David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (I)
In this series I’ll comment on David Macleod Black’s recent Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective, in preparation for a book review. In this first entry, I’ll provide an overview of Black’s general concerns, before turning to a particular trope that appears to knit together the ten essays in his collection: the proposal that psychoanalysis requires a new philosophical “foundation,” in order to clarify and support its relation to ethics.
The Problem: An Overview
Black begins his stimulating book with a short introduction to its themes, which he inserts into a synoptic reconstruction of modern European intellectual history. From René Descartes through Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber to Sigmund Freud, the story is now familiar: modernity’s elevation of scientific rationality into the sole arbiter in matters of truth and untruth, reality and illusion — culminating in philosophical “positivism” — has had an implacably disenchanting effect on our relation to the world and to ourselves. (Black defines positivism as “the belief that only science and what can be logically derived from scientific findings can be the ground of truth” (9).)
More concretely, such a scientific Weltanschauung condemns as superstition — a subjective, anthropomorphic projection — anything that does not conform to its (impersonal, materialist, and quantifying) standards of reality, including ethical values and religious objects. Nor has psychoanalysis been spared from this trend; Freud himself embraced it.
Somewhat idiosyncratically, Black recruits Dante Alighieri (author of the Divine Comedy) and Emmanuel Levinas (French ethical philosopher), as the heroes of his account. These theoretical innovators, Black indicates, will help stem the disenchanting tide and “re-enchant” the world, restoring intrinsic integrity to the objects of ethical and religious experience, both within psychoanalysis and beyond.
Indeed, while Black’s nominal focus is the relation between ethics and psychoanalysis, he immediately suggests that such a program has importance well beyond that discipline. Not only should psychoanalysis be re-founded on some sort of Levinasian (or even Dantean) ethical construction, in order to secure its theoretical coherence; the future of organized human life depends upon some such re-founding. Most strikingly, throughout the essays Black frames “the gathering dangers of populism and the ever-enlarging threats to the earth’s climate and biodiversity” (2) as catastrophes emanating from this same positivistic deracination of our ethical “ground.”
(It was a missed opportunity, I think, that Black never engages with the most subtle critique of abstract “enlightenment rationality” and its self-undermining conatus, undertaken first by G.W.F Hegel and later by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In particular, I suspect that such an engagement might have allowed Black to avoid some of the stark, unmediated dualisms — e.g. between “scientific” and “ethical” objects — that ultimately define his account.)
A New Foundation?
Black suggests that, strictly speaking, the ten essays in his collection are “free standing” (1). They do not advance a single argument, nor do they restrict themselves to a single topic. On the contrary, the essays range materials as eclectic as the ontological standing of “internal objects” in the psychoanalytic literature (Chapter 2); the psychological pressures governing the origins and development of Buddhism (Chapter 4); recent publications by philosopher-analysts Jonathan Lear (Chapter 3) and Joel Whitebook (Chapter 7); the nature of “allegorical objects” and their function in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Chapters 5 and 6); and Levinas’ contributions to ethical and religious thinking (Chapters 8, 9, and 10). Readers who are interested in any of these topics may want to look at Black’s thoughtful, well-written pieces.
Nonetheless, there is an underlying continuity to the collection, inasmuch as the essays “circle somewhat obsessively around a few related themes” (1). And one of these themes, in particular, commands Black’s attention: “Central to them all is the thought that psychoanalysis, when Freud founded it, had no adequate philosophical base from which to consider the hugely important questions of ethics” (1). Black’s agenda follows from this perceived deficit: to supply to psychoanalysis its — missing or insufficient — “philosophical base,” so that it is finally equipped to address “important questions of ethics.”
There are undoubtedly other ways of characterizing the continuity of Psychoanalysis and Ethics, but Black’s own gloss is apt, and I will take my orientation from it in my commentary. The metaphor of a “base” here is hardly an aberration. Black recurrently, insistently raises the desideratum of a “foundation,” although the ingredients in his conception — what exactly is to ground, and what is to be grounded — vary considerably with the context. At times, in fact, this variation becomes a source of confusion — a problem I will begin to examine in the next entry.