Ethics: Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the three chapters in this section, which explores central issues in ethics in the context of psychoanalysis, including the nature of virtue, the ground of normativity, moral development, the relation between reason and passion, naturalism and moral motivation. One such issue concerns Sigmund Freud’s theory of the superego, which is said to undermine the ‘authority’ of morality. The first chapter argues that the superego represses conscience, and that our ‘moral-psychological difficulties’ can be understood only in light of repressed love. The second chapter examines the place of psychoanalysis in the relationship between virtue and mental health, and between vice and mental dysfunction. The third chapter discusses the idea of an ‘evolved development niche’ to address object relations and their role in moral development.

‘A Ritual of Discourse’: Conceptualizing and Reconceptualizing the Analytic Relationship

Freud embarked on his exploration of an unconscious domain hand in hand with his clinical practice. He was thus forced to think deeply about the relationship between doctor and patient. He could not afford—quite literally—to do otherwise. In the postscript to ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), he pondered Dora’s abrupt decision to end treatment and spelled out what he had failed to appreciate in good time: transferences. Subsequent generations of psychoanalysts, particularly Melanie Klein, Bion, and Betty Joseph, pressed on along two separate—but certainly not parallel—tracks: first, stretching the concept of transference; second, introducing the concept of projective identification and rethinking countertransference. The first took off from the expansion of psychoanalytic practice to include children; the second from its expansion to include the seriously disturbed. Taken together these advances, in theory and in practice, led to reconceptualizing the analytic relationship.

Making the Unconscious Conscious

How should we understand the distinction between conscious states of mind and unconscious ones? This chapter briefly reviews an answer to this question that the author has set out and defended in earlier work; it then suggests a new answer—one that supplements, rather than replaces, the old answer. In spelling out this new answer, the chapter offers an account of a distinction that is related to, but not identical with, that between conscious and unconscious states of mind, viz. the distinction between conscious and unconscious expressions.

Body Memory and the Unconscious

In traditional psychoanalysis the unconscious was conceived as a separate intra-psychic reality, hidden ‘below consciousness’ and only accessible to a ‘depth psychology’ based on metapsychological premises and concepts. In contrast to this vertical conception, this chapter presents a phenomenological approach to the unconscious as a horizontal dimension of the lived body, lived space, and intercorporeality. This approach is based (a) on a phenomenology of body memory, defined as the totality of implicit dispositions of perception and behaviour mediated by the body and sedimented in the course of earlier experiences. It is also based on (b) a phenomenology of the life space as a spatial mode of existence which is centred in the lived body and in which unconscious conflicts are played out as field forces.

Introduction: Know Thyself

This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.

From Geschlechtstrieb to Sexualtrieb: the Originality of Freud’s Conception of Sexuality

This chapter returns to the 1905 edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to argue, against claims to the contrary, for the originality of Freud’s conception of the sexual drive (Sexualtrieb), in relation to his philosophical and psychiatric predecessors. After examining the claims that have been made concerning the relation between Schopenhauer and Freud on the question of sexuality, it lays out the conception of Geschlechtstrieb in Freud’s immediate psychiatric predecessors (particularly Krafft-Ebing and Moll) and its connection to the treatment of the same topic in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann. It then demonstrates how Freud’s conception of the sexual drive, which is divorced from any reproductive aim, is quite different to the earlier conceptions of the Geschlechtstrieb. The chapter ends by suggesting how Freud’s theory of sexuality can be understood as a contribution to a philosophical anthropology.

A New Kind of Song: Psychoanalysis as Revelation

Conceptions of psychoanalysis as science typically construe its key formulations as providing posits to be referenced in inferences to the best explanation of the clinical phenomena. Such was Freud’s own vision of the discipline he created, and it is reflected in his ambition to prove his fundamental formulations warranted. The first half of this chapter argues that this approach and this ambition significantly underestimate the significance of the psychoanalytic project. The suggestion is that it misconstrues foundational—and therefore unaccountable—forms of revelation, apprehension, poiesis, and grammar as merely factual claims, accounts, representations, and posits which, as such, now falsely appear to require scientific accounting. The second half of this chapter explores the significance of this for attempts to capture psychoanalytic theory and therapy within the ‘reflective scientist practitioner’ model of contemporary clinical psychology.

Psychoanalysis and Religion

Acknowledging the layers of the mind below the level of overt consciousness can lead to very divergent accounts of religious belief. One response—taken by Freud himself—argues that religious belief should be abandoned as unavoidably contaminated by unconscious motivations (e.g. an infantile longing for security) that distort our rational judgement. By contrast, Jung maintains that religious thinking is shaped by unconscious structures (the ‘archetypes’), which can play a vital role in the development of an integrated human personality. This chapter examines these contrasting psychoanalytic interpretations of religion, and then explores more recent accounts of the workings of the human psyche and how they affect the status of religious belief. A concluding section discusses some general implications of all this for the epistemology of religious belief and the way in which philosophy of religion should be conducted.

Twentieth-Century Engagements: Introduction

This section of the Handbook consists of four chapters that focus on the different ways in which twentieth-century philosophers engaged with psychoanalysis. The first chapter examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological reformulation of the psychoanalytic unconscious, with emphasis on his argument that the unconscious is an all-pervasive invisible ‘atmosphere’ (atmosphère) inexorably surrounding the lived-body and shaping all our emotional experience. The second chapter considers Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical critique of psychoanalysis and how he drew on Sigmund Freud’s writings to test his new linguistic methods in philosophy. The third chapter describes how the Frankfurt School used Freudian psychoanalysis to bolster its Marxist critique of modern society, citing as an example Theodor W. Adorno, who offered an explanation of how fascist mass movements occurred by drawing on Freud’s theory of narcissism. The last chapter discusses the key hermeneutic themes found in Paul Ricoeur’s engagement with Freud in his book Freud and Philosophy.

Human Excellence and Psychic Health in Psychoanalysis

This chapter begins with a seeming rivalry between two answers to the question ‘what are the aims of psychoanalysis?’, which seem to situate psychoanalysis differently in relation to ideals of human excellence: ‘we are trying to make people good’; and ‘goodness is none of our business—we are just trying to make people healthy’. But are these alternatives? If, as Aristotle said, human excellence is psychic health, one aim cannot be achieved without the other. That still leaves a space between human excellence and ‘the moral virtues’, until it is shown that one cannot be excellent of our human kind without possessing the moral virtues—as modern philosophers assume, though as Nietzsche denied. Attempting to resist these various assimilations, this chapter aims to untangle the complex relations between psychic health as it is conceived in psychoanalysis, the possession of the ‘moral virtues’, and excellence of our human kind.