Paul Ricœur, Concluding Comments (II)
I will conclude my discussion of Ricoeur by revisiting a couple of outstanding questions and obscurities, left open by my last entries.
Criteria of Analytic Experience — Descriptive or Prescriptive?
These four criteria are no passing, hesitant suggestions of Ricoeur’s; he repeats them, albeit with intriguing variations, in several places, at non-trivial intervals. These same criteria appear in “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” (1977) and “Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics” (1978), but also in “Narrative: Its Place in Psychoanalysis” (1988). This entitles us, I think, to attribute to Ricoeur a “considered view” of the core "analytic experience” that persists through any changes in his conception and estimation of Freudian “metapsychology.”
“Currently, I am trying to reinterpret psychoanalysis by taking as my starting point, not the theory, but what happens in analytic experience itself, that is, what happens in the relation between analysand and analyst, in particular in the transference phase. I am cautious about this since if one has some relation to the theoretical writings without having experienced the practice, it is imprudent to speak of the analytic experience. Hence it is from a distance that I say all this and I await the corrections of those who do practice psychoanalysis. Yet Freud’s writings, insofar as they do convey something of his experience, do present testimony about his practice that we can oppose to his theorizing” (202-203)
It is unclear whether Ricoeur himself would endorse any “practical” implications to his account. At least in this place, on Ricoeur’s own understanding, he is simply specifying certain differentia implicit in the analytic situation. He is not legislating a technique, even in the comparatively thin sense that Freud does in his “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis” — rules of thumb, “do this, don’t do that.” (Do not, for instance, work pro bono or tolerate excuses for absences; do not attempt to “educate” or “improve” the patient.) Rather, Ricoeur assumes that there is such a thing as analytic “practice,” in fairly good shape, but which has been insufficiently theorized. This practice was Freud’s “discovery”:
“If I speak of a theoretical dissatisfaction, this is because I became more and more convinced that Freudian theory is discordant with its own discovery and that there is more in this Freudian discovery than in the theoretical discourse Freud offers regarding it” (202)
(Such a position would put Ricoeur in the company of Edgar Levenson, the “interpersonalist,” who also argues that the “algorithm” or techne of analysis outstrips its “metapsychology,” which — beginning with Freud — has persistently misconstrued what actually happens in the clinical context.)
On this reading, Ricoeur’s reflections here, his identification of the four interconnected criteria of analytic practice, carry purely descriptive significance. Or again: Ricoeur is offering a Kantian-type, “transcendental” account: he begins from an uncontroversial object — call it “analytic experience” — and “regresses” from there to its conceptual conditions of possibility.
We may, however, construe Ricoeur’s account in more robust, “normative” terms. For comparison sake, consider Freud’s own, notorious stipulation of psychoanalytic criteria, in “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.” These criteria — the non-negotiable recognition of “resistance” and “transference” — entailed a demarcation between “genuine” psychoanalysis and the ideas and clinical practice of “pretenders” like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, perforce ejected from the movement. These stipulations also implied a continuum between more-or-less analytic approaches.
Similarly, there is an inescapably normative upshot to Ricoeur’s account. For it follows from his position that an analysis in which one or more of these criteria is absent, or insufficiently developed, has to just that degree failed to realize the promise of analysis. In other words, to understand analysis — in particular, how and why it is effective — is at once to establish practical standards of correct and incorrect, better and worse.
For this reason, whether Ricoeur’s discussion is merely “descriptive” or, beyond this, contains genuinely “prescriptive” content is, in fact, not so simple to say. By taking a stand on the essential or constitutive “marks” of analysis — particularly when these marks have not been emphasized or even noticed before — Ricoeur opens himself to charges of tendentiousness. It follows from any such specification that the pieces or aspects of a given analysis which do not evince these marks are, at best, superfluous, and at worst, destructive to the treatment. In other words, I do not think that Ricoeur is claiming that whenever two people encounter each other in the clinical hour, the interaction necessarily displays the four marks he enumerates. On the contrary, it is possible in every instance for an analysis to go awry, to fail — for example — to honor the “narrativizing” mandate of psychoanalysis or (at least) to recognize its value when it does occur.
Archeology and Teleology — A Potential Misunderstanding
How, with these clarifications in place, would an analysis look which assimilated, not only “archaeological” and “teleological” elements, but the “identity” between them? Here I would guard against a simplistic reading of Ricoeur and appropriation of his ideas. According to such a reading, an analysis may in some instances perform archaeological work, (when, that is, the analyst and patient emphasize memory, childhood precipitants and precipitates, the past generally); while in other instances, perhaps during the later phases of the treatment, the analysis becomes properly “teleological” (when, alternatively, the accent falls on the expectations, wishes, anxiety, and everything concerning the patient’s “projections” into the future). On this reading of Ricoeur, an analysis ought to negotiate, or strike some kind of a “balance” between the two, such that archaeological elements do not eclipse teleological ones — as Freudianism is disposed to allow — or vice versa.
But this, as I have indicated, is a misleading, albeit tempting way of construing Ricoeur’s position. His critique of Freudianism is not that it has promoted archaeological, and marginalized teleological claims — so that we ought to restore some “parity” between them, more emphasis on the future, less on the past. His idea is more subtle and counterintuitive than this: that, precisely in those gestures of Freudianism that appear most unequivocally archaeological, there is an internal, latent, unacknowledged teleological undercurrent. The point is not that we can add up the archaeological on one side, the teleological on the other, to see whether they zero out. On the contrary, if I have understood Ricoeur correctly, the point is that archaeology and teleology in reality form an inseparable “whole” that the metapsychology has traditionally misrepresented as a “purely” archaeological program.