Paul Ricœur, Archaeology and Teleology (I)
Archaeology and Teleology
In the last series of entries I expounded the “criteria” which, for Ricoeur, constitute analytic experience. These are the marks through which we can identify something as analytic and so distinguish between analytic and non-analytic “facts.” In summary, Ricoeur’s position is that the patient’s desire — the authentic analytic focus — will invariably appear or “show up” in an analysis as
But this commentary on the fourfold analytic “contouring” of desire, and in particular our most recent reflections on Nachträglichkeit — hence the possibility of retroactively “reforming” one’s past — have brought us to the threshold of another important area of Ricoeur’s thinking. This is the “archaeo-teleological principle” that, particularly in Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur discerns (albeit obscurely) at the core of Freudianism. In this entry and the next ones, I want to examine this principle to see what light it throws on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
The principle, of course, is actually compounded of two concepts. And ultimately, Ricoeur is preoccupied precisely with how these seeming antipodes mutually relate: on the one hand, “archaeology,” on the other, “teleology.” Initially, though, Ricoeur tentatively consider these concepts as separate, before raising the possibility of their essential “inseparability.” And we will follow him in this sequence.
Archaeology
Let us ask, then: what is the meaning for Ricoeur of terms like “archaeology” or “the archaeological” in the context of Freudianism? Undoubtedly, Ricoeur is first of all capitalizing on a metaphor that pervades Freud’s own writings. For Freud himself frequently likens the analyst to an archaeologist and analysis to an archaeological dig. What appealed to Freud in this metaphor? Like the archaeologist at the excavation site, the analyst with a patient attempts to uncover contents from a previous era — deeper “strata” — concealed beneath the “surface.” Both seek what is earlier in time and, it seems to follow, more basic, fundamental, primitive, and the like.
The analogy is imperfect, of course. Those traces of a past civilization uncovered by the archaeologist do not necessarily influence, shape, or “move” the contemporary civilization built upon it. By contrast, in psychoanalysis one purportedly reaches “deep,” unconscious mental strata of the mind — crystallized in the past, that is, during infancy — that continue to bear on, and disturb, the patient’s consciousness. And this is to say: not only do these more primitive mental strata antedate the adult mind; they also explain it, “in the present.”
Ricoeur’s use of “archaeology” implies each these aspects, but especially this last part. As he writes in “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” “the analyst…shows man as subject to his childhood” (109). And, speaking of the structural model’s mental agencies as mere precipitates of the past, Ricoeur continues:
“The bleak vision which he [Freud] proposes of consciousness as subject to the three masters of the Id, the Superego, and Reality defines the task of consciousness in an obverse sense and the route of epigenesis as a negative.” (109)
Hence “archaeology” in Freudianism has centrally to do with an explanatory direction, that is, a “regressive hermeneutics” (120). In the realm of mental life, at least, the past “explains” the present; the primitive “explains” the complex; the lower “explains” the higher. Ricoeur elaborates upon this “regressive procedure of Freudian analysis” (112) as follows:
“[A]n understanding of consciousness always moves backwards…The fundamental meaning of the unconscious is in fact that an understanding always comes out of preceding figures, whether one understands this priority in a purely temporal and factual or symbolic sense. Man is the only being who is subject to his childhood. He is that being whose childhood constantly draws him backwards. The unconscious is thus the principle of all regressions and all stagnations.” (113)
From this perspective, writes Ricoeur, “the unconscious is fate…the hinterside fate of childhood and of symbols already there and reiterated, the fate of the repetition of the same themes on different helices of a spiral” (118). And Ricoeur never loosens this conceptual association of archaeology, stricto sensu, with fatalism.
In Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur will dedicate considerable attention to this idea of explanatory “reduction.” But whereas “Consciousness and the Unconscious” does not even allude to the place of “desire” in analysis, in Freud and Philosophy this concept becomes the master concept of archaeological thought. On Ricoeur’s view, Freudian archaeology centrally and overtly involves an attempt to grasp
“the emergence or positing of desire through which I am posited, and find myself already posited. This prior positing of the sum [being] at the heart of the Cogito must now be made explicit under the title of an archaeology of the subject.” (439)
According to this reading of Freud, a person’s very being — neurotic and non-neurotic alike — is explicable only as the result of an antecedent “emergence or positing of desire.” The “archaeology of the subject” therefore designates the program of tracing this “being,” regressively, to the antecedent desire in which it originates.
