Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation An Archeology of the Subject Intro Paul Ricoeur

The subject I that experiences and interacts with the world is a central category of the modern world, and one that many postmodern thinkers wanted to question This notion of a subject as a synthesizing agency that acts as the basis of knowledge, ethics and aesthetic experience, and is capable of resolving the vicissitude of progress by comprehending the numerous challenges that it offers, has been the focus of critique from a wide range of modern and postmodern perspectives.1 This critique is led powerfully by psychoanalytic theory.

Psychoanalysis is first introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

We, products of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century have often adopted this pansexual Freud as the one we know best, and feel most comfortable ridiculing the sexobsessed old man who finds phallic symbols everywhere he looks.

How did he treat the human subject?

Freud and the Question of the Subject

Freudianism/Psychoanalytic is essentially a realism of the unconscious.2

Freud started a flight from the egological foundation and criticizes the immediate consciousness. He achieves a decentering a home of significations, a displacement of the birthplace of meaning. By this displacement, immediate consciousness finds itself dispossessed to the advantage of another agency of meaning3 the unconscious.

The Postmodern, p.65. Freud and Philosophy, p.431. Ibid., p.422.

Freud introduces the idea that the human consciousness, which Descartes and Kant identified with the I think (Ego Cogito), is supplemented by an unconscious reserve. The dispossession of consciousness implies that the place of meaning is displaced from consciousness to the unconscious.4

Here, consciousness as a subject is, for Freud, a lie the lie of consciousness.

The Crisis of the Notion of Consciousness

For Freud, consciousness is a lie, and that the prejudice of consciousness prevents the philosophers from doing justice to the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious.5 The notion of consciousness becomes problematic.

Firstly, the reduction of consciousness. Consciousness ceases to be what is best known and becomes problematic. And the unconscious is no longer defined in relationship to consciousness as a state of absence or latency, but as a locality (topography) where ideas or representations reside; anticipating this present analysis, we called this reversal of viewpoint an anti-phenomenology, an epoche in reverse.6

The implication of this is that self-consciousness in the strong sense of the word comes not at the beginning, but at the end as a limit idea terminal and not the initial.

Secondly, at the destruction of the pseudo evidence of the consciousness, the concept object is also abandoned. The lie of consciousness troubles Husserlian phenomenology which argues that any investigation into the constitution refers to something pre-given or pre-constituted.7 Husserlian Intentionality is troubled.

Ibid., p.423. Ibid., p.431. Ibid., p.424. The conflict of Interpretations, p. 100.

What is at stake is the possibility of a philosophical anthropologyWhat worldview and vision of man will make this possible? What must man be to assume the responsibility of sound thought and yet be susceptible of falling into insanity, to be obligated by his humanity to strive for greater and greater consciousness and yet remains a product of the unconscious?

Paul Ricoeur finds it urgent to find such an epistemology for psychoanalysis. And he further argues saying, The philosophical place of analytic (here, psychoanalysis) discourse is defined by the concept of an archeology of the subject.8

The Concept of Archeology (is purely of Ricoeurs)

According to Ricoeur, the philosophical stance of Freuds metapsychology, the other term for psychoanalysis, lies on the concept of relinquishing and recapturing of consciousness. Consciousness has to be abandoned in order to have found the subject.

Ricoeurs understands Freudian metapsychology as an adventure of reflection; the dispossession of consciousness is its path, because the act of becoming conscious is its task.

Ricoeur writes, For my part, I regard Freudiansim as a revelation of the archaic, a manifestation of the ever prior. Thus, Freuds thought has roots, both old and new, in the romantic philosophy of life and the unconscious. A review of Freuds entire theoretical work from the point-of-view of its temporal implications would show that its main preoccupation is the theme of the prior, the anterior.

The revelation of the archaic is also termed as regressive decomposition.

An example of which is the dream interpretation, where Ricoeur quotes Freud, saying, In regression, the fabric of the dream thoughts us resolved into its raw materials Dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamers earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it, and of the methods of expressions which were then available to him.9

Freud and Philosophy, p.419. Ibid., p.441.

