Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. III. Psychic Reality
Third Criterion: Psychic Reality.
Alongside (1) “discursivity” and (2) “intersubjectivity,” the analytic object — desire — appears in the mode of (3) “psychic reality.” Not only is desire uttered or sayable in analysis; and not only is this sayable desire essentially other-directed, a plea for recognition; beyond this, the desire that surfaces in analysis is determinate or “contoured.” This is to say: the desire encountered in analysis amounts to a specifiable pattern, revealed paradigmatically in fantasy, which imbues it with weight, inertia, efficacy — that is, “reality.” Ricoeur anticipates this third criterion in his 1960 essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious”:
“This is how I understand Laplanche's assertion— in many respects so disturbing — that the unconscious is finite. I take it to mean that, once finished, an analysis ends up with certain signifiers and not with others. That is the condition for a ‘terminable analysis,’ and in this sense a realism of the unconscious is the correlate of terminable analysis. The analysis of Philip’s dream, for example, finishes with the facticity of this particular linguistic chain and no other.” (104)
By the time of “Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics” (1978), Ricoeur had begun to describe much the same thing in subtly different language. In this place, the phrase “psychic reality” encompasses “the coherence and resistance of certain manifestations of the unconscious” (56).
What do these two descriptors mean? Evidently, “resistance” and “coherence” provide analogues to the “material reality” with which psychic reality is otherwise contrasted. Naturally, psychic reality is not directly observable, or publicly verifiable in the way that objects in the laboratory appear to the natural scientist. Nonetheless, unconscious desire exerts enough repetitious, specifiable, and predictable impact on the patient’s “productions” — indeed, on the full course of the patient’s life — to warrant speaking of a “psychic reality” quite as tangible as the “material” sort.
By “resistance,” of course, Ricoeur means that the particular configuration of desire definitive for a person persists, thus imparting to his or her thoughts, feelings, and behavior a certain stubborn uniformity across time, largely independent of — “resistant” to — changes in “material reality.” And the desire is resistant, not only to change, but to any attempts to become aware of it, to make its “identity” known. (Presumably, this is so because desire intuits this “self awareness” as a precipitant to the “change” it resists.)
With “coherence,” on the other hand, Ricoeur seems to refer to the mutual consistency, indeed, the “referentiality” of the many discrete manifestations of unconscious desire to one another. It is the “coherence” of these manifestations, such that they amount to an intelligible whole, which persuades us they do express the patient’s determinate, unconscious desire. This does not exclude the possibility, indeed, the inevitability of conflict — between, say, the desire for intimacy and for distance, the drive to triumph against the wish to submit or the fear of retaliation. We need only add that these conflicting ingredients form a coherent “package,” intelligible in different domains and over time. Ricoeur writes as follows:
“The fantasies deriving from infantile scenes (observation of sexual relations between the parents, seduction, and, above all, castration) constitute the paradigmatic case insofar as, despite their fragile basis in the the real history of a subject, these fantasies present a highly structured organization and are inscribed in scenarios that are both typical and limited in number.” (57)
I take it that these predicates of fantasy — “highly structured,” “typical,” and “limited in number” — capture between them the meaning “coherence” which bears for Ricoeur. The Oedipus complex “typifies” human development in a way that few other paradigms, if any, can match. In this respect, too, such paradigms represent counterparts to the “facts” of material reality, in which domain objects are likewise defined by a limited stock of mutually-related properties and governed by universal laws.
We can say more about this third criterion — to which Ricoeur dedicates more attention, by far, than the others. (I suspect this disproportionate attention follows from Ricoeur’s uncertainty about what, exactly, “psychic reality” involves.) He lingers over the “paradox” of this conception: not only everyday common sense, but psychoanalysis itself, is accustomed to oppose “reality” generally to mental life, interiority, and the like. It is Freud himself, after all, who speaks of a psychic apparatus governed initially by the “pleasure principle,” inasmuch as it refuses “reality” and the “reality principle.” To characterize unconscious desire, and primary process, as offending against reality, only to immediately attribute a kind of “reality” to this same, reality-offending mind — with an integrity parallel to that of “material” reality — is to court paradox or risk meaninglessness.
Really, however, we are only filling out an incomplete idea we may have concerning unconscious desire. The latter does not “merely” distort or misrepresent reality; for, in addition to this distortion, and precisely by means of it, it is also a “moving force.” Unconscious desire, and the particular “fantasy” by which it is structured — because of their illusory quality vis-à-vis reality (e.g. “the analyst is not the father”) — bear a “reality” all their own. (An unconscious that, per impossible, were epistemically sound, victim to no distortions or illusions regarding “material reality,” would presumably possess no “psychic reality”; it would simply be adapted to the facts as they are. In short, “psychic reality” is intelligible only as a repudiation of, or at least an indifference to, “material reality,” and presupposes some illusion about it.)
