David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (II)
Among David Black’s many preoccupations in his collection of essays, one ranks highest — namely, “the thought that psychoanalysis, when Freud founded it, had no adequate philosophical base from which to consider the hugely important questions of ethics” (1). This criticism naturally implies a task: to supply to psychoanalysis an adequate philosophical “base,” so positioning it to address “important questions of ethics.”
Yet as I began to suggest in the last entry, the meaning of philosophical “foundations” — particularly vis-à-vis psychoanalysis — is itself hardly obvious, and Black’s use of the phrase is not terribly clarifying. Indeed, in the Introduction alone, in the space of just a few pages, we find the following handful of passages, all of which contain variations on the metaphor of “foundations”:
“Levinas[’s]… phenomenology, the prioritizing of direct experience over theoretical understanding, allowed him to make an important move: he declared that ethics was “first philosophy,” that ethical insight, derived from a perception of “the other” in all his or her alterity, recognized something that was prior to “ontologies” such as those that underpin the natural sciences.” (2-3, my italics)
“[M]y own earlier writings…were still impeded by the over-valuation of science in the Freudian tradition…I think now that that tradition needs to be stood on a different philosophical foundation, a phenomenological base.” (3, my italics)
“What Levinas meant by ethics is something rather different from what concerned Aristotle. Levinas is concerned with something deeper, which provides the necessary perspective from which “Aristotelian” virtues and ethical decisions can be addressed.” (4, my italics)
“[T]he initial standpoint of psychoanalysis on the base of natural science (as understood at the end of the nineteenth century) rendered the nature of internal objects…impossible to address adequately. More recently, a more phenomenological approach and, particularly, the thinking of American psychoanalysts…have opened up new possibilities.” (4, my italics)
“[My essay] discusses the “different legacy” for psychoanalysis that [Jonathan] Lear describes, deriving from the thought of Hans Loewald and enabling psychoanalysis to be set on a more secure philosophical basis than that of Freud’s understanding of science.” (5, my italics)
Given the obvious significance of this metaphor for Black, and its appearance in virtually every essay, it is regrettable that he never examines it directly. This lacuna is especially remarkable, since so much of philosophy in the last century is avowedly anti-foundationalist in its ambitions. Unfortunately, Black writes as though he is either unaware of, or indifferent to, any potential objections to his capitalization on this metaphor.
As these quotations from the Introduction indicate, though, the metaphor easily becomes slippery: sometimes it is natural science that has, or requires, a “foundation” in philosophy (“…‘ontologies’ such as those that underpin the natural sciences”); sometimes it is psychoanalysis more narrowly that must be grounded in a “prior” phenomenological ethics — an ethics, moreover, that needn’t be sought in the precincts of analytic experience, but may be provided by (extra-analytic) ethical intuitions; sometimes another institution or tradition is at issue, as is announced in the title of the final essay, “Levinas’ Re-basing of Religion”; and at still other times, Black’s words suggest that ethics itself — norms, ideals, values — must be “grounded” at a deeper level of “ethical” experience or analysis than we’ve hitherto appreciated.
To be clear, I am not saying that these discrete foundationalist programs are inconsistent with one another, or even that they are separable in practice. (Perhaps upon examination we will find that each “foundation” somehow demands or presupposes the others.) I am saying, however, that Black is far from clear that he is advocating different sorts of programs, at different times, let alone clear about how these might add up to something more than their sum. And insofar as the central, organizing metaphor of Black’s project is so imprecise, I’ve had difficulty coming to an assessment of it.
An Illustration
To get some sense of the (unacknowledged) complexity into which this metaphor plunges the reader, consider the following, quite representative passage, from Chapter 2:
“With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in philosophy…To say this is in no way to disrespect science, but to recognize that the “phenomenological” nature of the internal world makes it a different sort of thing from the shared objective world that science describes so successfully — not a replacement of it…but different from it and requiring a different approach to language if we are to grasp it appropriately.” (18)
What exactly is Black suggesting in this passage? Let us consider it closely. To begin with the first sentence: Freudian psychoanalysis, we are told, had “its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences,” rather than “stand[ing] on a richer and more complex base in philosophy,” as Loewald’s thinking putatively allows.
But is this a sound characterization of psychoanalysis’s original “base” — that is, in “medicine and the natural sciences” — even according to Black’s own conception? In fact, throughout the essays, Black oscillates in his critique between two different objects:
science — 19th century or otherwise; and
scientistic philosophy — announced by terms like “positivist,” “materialist,” and (more tendentiously) “reductive”
While the passage above flags the “initial base” of psychoanalysis “in medicine and the natural sciences,” Black also claims things like, “the elimination of subjecthood in favor of objectivities…followed from Freud’s adoption of the standpoint of reductive materialism” (15, my italics). This picture is also reflected in passages like the following:
“The tradition within philosophy that gives “science” the central place as our model for knowledge and for the process of acquiring knowledge has valorized certain philosophical modes — ontology, epistemology — at the expense of ethics.” (20, my italics)
At such moments, Black’s objection is not that Freudian psychoanalysis was founded on science, but that it was founded precisely on an inadequate philosophy: the “scientific Weltanschauung” (9), or “the nineteenth century materialist conception of science” (9); or again, “the ‘materialism’ that was an unquestioned metaphysical assumption in Freud’s scientific milieu” (107). And this, indeed, seems to be Black’s considered view. Hence the ostensible “foundation” of psychoanalysis was never “science” per se, but rather the philosophy of “positivism,” which (on this account) “involved accepting materialism and rationality, and rejecting metaphysics, idealism, and religion” (9). (I’ll pass over without comment Black’s questionable proposal here that “rationality” is something to contrast with “metaphysics, idealism, and religion.”)
Once these clarifications are in view, however, we must turn back to the more significant question about the meaning of philosophical “foundations,” generally speaking, and as well as the meaning it holds for Black, in particular.
I will discuss these questions in the next entry.