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.
Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. IV. Narrativity (2)
We have been discussing the importance for Ricoeur of “narration” in psychoanalysis. This is the fourth mark or “criterion” by which we recognize an experience, process, situation, object, and so on, as properly analytic. As we have seen, in order to “count” as analytic — to enter into analysis at all — the patient’s desire must
be (or become) expressible in words
assume an other-directed, dialogical form
announce an efficacious “psychic reality” which shapes the patient’s thought and behavior, and
We found, moreover, that for Ricoeur this power of narration is implicit in Freudian notions of memory and has therefore always borne the greatest importance in psychoanalysis. But we have not yet understood what, exactly, “narration” means for Ricoeur. Or, as we asked in the last entry: what does the concept of narration contribute to discussions of these matters, that has not been adequately captured by traditional, Freudian notions of “memory”? This is how Ricoeur puts things:
“But what is it to remember? It is not just the power to recall certain isolated events, but to become capable of forming meaningful sequences, orderly connections. In short, it is the power to give one’s experience the form of a history for which an isolated memory is just one fragment. It is the narrative structure of these ‘life histories’ that makes a ‘case’ into a ‘case history.’” (59)
Hence our next questions arise immediately: what is involved in “forming meaningful sequences, orderly connections”? — what is it to “give one’s experience the form of a history”? — to unveil, or construct, the kind of “narrative structure” we associate with case histories?
To help with these questions, let us consider what Ricoeur says in other places about narration, particularly in two essays touching on similar matters: “Narrative: Its Place in Psychoanalysis” and (to a lesser degree), “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” The latter is mainly significant for containing an illuminating passage in which psychoanalysis is tied to narrativity in a summary way:
“The patient who addresses him- or herself to a psychoanalyst presents him with bits and pieces of lived histories, dreams, “primitive scenes,” conflicting episodes. We can rightly say that the goal and outcome of analytic sessions is that the person analyzed draws from these bits and pieces a narrative that is both more bearable and more intelligible. This narrative interpretation of psychoanalytic theory implies that the story of a life proceeds from untold and repressed stories in the direction of stories that the subject can be responsible for and take as constitutive of his or her personal identity. It is the search for this personal identity that guarantees the continuity between the potential or virtual story and the express story for which we assume responsibility.” (197-198)
This way of putting things gets to the heart of the matter. For what does it mean to call a narrative “fragmented” and why — to ask a naive question — should this fragmentation pose a problem for the patient? What, after all (and apart from its pejorative colorations), is wrong with fragmentation?
I will suggest that the descriptors “bearable” and “intelligible” in the quoted passage provide us with useful orientation here. To repeat: Ricoeur indicates that, at the beginning of a treatment, and for some time afterwards, the patient presents — and is hostage to — an insufficient, perhaps even a failed “narrative.” Initially, the latter — compounded from “bits and pieces of lived histories” — is neither “intelligible” to, nor “bearable” for, that patient. These two qualities of deficient narratives are perhaps inseparable; and the direction of inference may well run both ways. Perhaps, that is, a narrative is
unbearable insofar as it is unintelligible, since what can’t be grasped or known is ipso facto distressing, and
unintelligible insofar as it is unbearable, since what is overwhelming is forced out of awareness, repressed, experientially unapproachable — and hence unknowable
(In what follows I will focus on 1., though ultimately we ought not to let 2. entirely out of consideration.)
What, then, accounts for such a narrative? For Ricoeur, again, a narrative with these two qualities — unbearable and unintelligible — is essentially fragmentary. Fragmentation is, so to speak, the common denominator. The “bits and pieces” presented, the substance of the patient’s productions in an analysis, evidently amounts to a narrative with both gaps and inconsistencies.
Both gaps (omissions) and inconsistencies (conflicts) typify the beginning of an analysis, and perhaps — no matter the success — its entirety. On the one hand, there are holes in memory, all variety of blind spots and motivated inattentions, abrupt halts in the associative flows. One’s efforts toward self-narration is naturally hampered when important “pieces” are missing, connecting links inaccessible.