Freud quoted Nietzsche, saying: In dreams some primeval relic of humanity is at works which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path; and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to mans archaic heritage; of what is psychically innate to him.

What is the subject then in its most archaic form?

Ricoeur identified the circle of, on the one hand, the restricted archeology of the subject: 1. The id the unconscious is nothing but the id.10 It is the neuter which is charged with ideas and impulses, an amorphous unstructured set of desires, the region of the untimely dark, inaccessible part of our humanity of which very little is known by us. 2. The climax of this archeology is narcissism. Narcissism was a term originally used by Freud to describe the sexual attitude in which a person directs his love towards himself, rather than towards another.11 It is the original form of desire to which one always returns; reservoir of libido; all object-libido is transformed into it. Thus, object-choice itself bears the indelible mark narcissism. Ricoeur interprets it that for Freud, all our loved-objects are patterned on the archaic objects: the mother who bore us, nursed and cared for us; and our own body. On the other hand, the generalized archeology: 3. The superego (The Father Complex) a. It forces one to abandon the position of infancy (thus functions as LAW) b. It holds any subsequent formation of ideals within the network of dependence, fear, prevention of punishment, desire of consolation. c. The dominating agency The archeology of the subject presupposes topography. Topography refers to mapping. Freuds maps of the mind are, in a sense, imaginary; they cannot be traced out on the material of the body or the brain. Rather, Freuds topographies perform the service of helping us understand the way these areas of the psyche work together and relate to each other.12 The archeology of the subject is made possible only through the dispossession of consciousness. What can be said about consciousness then?

10

The Conflict of Interpretations, p.105. Sigmund Freud, pp. 80 Ibid.

11

12

Consciousness as a Task

According to Ricoeur, Freud seems to be contained in the following formula: CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT A GIVE, BUT A TASK.

Consciousness/ the Self, for Ricoeur cannot be achieved by an analytic (archeology), but is arrived at only through a dialectic (teleology) process, as in epigenesis.

What happens to this process? Nothing less than the birth of the self through a diremption of consciousness. There had been no Self before the dialectic.

Ricoeur says that, the stages of this mutual relation bring us across regions of human meaning. By relations of possession, Ricoeur understands those inter human relations when such relations occur, we see the birth of the new, purely human, and non-biological feelings. These feelings originate not from the biological life, but from reflection within human affectivity upon a new realm of objects and specifically economic objectivity where man appears as capable of economics It is in this way that man becomes adult and capable of adult alienation13Here, man is capable of exchange of values, monetary signs, structures, and institutions. Man is in this stage is self-conscious.

This is the economic model of Freud. It is this new objectivity which generates new instincts, representations, and affects.

Ricoeur says that here also, consciousness increases reciprocally to an increase in objectivity. Man widens his relations and enters into an economic, political, and culture. It is in this new set of objectivity that the search for human possibilities is pursued.

Cultural background is what gives these images of man the destiny of things, makes them exist between and among men, and incarnate them in works. By the mediation of works and cultural monuments such as these, human dignity and self-esteem are constituted.

13

TCOI, pp.107-108.

Final question would be:

What is the relation between unconscious and conscious?

Ricoeur answers,

We might say that consciousness is history, while the unconscious is fate And yet man has a responsibility to grow out of his childhood and shatter the process of repetition by constituting ahead of himself.

We can atleast say, however, that at the point we have reached, the great temptation would be to declare that the unconscious explains the lower, inferior, and nocturnal part of a man and is the Passion of the Night, while consciousness expresses the higher, superior, daylight part of man and is the Law of the Day.14

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Bibliography:

Ricoeur, Paul, The conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. by John Ihde (London & New York: Continuum, 2004). ___________, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, ed. by Denis Savage (New Haven & London: Yale Uiversity Press, 1970). John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to PostStructuralism (London & New York: Routledge, 2008).
14

Ibid., p.115.

Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (London & New York: Routledge, 2005). Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).