Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. I. Discursivity

In this series of entries, I draw on a range of Paul Ricoeur’s writings. I do this in order to grasp several concepts that, for Ricoeur, define the meaning of Freud and Freudianism — both theoretically and clinically. The texts include, especially, the early essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” the concluding sections of Freud and Philosophy, and several pieces from the collection, On Psychoanalysis. Over time and across these texts, Riceour consistently develops certain idiosyncratic concepts that help clarify the structure of psychoanalysis. In the first entries I will consider the four “criteria” that, for Ricoeur, constitute analytic experience as such: “discursivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “psychic reality,” and “narrativity.” Later, I will consider the place of “archaeology” and “teleology” in his accounts. What do these admittedly commonplace terms mean, for Ricoeur, in the context of analytic theory and practice? And what kinds of experience and knowledge are unsealed by these concepts that might otherwise remain inaccessible?

Four Criteria: An Introduction

In several places, Ricoeur enumerates the four characteristics — four “criteria” — of an analytic “fact.” The proximate motivation and context for this enumeration is epistemological: Ricoeur wants to establish whether, and in what sense, psychoanalysis trades in “facts” analogous to those found in the natural sciences — whether, that is to say, psychoanalysis can be scientific, and how. (Ultimately, Riceour argues that it cannot be a natural science, which reckons with “facts” that are differently constituted.)

We may abstract from this epistemological context, though, and rehearse these criteria as a ways of grasping Ricoeur’s “picture” of analysis — not, that is, to assess whether analysis bears comparison with the natural sciences, but rather to determine — as a clinical matter — what kind of thing analysis is or ought to be. On the one hand: what is the “object” of an analysis? What sort of “thing” do analyst and patient activate, experience, examine, and the like? On the other hand: how, according to which norms and principles, do analyst and patient relate to this object? — and with what end in view? It seems to me that Ricoeur’s discussion of analytic “facts” provides answers to these fundamental questions surrounding the “identity” of psychoanalysis.

While Ricoeur is not at all time clear on this point, these criteria seem to share a common denominator: that is, they presuppose the patient’s “desire” as in all cases the sui generis clinical focus. What these four criteria elucidate are the necessary dimensions of desire, or the “modes” in which desire must appear in analysis.

In this respect, “desire” in analysis is something akin to Kant’s “concept of an object in general,” a placeholder for a theoretical entity — an “x” — which is never directly apprehended, but which “appears” through certain specifiable “categories” of experience. For Kant, any object of possible experience will evince certain features: a spatiotemporal “substance” with “properties,” linked by chains of causality with other such substances, and so on. By analogy, we may say that, for Ricoeur, any object that admits of analytic experience must, likewise, conform to a suite of conceptual conditions of possibility. The account is in either case “transcendental.” That is, one begins with an uncontroversial item of experience and inquires: what must be true in order for that item to exist as it does? So we may observe a typical analytic situation and ask: what kinds of “structures” must be in place, latently but effectively, such that this situation is possible at all? For Kant, the “categories” of inter alia “substance,” “causality,” and “plurality” are constitutive of any object of experience. What, on this analogy, are the “categories” constitutive of any possible analytic experience?

First Criterion: Discursivity. The desire that is in any way accessible to analytic investigation is discursive, or verbally expressible:

“All that enters into the field of investigation and treatment is that portion of experience capable of being put into words…This screening by discourse in the analytic situation thus functions as one criterion of what will be taken to be the object of the discipline: not an instinct as a physiological phenomenon, not even desire as a kind of energy, but desire as a meaning capable of being deciphered, translated, interpreted. The theory must therefore take into account what I will call the semantic dimension of desire” (54)

We might like to enter a caveat here, or a reminder about how this account is framed. Ricoeur needn’t be claiming that human desire is always and everywhere discursive — a strong ontological claim. To be sure, there may be reasons to attribute such a strong claim to Ricoeur, based on the drift of his thinking as a whole. But in the present context, he is committed only to a weaker claim: namely, that in order to show up in analysis, hence to constitute an analytic fact, desire must be expressible in words. That is to say, this account does not in principle preclude other approaches towards, and conceptions of, desire. A neuroscientist or research psychologist, say, might organize their experience along different lines, and in ways that enjoy perfect legitimacy in their object-domains. Hence, for instance, to show up on a brain imaging device, or on a longitudinal study of a control group’s behaviors, “human desire” must conform to other categories of experience.

Again, it is not just any piece of experience that in analysis is put into words, at least centrally, but something specific, namely: desire. Everything about the “analytic situation” is arranged, in fact, such that it “forces desire to speak” (54). This criterion, especially, nods to Freud’s “Repetition” essay, and its premise that certain mental contents, when they are not known and recollected in analysis — in the medium, finally, of communication — are instead unconsciously discharged in deed, “acted out,” repeated. Ricoeur seems to extend or enlarge upon Freud’s position. Not only must analysis bring the patient to explicitly recollect repressed memories, rather than repeat them in action, as a more primitive mode of “remembering.” Beyond this, and while perhaps including it, all desire must be spoken, put into words.

Now, broadly construed, this first criterion would not in itself distinguish analysis from the natural sciences. After all, in the latter, too, nothing — no observation or data — finally enters its domain except in propositional form. Hence in claiming that nothing counts or figures in analysis except “that portion of experience capable of being put into words” (54), Ricoeur must have something narrower in mind. Analysis centers desire, not merely as something given propositional form — “from the outside,” so the speak — but as something expressed, verbalized, or communicated and not realized. Precisely inasmuch as this desire is not “acted out,” it enters into the medium of language, whereupon it admits of “analysis” proper — discussion, association, interpretation, and the like.

The expression of desire need not, for course, take as direct or literal a form as “I want to do x” or “I wish to possess y.” On the contrary, the working assumption of an analysis is that such an utterance is potentially unavailable to the patient until much later — not until after the resistances have been beaten back and the repressions loosened. We may rather suppose that, in the full range of the patient’s communications during analysis, many of which have no obvious contiguity with his or her “desires,” these latter nonetheless infuse and inflect everything: reports of dreams, accounts of interactions, descriptions of scenes that are remembered or imagined, and so on. Indeed, just because the patient’s desire is rarely, if ever, uttered in so artless, unambiguous, and undisguised as form as “I want x,” every communication falls under suspicion, as something “decipherable” in terms of that (otherwise unexpressed) desire.

Now, certainly Ricoeur does not deny the existence or discount the importance, in analysis, of such things as non-verbal communication, “acting out” and “acting in,” dreams and fantasies, somatic events and sensations — all phenomena that are not immediately, “as such,” or in the first instance “expressed in words.” (A dream itself, while it is being dreamt, is unlikely to have this quality.) Ricoeur’s point is rather that these things only enter analysis, become analytic “facts,” inasmuch as they are “spoken” and thus become “meaningful.” Not the dream per se — as-dreamt — but the dream-as-reported possesses “reality” in an analysis. What matters is not the slouch or provocative outfit, nor the tardiness or missed payment, but these same events as registered — remarked upon, associated to — and so drawn into the discursive vortex or “semantic field” of analysis, in which every “piece” relates to all the others.

In the next entry, I will discuss Ricoeur’s “second” criterion.