Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology

by Richard Askay, Jensen Farquhar, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Overview

Throughout history philosophers have relentlessly pursued what may be called "inaccessible domains." This book explores how the traditions of existential phenomenology relate to Freudian psychoanalysis. A clear, succinct, and systematic account of the philosophical presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory and practice, this work offers a deeper and richer understanding and appreciation of Freudian thought, as well as its antecedents and influences.

With its unique perspective on Freud's work, Apprehending the Inaccessible puts readers in a better position to appreciate his contributions and evaluate the relationship between his and other philosophical world views. The authors, both of whom have extensive backgrounds in philosophy and psychology, present balanced critical analyses of crucial developments in, for example, the evolution of the Freudian notion of the unconscious, and the engagement of existential phenomenology with Freudian psychoanalysis. Askay and Farquhar then consider—often for the first time—individual thinkers' reflections on and interpretations of Freud, ranging from the primary figures in existential phenomenology to the most prominent figures in the existential psychoanalytic movement. Even as their work offers a new approach to Freudian thought, it reasserts the importance of alternative views found in existential phenomenology as those views pertain to psychoanalysis and the question of apprehending the inaccessible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810119000
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	01/27/2006
Series:	Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Edition description:	1
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

RICHARD ASKAY is professor of philosophy at the University of Portland.

JENSEN FARQUHAR is a practicing psychotherapist and an editor in the field of psychology and philosophy.

Read an Excerpt

APPREHENDING THE INACCESSIBLE
Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology

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By Richard Askay Jensen Farquhar
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2006
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-2228-4

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Chapter One The Atavistic Spirit or "the Monster of Energy": Origins of Freud's Synthesizing Mind

That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent-is betrayed in the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other-to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally; philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order. -Nietzsche By then, there is usually also someone who becomes the recipient of great gratitude, not only for the good he himself has done but above all for the treasure of what is best and highest that has gradually been accumulated by his predecessors. -Nietzsche I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgement of the prevalent science of to-day. -Freud

As Nietzsche so eloquently noted, the generation and evolution of ideas and even entire systems of thought rarely occur in a historical vacuum. More typically they incubate within the multifarious forces of abundant dynamic, historical environments, when at last they burst forth in a sudden flash of intricately synthesized insight. Nietzsche created an even more powerful imagery in this respect:

There are men who are the heirs and masters of this slowly-acquired manifold treasure of virtue and efficiency-because, through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired and stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. In the end there appears a man, a monster of energy, who demands a monster of a task.

Freud may be said to have been a prototypical example of the "monster of energy" Nietzsche presaged. Furthermore, Freud fit Nietzsche's descriptions in another way as well:

A higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of nonscience: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health.

Recall Strachey's earlier observation that Freud was "a man of two cultures" in precisely the above way.

To appreciate the nature and extent of Freud's synthesizing mind it is important to mention in a preliminary way some of the general characteristics of his specific historical context (the synchronic) and those historical influences exerted upon it (the diachronic), as well as the way in which he engaged them.

The historical context in which Freud worked was characterized by an especially tumultuous intellectual climate, and various fundamentally opposing and powerful conceptual viewpoints were operative. In the wake of the Philosophes and Comte, science was defined by Helmholtz in positivistic, physicalistic, and deterministic language. Darwin and Spencer (who were promoting the psychology of instincts) were especially prominent in this movement. While jointly opposing this worldview, nonscientistic philosophy was itself split into a spectrum of competing worldviews. As the pinnacle of German idealism, Hegelian philosophy was dominant during the nineteenth century: absolute consciousness was in the process of coming to know itself in the dialectical movement of the phenomenology of spirit. Contra Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche focused on the will, and will to power, as the underlying impetus for all that happened (yet each conceived this will in very different ways). As the heir to Kant's chair at Königsberg, Johann Herbart sought to develop a "mathematized" psychology that adequately took into account the "unconscious" in psychical life. Finally, in his fervent opposition to German idealism, Franz Brentano sought to bridge the gap between philosophy and science in protophenomenological terms. These philosophical currents permeated the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna during the time of Freud's formative development. Freud was influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by all of these orientations, as well as their philosophical ancestors.

On a more personal level, Freud's intellectual development was molded in part by his classical training. Freud's educational experiences gave him extensive, direct access to the wisdom of previous generations. It provided him with an immense pool of resources, that contained many historical and philosophical ideas. These ideas were consciously and unconsciously manifested in Freud's theory of human nature-hence, to truly understand what Freud had in mind when he generated his theory of human nature, it is helpful to consider the various philosophical ideas contributing to Freud's intellectual development and his formulation of psychoanalysis.

Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

One of the claims made by Freud was that psychoanalysis had a great deal to offer philosophers by looking at the psychoanalytical underpinnings/ origins of their ideas (what he describes as a "psychography"). It is equally true, however, that philosophers have a great deal to offer psychoanalysis by considering the philosophical underpinnings/origins of its ideas (a "philosophography"). Ironically enough, by doing so, we may be in a better position to appreciate the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the development of any theory-and the theory of psychoanalysis itself.

When we inquire into the relationship between Freud and various historical figures, we will be addressing two interwoven questions. To what extent did philosopher X anticipate, or prediscover, Freud's ideas? And then, to what extent did philosopher X influence Freud? The latter question breaks down into a question of conscious versus unconscious influence: and the unconscious influences are crucially important, given Freud's own theory on the development of a thinker's ideas.

Unconscious Influences on Freud

First (and possibly foremost) Freud himself made the following essential point regarding the apprehension of the inaccessible within himself, as well as others: for the most part we are unaware of the origins of who we are, what we think, and why we think in the way we do. Indeed, this was why Freud partially defined psychoanalysis as "a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way." His metapsychology was designed to elucidate the very foundations of who we are, and the origin of meaning for human nature in general; while his therapeutic practice was meant to do this (resolve psychological problems) for the individual within his/her own idiosyncratic context. For our purposes, this applied to the very development of Freud's ideas (or those of anyone), for they were always more than he consciously understood them to be. As we shall see, he himself was largely unaware-that is, unconscious-of the origin and meaning of those ideas which made him who he was, and led him to think as he did.

Freud clearly acknowledged this in his ambivalence concerning the claim of originality of his major ideas. As we shall see, Freud often denied having read various philosophers, for fear of their contaminating his own fresh discoveries, and asseverated that (at least some of) his ideas were truly original. In 1927, he assumed the air of a solitary explorer blazing entirely new and original trails in human knowledge without the benefit of assistance from past explorers. For example, while contrasting the nature of his own investigations with those of Einstein's, Freud lamented:

The lucky fellow has had a much easier time than I have. He has had the support of a long series of predecessors from Newton onward, while I have had to hack every step of my way through a tangled jungle alone.

Yet it is also the case that at times Freud seemed to conveniently sacrifice his desire for originality of thought in order to seek the supportive "confirmation" afforded by great thinkers for some of his primary and more controversial insights. When psychoanalytic ideas incited disbelief and outrage from his audiences, Freud was more apt to concede the very real "possibility of cryptomnesia." Freud realized that humans are often not fully conscious of the origin of their ideas (in this case, from other thinkers). His thoughts on this are both revealing and instructive:

When some new idea comes up in science, which is hailed at first as a discovery and is also as a rule disputed as such, objective research soon afterward reveals that after all it was in fact no novelty. Usually the discovery has already been made repeatedly and has afterward been forgotten, often at very long intervals of time. Or at least it has had forerunners, had been obscurely surmised or incompletely enunciated ... But the subjective side of originality also deserves consideration. A scientific worker may sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar to himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of them he will discover without much reflection the hints from which they were derived, the statements made by other people which he has picked out and modified and whose implications he has elaborated ... Careful psychological investigation ... reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible new creation by a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh material. There is nothing to regret in this; we had no right to expect that what was "original" could be untraceable and undetermined.

This was a remarkably stark and intellectually honest statement by Freud. It conceded the very real possibility of unconscious influences upon his own work. Freud himself offered an example of this in 1914, when he acknowledged that some of his most important ideas (for example, the sexual etiology in neuroses) had a genesis which he initially thought to be "new and original," but later saw "by no means originated with [him]" but were "imparted to [him] by three people who commanded [his] deepest respect." As was often the case, Freud's personal discovery gave him "valuable insight into the processes of human creative activity and the nature of human knowledge." One can be exposed to ideas which lie dormant until one day they emerge in the form of an "original" discovery.

If one applies Freud's own insights of unconscious elements in the acquisition of human knowledge, it may be said that psychoanalysis was Freud's own original discovery that emerged as a culmination of numerous historical and philosophical insights. To some extent Freud was aware of this. Yet his attitude toward philosophy in general was ambivalent: he both embraced the spirit of philosophical thought and attacked the then-current general philosophical demeanor, which he at times perceived as an impediment toward the acquisition of "scientific" truth and therapeutic success.

Freud's Ambivalence toward Philosophy

It is an interesting fact that early in Freud's adult life, his self-ascribed "original goal" was to pursue philosophy and the insight it afforded. While under the influence of Brentano, at one point Freud had decided to take his Ph.D. in philosophy and zoology; and from his student days until his early forties, philosophy clearly held an enormous attraction for him. Indeed, Freud took himself to be pursuing philosophical goals throughout his career-in psychology. Given this, one might even argue that through the development of his metapsychology (which was at times highly speculative) Freud was seeking to ground psychoanalysis on a philosophical level. Near the end of his career, Freud reflected that he was able to return to his "original purpose" which was "to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution."