Our conventional way of speaking indicates that, while the shadowy tree a a child sees at night is real, the monster he imagines it to be is not real. But in psychoanalysis, a fantasy — especially an unconscious fantasy — though counterposed to realty, nonetheless enjoys a kind of “second order” reality, manifested in its effects on mind and behavior.
There is a specific inspiration for, and purport to, this distinction: namely, Freud’s abandonment of his original “seduction theory.” More concretely, he found that whether or not the adult’s memory of childhood abuse is veridical, or corresponds to “material reality,” is beside the point — doesn’t matter — as regards unconscious fantasy, symptom, dream, repetition, and so on. In a sense, it becomes nonsensical to speak of a “veridical” or “non-veridical unconscious,” one beset by illusions or not, since from the standpoint of the omnipotent, primary-process unconscious, such distinctions are themselves meaningless. But if it “was not clinically relevant whether the infantile scene was true or not” (56), then this could only mean that “material reality” must give way to “psychic reality” in one’s “clinical” account; that where psychological “symptoms” are the explananda, one must look to psychic, and not material, reality as the explanans.
(A skeptic might object: but isn’t so-called psychic reality itself ultimately reducible to “material” reality, as well — if not the “outer” reality of documented abuse (the original seduction theory), then the “inner” reality explored by, say, neuroscience? Here again we must reiterate that, whatever its merits, such a natural science does not in its results bear on analytic experience; “desire” simply cannot enter into the latter in the form of neurons per se. To say that psychic reality is irreducible to “material reality” — inner and outer — and only problematically connected to it, is to say that clinically, in the norm-governed practice of analysis, in the sui generis experience afforded by it, one can only ever reckon with unconscious mentality, which requires the specific vocabulary-set that captures it: desires, fantasies, intentions, anxiety, aggression, and so on. (As early as his “Charcot” obituary, Freud seems to defend the autonomy of psychological “facts.”)
Ricoeur writes:
“The epistemological consequences of this paradox for the analytic experience are considerable. Whereas experimental psychology does not encounter such a paradox, inasmuch as its theoretical entities are supposed to refer to observable facts and finally to real movements in space and time, psychoanalysis works only with psychical reality and not with material reality.” (56-57)
Now, in claiming that an analysis has to do “only with psychical reality and not with material reality,” Ricoeur is certainly not denying that communications between analyst and patient — those laden with other-directed, desire-saturated fantasies — may “refer” to material reality. We certainly expect the patient to recount episodes and interactions as they come to mind — say, an exchange with a pharmacist earlier in the day — that may be as veridical as any the most hard-nosed positivist could want. Yet we would then need to add: this “report” becomes relevant, or “counts” in the analysis, only qua possessing “psychic reality.” Not material reality per se, but only material reality “for” the patient, and specifically as invested with meaning, desire, and concern, enters into analytic experience at all. In analysis, something or someone — say, the pharmacist — is “real” only for the patient, as meaningful to him or her:
“The result is that what is relevant for the analyst are not observable facts or reactions to variables in the environment, but rather the meaning that a subject attaches to these phenomena…[W]hat is psychoanalytically relevant is what a subject makes of his or her fantasies” (58)
Further, as Ricoeur now observes, something’s “meaning” in an analysis presupposes the principle of “substitutability.” A dream, symptom, or illusion have “meaning” only owing to “their capacity to stand for one another” (58). The patient experiences in the pharmacist, who is manifestly “present,” an important childhood figure, an abandoned object, who is long since “absent.” Only the patient’s capacity to experience something (which is) as something else (which it is not) explains the possibility of analysis, in which “free association” and “interpretation” together formalize this same principle into its essential method. A patient unconsciously conceives the analyst “as” the father, and non-compliant behaviors, such as tardiness and non-payment, “as” attempts to triumph over him. By contrast, no such principle appears to reign in the natural sciences, in which what something is “for” the observer — the experience of something “as” what it emphatically is not — can only be irrelevant, at best, and, at worst, injurious to knowledge.
A Note on Analytic Criteria
Ricoeur might well have entitled his discussion of these four criteria “The Fourfold Determination of an Analytic Object in General,” so reminiscent in spirit is it of a Kantian deduction. If this identification is correct, Ricoeur would only be taking up a thread introduced in “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” where he proposes (103-108) an explicitly Kantian “critique” stipulating the conditions, validity, and limits of psychoanalytic knowledge. (In Freud and Philosophy, the entire enterprise is approached in this spirit.)
Ricoeur is not suggesting, I don’t think, that the “facts” found in an analysis can simply be sorted into one or more of these four categories. His position is rather that everything properly “analytic” participates simultaneously in all four, which are — in the context of an analysis — also inseparable from one another. Everything “brought to speech” during an analysis, for instance, will admit of interpretation in terms of other-directed desire. It will bear some “meaning” which only the total analytic context can impart to it, and which for just that reason is continuously “revisable.” And long before any fantasy is explicitly communicated in language — before, indeed, the patient is aware of harboring any fantasy at all — his or her words can and should be plumbed for the “psychic reality,” that is, the specific “structuration” of desire, which those words unconsciously betray.