David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (V)
A Coda
In the last entry I concluded a proper “review” of David Black’s Psychoanalysis and Ethics. Here I’d like to revisit a couple lines of thought intimated in the review that, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to develop.
Psychoanalysis, Science, Philosophy
I suspect that some distinction between “causes” and “ends” — between Aristotle’s “efficient” and “final” causes — would have greatly simplified Black’s account, though perhaps at some cost to its originality. For in a significant way, the question of “positivism’s” historical grip on psychoanalysis — the unambiguous antagonist in Black’s drama — is precisely the question of its uneasy relation to “ends,” to the irreducible place of teleology in human thought and behavior. Drawing this distinction would have brought Black’s ideas into the theoretical ambit established by Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas, both of whom attempt to reckon with the scientific, efficient-causal ambitions (and pretensions) of psychoanalysis, as compared (especially) to its clinical practice, which presupposes “hermeneutic" and “teleological” forms of of sense-making. A patient’s mental functioning and behavior in a given instance, still less his or her interpersonal integration with the analyst, is never simply caused by antecedent states of affairs, but is always also undertaken “for the sake of” some end. And at a higher level, clinical psychoanalysis itself, even when confined exclusively to interpretation, is unintelligible apart from certain “ends” toward which it is directed: above all, the improved self-awareness, functioning and freedom of the patient.
To be sure, Black himself refers to this distinction, almost in passing, in his review of Jonathan Lear’s work:
“This final cause [shared by diverse psychoanalytic traditions] is the patient’s “freedom”… [T]he recognition of an inherently ethical dimension to psychoanalysis…opens up the possibility that psychoanalysis could in the future found itself on a more coherent and stronger philosophical base than Freud himself, product of the late nineteenth century’s fascination with natural science, was able to give it” (39)
But apart from the single paragraph containing this passage, Black leaves this fundamental idea essentially undeveloped. Again, as I emphasized in the last few entries, the desideratum of a “philosophical base” introduces obscurities that Black never addresses directly. Yet whatever Black means with this metaphor, the project would surely have been advanced by some engagement with, for example, Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy, or the many other sophisticated treatments of psychoanalysis’s uneasy relation to science.
Some Notes on “Foundations”
Even the general “foundationalist” program, whatever its ultimate form — broadly, that some “x” must be grounded in some foundation, “y” — ought immediately to raise questions such as:
Does “x” require such a foundation? — do we feel a theoretical or practical “need” for it?
If we do feel such a need, then why? — what are we hoping to accomplish via such a foundation?
Is such a foundation possible?
As I rule, it seems, we must look for answers to such basic questions “between the lines” of Black’s argument.
In fact, this persistent advocacy of a philosophical and ethical “foundation” of psychoanalysis — one allegedly missing from Freud’s original picture but somehow demanded by it — suggests something Black seems to believe without stating openly. The belief is that psychoanalysis is not autonomous in its theory and practice, but is somehow parasitic upon something “extra analytic” it cannot provide from out of its own resources. But what sort of thing is philosophy, and especially those branches of philosophy called “phenomenology” and “ethics,” such that some more “empirical” theory or practice — say, psychoanalysis — stands in need of them?
Sometimes Black’s position seems to be that psychoanalysis has a weak foundation, and our task — with the assistance, perhaps, of Levinas — is to give it a stronger one. All sorts of unfortunate consequences evidently follow from our failure to deliver such a foundation.
At other times, Black suggests that the tradition of psychoanalysis — certainly the work of clinical analysis — is in fairly good shape. Hence we may, as a nearly pro forma gesture or academic exercise, choose to recognize and articulate the philosophical ethics long implicit in this tradition and its practice (particularly in so-called “object relations” psychoanalysis, Black’s favored school). But the analytic tradition itself, the mutual conduct of analyst and analysand, can get along fine without this articulation — it doesn’t require our reflections to do its “work” any more than birds require ornithology to build nests.
Ethics
Ironically, the book does not explicitly address the questions that its title, Psychoanalysis and Ethics, calls most urgently to this reader’s mind, namely: what is or ought to be our “psychoanalytic ethics?” (Or: what is an “ethical psychoanalysis?”)
On the one hand, what sort of ethical conception — values — are implied or demanded by a psychoanalytic understanding of the human condition? (39-40). Or again: what does psychoanalysis have to contribute to the wider ethical discourse? On the other hand, running in the opposite direction: how ought the practice of a clinical psychoanalysis itself to be conducted? — with which values in mind? What end or ends ought a clinician to help realize?
To my mind, many of the most interesting questions belonging to the “psychoanalysis and ethics” nexus arise just here. Ought analysis to have some sort of morally educative role? Does the goal of analysis — hence the job of an effective analyst — include the “improvement” of the patient in some robust moral sense? I imagine most working analysts would disclaim any such “patronizing” presumption. Few would say unreservedly that their “mandate" involves making the patient more virtuous, let alone that a successful analysis brings the patient around to the analyst’s own ethical or political vision. And yet something verging on this presumption may be discerned just beneath the surface of Black’s argument — and sometimes above the surface!
But I have always found that the moral “austerity” of Freud’s vision consists precisely in its non-moralizing substance. This sort of austerity is reflected, for instance, in the famous lines from the Ego and the Id: “[T]he normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows” (52). For both our immoral impulses (incestuous, murderous) and our moral condemnation of these impulses (in the form of punitive guilt feelings) are largely unconscious. As I suggested in the last entry, however, I occasionally suspect that this “unconscious” layer of mind is precisely what is missing from Black’s account.