Paul Ricœur, Four Criteria: A Reprise
These last reflections present us with one, intriguing way of tying the “archaeo-teleological principle,” outlined mainly in Freud and Philosophy, to the four “criteria” of analytic experience, developed only later in essays anthologized in On Psychoanalysis. The most explicit common denominator is, of course, desire. On the one hand, this is the uncontroversial archê of Freudian thought, hence the “truth” of its whole explanatory drift. On the other hand, as we have seen, desire is the express “object” that appears under the four-fold conditions of analytic experience, apprehended as
But precisely these criteria, it seems, give flesh once again to the teleological dimension of Ricoeur’s principle. For each of these criteria plainly have to do with desire’s “self-manifestation,” that is, the development and “making known” of the archê. Psychoanalysis advances the program of self-consciousness because, or inasmuch as, it endows desire with a “voice” through which it may be “recognized” — known, cognized — as what it is.
In analysis, there is no such thing as desire per se or “as such”; there is rather only desire (a) expressed (and concealed) by these words, (b) directed toward this person (or his or her avatar), (c) constituting and shaping this life, and (d) conceived, recalled, recounted, and projected in this way.
We will recall that Ricoeur’s “principle” stipulates that — owing, perhaps, to the dialectical structure of philosophical concepts generally — the explicit archê of Freudianism, desire, entails an implicit telos, self-consciousness. The two are finally inseparable. The very effort to analyze, regressively, the adult in terms of the infantile, is redolent of this “quest for consciousness” and so — properly conceived — is something like the final incarnation of desire itself. It is, to put it somewhat grandiosely, desire knowing itself as desire.
In other words, each of the four criteria isolates a side of the generic telos of “progress in self-consciousness.” Let us consider each at greater length:
To say that desire is discursive, expressible, sayable, and the like, is naturally at the same time to make some distinction between “potential” and “realization.” The desire in question is initially something abstract, indeterminate, or “in itself,” but via language — the “empire of speech” — it acquires concretion, determinacy, and becomes “for consciousness.” Such a thought appears, for instance, in “Consciousness and the Unconscious”: “the Freudian unconscious can in essence be known because the instinct’s ‘ideational representatives’ remain on the level of the signified and are permissibly homogeneous with the empire of speech” (105)
Likewise, calling desire “interpersonal” or “other-directed” is to postulate an “end” toward which it strives, and through which — by the mediation of which — this desire “becomes what it is.” One seeks the other’s “recognition” (first the parents’; later the analyst’s), in order to “know oneself in the other.”
The criterion of “psychic reality,” too, entails that desire is never simply desire per se — paradigmatically, a fungible, quality-less quantum of libido. On the contrary, desire is always contoured, configured, or determined as a particular fantasy. In fact, it is only in the course of “realizing" this particular configuration that it may know — and thus become more fully — “itself.” The repetition compulsion represents a stalled development, a stubborn, unconscious recurrence of the same. But an analysis, so it is claimed, may “reactivate” this development and escort the desire to meaningful awareness.
“Narration,” finally, signals the most transparently “teleological” fact about desire. As we have seen, “un-narrated” desire is per definition unsatisfied desire, while it becomes satisfied, or at least promises satisfaction, when it is called into the kind of “order” that narration effects. And this narration, for Ricoeur, is precisely the most developed and sophisticated “self knowledge” of which human begins are finally capable.