Yet it is commonly asserted that Freud exhibited nothing but antipathy toward philosophy. And many of his comments, throughout his lifetime of writings, do suggest a strong negative opinion of "philosophy."

We have nothing to expect from philosophy except that it will once again haughtily point out to us the intellectual inferiority of the object of our study. Let us humbly accept the contempt with which [philosophers] look down on us from the vantage-ground of their superior needs. We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make cannot alter the situation ... such a benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears but for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose. I not only have no capability for philosophy but also no respect for it ... in secret, I cannot say this aloud, I believe that metaphysics will one day be seen as a nuisance, as a misuse of thought ... and it will be judged thus. As if the most useless things in the world were not arranged in the following order: shirt collars, philosophers, and monarchs.

Freud's ambivalence toward philosophy was perhaps no better exemplified by the comments he made during discussions before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In a 1908 discussion on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Freud made no bones about "his own peculiar relationship to philosophy; its abstract nature [was] so unpleasant to him, that he has renounced the study of philosophy." Again, in a discussion in 1909 entitled "Theory of Knowledge and Psychoanalysis," Freud ostensibly held the same line: "Personally, [I have] particular difficulty grasping such abstract ideas, ideas that should have been presented in a much more elementary manner." However, Freud immediately pondered the following point:

It would be interesting to find out whether a philosophic study [of a question] would yield more than a mere translation into a language difficult to understand, or whether one could perhaps expect a further simplification and the achievement of clear results ... The philosophic mastery of our experiences is actually going to yield new results.

To be sure, Freud was unsure whether or not "the time [was] ripe for it." It is clear, however, that Freud held out hope that it was not only possible but a valuable endeavor as well.

Given Freud's ambivalence toward philosophy, certain compelling questions emerge. For instance: To what extent was Freud familiar with philosophy, and how did his familiarity (or lack of familiarity) manifest itself in his theory of human nature? After all, it may be argued that the very fact that Freud developed a theory of human nature could not help but place him squarely within the domain of philosophy.

Freud's Familiarity and Involvement with Philosophy

It is natural to wonder how much philosophy Freud had actually read. Ernest Jones posed this very question to Freud himself. His response: "Very little. As a young man I felt a strong attraction toward speculation and ruthlessly checked it." Furthermore, while speaking of the field of philosophy, Freud periodically claimed that he was simply not "well read."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from APPREHENDING THE INACCESSIBLE by Richard Askay Jensen Farquhar
Copyright © 2006 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The Theme of Apprehending the Inaccessible in Western Philosophy

Part I: A Regressive Archaeological Exploration of the Dialectical Synthesis of Freud's Philosophical Heritage
Chapter 1 The Atavistic Spirit or "the Monster of Energy": A Regressive Philosophical Archaeology into the Origins of Freud's Synthesizing Mind
Chapter 2 Freudian Metaphysical Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice
Chapter 3 The Aspiration to Make the Ego Master in Its Own House: Freud and the Enlightenment
Chapter 4 Unity and Separation: Freud and Greek Philosophy
Chapter 5 Freud's "Romantic" Overtures: Goethe, Schiller, Schelling
Chapter 6 A Case Study of Freud's Philosophical Repression: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
Chapter 7 The Masters of Suspicion: Schopenhauer and Freud on the Inaccessible Nature of Humanity
Chapter 8 Of Philosophers and Madmen: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud on the Unconscious, Freedom and Determinism

Part II: Freud's Philosophical Engagement with Husserlian Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Chapter 9 A Propaedeutic to Freud and Husserlian/Existential Philosophy
Chapter 10 A Intelligible and Yet Enigmatic Mutual Silence: Freud and Husserl
Chapter 11 Being versus Id: Heidegger's Critique of Freud's World View in the Zollikon Seminars
Chapter 12 The Unspoken Dialogue: Heidegger's Specific Criticisms of Freud's Theory and Freud's Response to Heidegger
Chapter 13 ("Lack" of) Father and Sons: Sartre and Freud
Chapter 14 "The Science That Never Was": Sartre's Critique of Freudian Metapsychology
Chapter 15 The Master of Self-Deception: Sartre on Freud
Chapter 16 The Poetic Weight of the Body: Merleau-Ponty's Reposturing of Freudian Psychoanalysis
Part III: Unity and Separation: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Husserlian/Existential Phenomenology
Chapter 17 Freud as a Confused Cartesian/Kantian or a Philosophically Split-Personality: The Existential Phenomenological Perspective
Chapter 18 Unification of Freudian Psychoanalysis through an Archaeological Methodology

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a wonderful journey through the probable historical influences on many of Freud's most basic assumptions; and a moving as well as illuminating conversation between many existential phenomenologists and Freud."

From the Publisher