On the other hand, there may be no obvious “coherence” between any particular “fragment” and any other. Within a dream, for instance, it may be far from clear how the separate ingredients — settings, objects, affects, sensations, interactions, scenes, etc. — “add up”; they may even seem to exclude one another. (In a dream, such incongruities are evidently much more the rule than the exception. An objectively “pleasant” scene may generate anxiety; one that is objectively “dangerous” one may generate pleasure.) Likewise, the patient may struggle to harmonize the content of a dream (one, say, expressing hostility towards the analyst), with his everyday, conscious, and professed attitude (respectful, affectionate, and the like).
On the basis of these admittedly schematic reflections, we can now return to our questions: what makes a narrative fragmentary? — and why should this pose a problem for the patient? We can tentatively answer, first: a patient’s narrative is fragmentary inasmuch as it is characterized by (a) omissions and (b) inconsistencies. (The concept of “discontinuity,” too, seems to capture both qualities at a stroke.) But second: this fragmentation, as we saw above, poses a problem inasmuch as the patient experiences the narrative thus constructed as “unintelligible” and “unbearable” — each of which seems somehow to reinforce the other.
But why exactly, to complete the thought, should omissions and inconsistencies be “unintelligible” and “unbearable” to the patient whose narrative is afflicted by them? The first connection is simple enough to draw: omissions and inconsistencies are per definition the very stuff of “unintelligibility.” Our reason demands, if nothing else, that things “add up,” and seeks more, rather than less, “data.” Conversely, the least intelligible scenarios — obscure, mysterious, and disorienting — are those where (a) we know little or nothing, and (b) what we do know — or at least imagine we know — doesn’t cohere, or strikes us as self-contradictory.
In these respects, then, a fragmentary narrative is in principle an unintelligible one. But why, finally, should the patient find a fragmentary narrative — omission- and inconsistency-riddled — unbearable? I suggested above that what cannot be understood is ipso facto distressing — a proposition with a certain intuitive weight. This is the sort of epistemic uneasiness signaled in the opening sentence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
“Human reason has the peculiar fate…that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”
Rational creatures have an inborn conatus or drive to make sense of things and naturally feel happy when that drive is satisfied, unhappy when it is thwarted. Harry Stack Sullivan may have had this partly in mind when he suggested: “No one has grave difficulties in living if he has a very good grasp of what is happening to him.”
Yet Ricoeur seems to imply more than this in calling a fragmentary narrative “unbearable,” or at least difficult to bear. Or rather, he deepens the dilemma, the existential ramifications of finding oneself hostage to a fragmentary narrative. For the fragmentation in question extends, not only to this or that aspect of one’s mental life or situation, but into the core of one’s “self” tout court. We may state this interpretation as a syllogism:
If what I essentially “am” is inseparable from how I take myself to be — that is, my “self-concept” and, ultimately, my “self-narration”; and
this self-narration is “fragmented,” that is, involves profound omissions and inconsistencies; then
I am fragmented, do not “make sense” or “add up.” At worst, my own memories, affects, ideas, motivations, and conduct do not strike me as “mine” at all, but — such is the degree of self-alienation — manifestations of something decidedly “not me,” thing-like, and so on.
Indeed — and this is the point I’d really like to underscore in these reflections — since for Ricoeur narration is at bottom a modification (alongside language, intersubjectivity, and fantasy) of desire, it would make perfect sense to say: a fragmented narrative is one according to which desire itself is “out of sorts,” at odds with itself. And if this is correct, which seems likely enough, then it requires no argumentative leap to call a fragmented narrative “unbearable.” For in this case, desire itself, together with the mental and behavioral phenomena that evince it, is obscure and conflict-ridden. And what could be more unbearable than that?
The promise of narration in analysis, then — already embedded, purportedly, in Freudian notions of memory — consists in its power to remedy this fragmentation, that is, to restore the self to an “intelligible” and “bearable” condition. How is this achieved? And what is the theoretical significance of this procedure for our understanding of past, present, future, and their interrelations?
Somewhat unexpectedly, Ricoeur cites Nachträglichkeit (“afterward-ness”), a process by which the mind confers retroactive significance and efficacy to an earlier episode, as exemplary of psychoanalytic narration in general. In its original form, beginning at least with Freud’s early account of hysteria, Nachträglichkeit related narrowly to trauma. In particular, Freud made the claim that a certain event — not “in itself” traumatic, that is, not pathology-inducing when it occurs — may become traumatic later, by virtue of fresh experiences that endow the original event with a new, and newly-distressing, significance.