Hence to “regard Freudianism as a revelation of the archaic, a manifestation of the ever prior” (440) now just means attending to “our timeless, immortal, indestructible desire” (453). There is no question about the identity of that explanans underlying all human explananda:
“[P]sychoanalysis is the borderline knowledge of that which, in representation, does not pass into ideas. That which is represented in affects and which does not pass into ideas is desire qua desire.” (453, my italics)
This characterization is readily generalized:
“The genius of Freudianism is to have unmasked the strategy of the pleasure principle, the archaic form of the human, under its rationalizations, its idealizations, its sublimations. Here the function of analysis is to reduce apparent novelty by showing that it is actually a revival of the old: substitute satisfaction, restoration of the lost archaic object, derivatives from early fantasies — these are but various names to designate the restoration of the old in the features of the new.” (446)
Ricoeur perceives this same archaeological gesture across the entirety of Freud’s corpus: in accounts of dreams, narcissism, the superego and morality, the Oedipus complex, masochism, the death drive and repetition compulsion, and finally “culture” broadly speaking, i.e in art, religion, and morality. In short, and in the same language we considered above: “If one interrelates all these modalities of archaism, there is formed the complex figure of a destiny in reverse, a destiny that draws one backward” (452). Freudianism, so construed, amounts to “a strange and profound philosophy of fate” (468).
In a general way, then, Freudianism has become synonymous with a disenchanting program — the systematic effort to “expose” the lower in the higher, to identify where and how the adult remains “subject to his childhood.” This is hardly a controversial or unfamiliar reading of Freud, of course, and probably doesn’t require much in the way of clarification, illustration, or justification. After all, it is widely known that a “classical” analyst might interpret the adult patient’s conscious desires, e.g. for a mistress or a promotion at work, as more or less obscure manifestations of original, now unconscious desires, e.g. for the breast or the phallus.
And this program is thoroughly universalized in Freud’s cultural writings, wherein modern man remains stubbornly bound to ancient man. Between the primal horde and the most organized, differentiated society there is no qualitative distinction to be drawn, since the latter amounts only to the channeling, deflection, or restraint of some quantity of libido in the body politic.
Thus the archaeological direction of Freudianism is well established, and Ricoeur locates this “regressive hermeneutics” in all the corners of Freud’s writings. And yet Ricoeur nonetheless now asks: is there some path open, in Freudianism itself, to conceptualizing the obverse — the thought that childhood may also be “subject” to adulthood, that the lowest may become the highest without essentially remaining the lowest? Is there in Freud’s system, however latent, a progression that is not a “mere” repetition? In short: is there for psychoanalysis such a thing as “progress” at all, and — if so — what concepts enable us to reflect on it?
These are evidently the sorts of (hopeful) questions that motivate Ricoeur’s turn from the concept of “archaeology” to that of “teleology.” For the latter contains the promise of a non-fatalistic conceptual counterpart to archaeology:
“It seems to me that the concept of an archaeology of the subject remains very abstract so long as it has not been set in a relationship of dialectical opposition to the complementary concept of teleology. In order to have an archê a subject must have a telos.” (459)
Moreover, as I have suggested, Ricoeur will attempt to locate and elaborate this telos, not beyond Freudianism, but precisely within it. A discussion of teleology, in other words, is implicitly demanded by Freudianism itself. So Ricoeur writes:
“[I]n a direction contrary to the regressive movement psychoanalysis sets forth in theory, there must be supposed an aptitude for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which the theory does not thematize.” (492)
What is Freudianism’s telos, then? — what can we say about this teleological “aptitude for progression,” presupposed but unrecognized by psychoanalysis? — and how does this aptitude relate to the more conspicuous “regressive” or “archaeological” dimension of Freudianism? I will take up these questions in the next entries.