Paul Ricœur, Concluding Comments (I)
Before concluding this lengthy series of entries on Ricoeur and psychoanalysis, I would like to revisit some of the ideas we’ve considered which may deserve additional comment.
Regression: Explanation or Process
There is an persistent, though largely unremarked ambiguity in Ricoeur’s use of “regression” in Freud and Philosophy. On the one hand, the term may characterize a form of argument or account. I construe what is highest and latest as essentially manifestations — more or less concealed — of what is lowest and earliest.
Ricoeur flags some such meaning where he describes “the analytic character of psychoanalysis and the ‘regressive’ (in the technical sense of the word) character of its economic interpretation” (463-4).
But of course, and on the other hand, regression may equally designate a certain process. This is a “moment” when, under the impact of some stressful circumstance, an item — an adult mind, say, or an organized group — reverts to an earlier, simpler phase of its development. So: a mind is dysregulated and breaks down from an intolerable demand, from trauma, and finds itself reduced to some point of libidinal fixation it had — seemingly — long since overcome. Or: a highly-structured collective, united by bonds of libido, dissolves into an anarchical, formless multitude when its members intuit that its chain of command has been severed, along with its promise of protection and security.
Yet these distinct uses of “regression” — a property of “argument” and of “organic life” — are on some level mutually reinforcing. The viability of a regressive argument, which explains the higher by the lower, seems to be premised upon some such notions as the following:
the object really is enduringly constituted by, or built up out of, simpler elements that remain simple, whatever “sophistication” reached by their organization; and for just this reason,
there is no guarantee against that object’s “regressing” to a less refined expression of those simple “elements” it has all the while essentially remained.
Teleology: Addendum
At crucial moments — I am tempted to say, “when it counts” — the meaning for Ricoeur of a Freudian “teleology” is relatively straightforward. As I discussed in previous entries, this teleology has essentially to do with the advance or enlargement of self-consciousness. This is the end or “telos” imparting intelligibility to human mentality (together, that is, with the “arche” of primitive desire.
Occasionally, though, Ricoeur’s use of the concept deviates from this narrow “object” and loses definition. This makes a certain amount of sense. As Ricoeur continuously reminds us, we are accustomed to “archaeological” images of the psychoanalytic project, which are therefore far from controversial. Yet the very suggestion of a necessary “teleological” aspect in Freud may strike us as strange and untenable. Small wonder, then, that this latent, unacknowledged, even repressed “teleology” is not always perfectly clear.
In fact, the trope might cover a range of meanings, of analytic ideas, practices, and phenomena, and I don’t see why this should count against its use. We may distinguish several “classes” straightaway. And here I will leave aside the “letter” of Ricoeur’s text in order to make use of the full history of psychoanalysis:
the particular, concrete “ends” uncovered during an analysis. The patient does and does not desire certain things — money, fame, love, sex — and the analysis itself helps elicit the existence, identity, meaning, and (potentially conflicting) implications of these “ends”
the generic “ends,” not of this or that analysis, but of all analyses, that is, of analysis-as-such. “Classically,” of course, these include the ends of insight, enlarged self-consciousness, and the greater freedom these afford. But we might add other “ends” — additionally markers of analytic progress — introduced by more recent iterations of the psychoanalytic project, such as: a greater sense of “meaning,” or perhaps “interpersonal skillfulness”
relatedly, the “ends” implied in accounts of developmental phases. These include Freud’s psychosexual stages, of course, but also (arguably) the “positions” of Klein, as well as Margaret Mahler’s phases of infancy. Each scheme involves items “toward which” an ostensibly fixated or regressed patient ought to “progress.” These, on my understanding, are somewhat more concrete than “generic” ends such as self-awareness, freedom, or meaning, but rather help “fill out” the latter with content.
Where and how does teleology enter into psychoanalysis? Or again, what ingredients in psychoanalysis — however “tacit,” even suppressed —would qualify for the designator, “teleological”? And what, in a more clinical register, are the “ends” of an analysis? Our answer to these questions will determine the particular form the archaeo-teleological principle assumes in our discussion.
Psychoanalytic Criteria: The “Kantian” Reading
In several of the last entries, I underscored the Kantian, “transcendental” structure of Ricoeur’s account concerning psychoanalytic criteria. In fact, we find intimations of both this Kantian structure and the four criteria themselves in Ricoeur’s early essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” and especially its middle section, “Critique of Freudian Concepts”:
“In short, we exercise a critique of the concept of the unconscious, in the wide sense of the term critique, i.e. as a justification of the concept’s meaningful significance and a rejection of all claims to extend the concept beyond the limits of its validity. We can say, therefore, that the unconscious is an object in the sense that it is ‘constituted’ by the totality of hermeneutic procedures by which it is deciphered.” (107)
The “object” of a particular order of experience or observation — one encountered, in this case, in a psychoanalysis — posses an identity “relative to,” that is, dependent on, certain synthetic functions of mind. In other words, one can experience that object at all only the condition of organizing it according to certain “categories” to which it must conform. In this respect, at least, as Ricoeur emphasizes at the close of the quoted passage, the analytic object (unconscious desire) is no different that any other item of knowledge, which always involves some orderly synthesis of the “manifold” — concrete experience — according to principles, laws, categories, and the like, which are never themselves directly apprehended objects of experience.
Indeed, in this section, Ricoeur anticipates, not only much of the general Kantian principle of a transcendental idealism which holds of psychoanalysis, but much of the specific “contouring” undergone by the analytic object. But I will leave this thread for another entry.