psychoanalytic training as a spiritual discipline. It is, then, something more along the lines of a formation, to use the Catholic Church’s language, and as Dr. Prall goes on, change is only possible when one’s self-understanding has come into question. Jungians would call this a failure of persona adaption. It is also part of what Dr. Leupnitz points to as the subjective as tool of analysis.
In 1913, at the international psychoanalytic congress in Munich, Jung presented a paper entitled “A Contribution to the Theory of Psychological Types” in which he questioned how it was that two observers of ostensibly identical phenomena, such as Freud and Adler—who had only recently been expelled from the movement—could come to interpret the phenomena in such different ways. His conclusion was that different personality types, in this case an extroverted seeking of the object for Freud in contrast to an introverted seeking of a sense of subjective integrity and power for Adler, played a decisive role in determining the course of psychoanalytic theorizing. Needless to say, this argument did not go over well with Freud, and this was the last time Jung and Freud met. The typological analysis, and comparison to the just exiled Adler was the final blow to their relationship. Nevertheless, what we have here is instance at the beginning of psychoanalysis where it is precisely the subjective orientation of the analyst’s personality that is seen to determine the direction of theoretical and clinical work. Along the lines of our exchange about psychoanalytic theories being either defense mechanisms or phobias, Jung once remarked that very psychological theory is the personal confession of the theoretician.
My question at this point is one of just how unmoored from empirical data, one might say empirical reality, is psychoanalysis? It would appear that the contemporary sciences of mind, whether anthropological linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, complex dynamic systems theory or even evolutionary psychology, of which I am particularly critical, all lead away from one or more of the most cherished positions held by psychoanalysts, not the least being the very primacy of the dynamic unconscious. Working out of detailed infant observation, coupled to dynamic systems theory, the members of the Boston Change Process Study Group have suggested that the psychoanalytic theory of the dynamic unconscious is essentially backward:
The major point of this paper has been to delineate the upside-down relationship between the supposedly ‘superficial’ layer of immediate interaction and the supposedly ‘profound’ layer of intrapsychic entities, such as conflict and defense. Traditionally, the intrapsychic entities were assumed to determine what happened at the interactive level. The interactive level was seen merely as the instantiation of deeper forces. We suggest instead that the interactive process itself is primary and generates the raw material from which we draw the generalized abstractions that we term conflicts, defenses and phantasy. From these moves as experienced in the interaction, psychoanalytic interpretations are drawn. It follows that conflicts and defenses are born and reside in the domain of interaction, and that this relational living out is the deep layer of experience, while the abstractions that we use to describe the repetitive aspects of these relational strategies, such as conflict and defense, are secondary descriptors of the deep level, but not the level itself, and exist further from the lived experience. (Stern et al., 2007, p. 14)
But on the side of hermeneutics one cannot simply indulge in an undisciplined subjectivism of the “this feels right to me” variety. Hermeneutics, as least as worked out by the likes of Gadamer or Ricoeur also has canons of practice that give it shape and definition. Theoreticians of argumentation, such as those mentioned by Dr. Bernardi but also Habermas, as mentioned by Dr. Prall, and my own favorite, Karl Otto Apel, insist on quite rigorous principles of argumentation. But if the subjective orientation and phobic/defensive/confessional is the real basis of our observation, how are we to respond to the demand for well-grounded argument, or even instructive hermeneutical insight?
Ricoeur has an interesting essay in which he draws a different distinction that may be worth reflecting on in the midst of this problematic question of grounding. In his continued reflections on the nature of the sacred, he distinguishes between what he calls manifestation and proclamation (Ricoeur, 1995). Proclamation is amenable to a hermeneutics, he argues, but manifestation, characterized first of all by numinous experience, is a form of immediate presentation. I wonder whether this experience of a kind of moment of transcendence is not in fact our first experience in the clinical setting, to which we then apply the defensive/phobic structure of theory in order to contain an experience rather than define a state of affairs.
Best regards for now. I will be more actively engaged now that some other tasks are resolving themselves.
Galatzer-Levy, R. M., & Quinodoz, J.-M. (2004). Chaotic Possibilities: Toward a New Model of Development. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85(Pt 4), 419–442.
Kitcher, P. (1995). Freud’s dream: A complete interdisciplinary science of mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1995). Manifestation and proclamation. In M. I. Wallace (Ed.), D. Pellauer (Trans.), Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (pp. 48–67). Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A. C., … Tronick, E. Z. (2007). The foundational level of psychodynamic meaning : Implicit process in relation to conflict, defense and the dynamic unconscious. International Journal of psychoanalysis, 88, 1–16.
Sulloway, F. J. (1979). Freud, biologist of the mind: beyond the psychoanalytic legend. New York: Basic Books.