Ricoeur broadens the scope of this mechanism, though, so that it includes, not only the belated generation of trauma, but also the characteristic action of analysis: the retroactively healing or liberating narration of one’s past. The implications are immense:
“This phenomenon [Nachträglichkeit] is implied in the very work of psychoanalysis as psychoanalysis. It was in the process of working through…that Freud discovers that the history of a subject did not conform to a linear determinism, which would place the present under the control of a past in a univocal way…It was only the arrival of new events and new situations that precipitates the subsequent reorganization of these past events.” (59-60)
If we are prepared, then, to loosen this mechanism’s tight association with trauma, so that it embraces the basic procedures of psychoanalysis generally, then new conceptions of human self-consciousness, temporality, and freedom are brought into view. In fact, precisely this cluster of ideas will enable us to make a transition to the next phase of our commentary — on Ricoeur’s “archaeo-teleological principle.”
I will begin here in the next entry.
Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. IV. Narrativity (1)
The fourth and final criterion that a “fact” must meet in order to qualify as analytic is “narrativity.” Here again, we may construe this category as a modification of the “object” presupposed, uncontroversially, by psychoanalytic practice: namely, desire. How, to revisit our question, must desire be constituted, what characteristics must it bear, in order to appear as an object of possible analytic experience — assuming, as Ricoeur does, that there is such a thing? To recapitulate Ricoeur’s account: the desire encountered in analysis must
admit of say-ability or discursivity, in which form it becomes intelligible, meaningful, hence subject to interpretation;
contain at root an other-directed character, a “demand for recognition” addressed second-personally to a “you”; and
possess a psychic reality that — in the special attributes of unconscious life — stands comparison with “material reality”
We may now add that, for Ricoeur, this desire will also
submit to — be “absorbable” by — narration, in the absence of which quality, again, it could not “show up” at all in analytic experience
We might continue our Kantian reading here and say that an object — desire — that failed to conform to these four categories could simply not be an object of experience “for analysis.” Or, as Kant’s famously puts things in the Critique of Pure Reason, such an object “would be nothing to me” (B131-32).
A Clarification
Now, one may quibble here that, while criteria 1-3 directly modify desire, the fourth criterion pertains to memories — episodes, events, fragments, and so on. And in fact, the word “desire,” frequent enough in Ricoeur’s descriptions of the first three criteria, does not explicitly appear in this section.
But implicitly, at least, there can be no doubt that nothing essentially changes in the account. On the one hand, at the opening of this entire discussion, Ricoeur expressly told us that “the object of this discipline” is “desire as a meaning capable of being deciphered, translated, interpreted” (54). So it would be exceedingly strange if this final criterion had abruptly to do with some other object — as though the discipline of psychoanalysis were suddenly preoccupied with something essentially different. We must rather suppose that, however “shaped,” the materials that enter into analytic narration — episodes, events, fragments — are themselves configurations of desire.
On the other hand, Ricoeur’s preceding treatment of psychic reality has prepared us for just such an extrapolation. In bracketing “material reality” as clinically irrelevant, and in demanding of an analytic fact some “reference to the make-believe” (58), Ricoeur has perforce excluded from analytic experience any data “untouched” by desire. Psychic reality certainly embraces “fantasy” in the narrow sense — something inseparable from memories of sexualized childhood experiences and thus, inevitably, desire. But even mental phenomena that appear very remote from this “kernel” are inflected by desire in just the same way:
“But the notion of psychic reality is not exhausted by that of a fantasy in the sense of these archaic scenarios. The imaginary, in the broad sense, covers every kind of mediation implied in the development of desire.” (57)
Hence we may confidently conclude that the narration-conferring capacity of analysis, confined as it is to psychic-reality, is also — by definition — confined to mental productions generated, organized, and delimited by desire.
The Meanings of Narration
With these clarifications in place, we may return to Ricoer’s comments on this fourth criterion and ask: what exactly is narration in an analytic context? — how and why does an analysis go about its narrations? — with what “materials?” Ricoeur himself says the following:
“The analytic experience selects from a subject’s experience what is capable of entering into a history, in the sense of a narrative. In this sense, the “case histories” as histories constitute the primary texts for psychoanalysis.” (58)
We may straightaway note an ambiguity. These case histories document, reconstruct, organize the “histories” both of
the patient’s life, in the wide sense — the biography inasmuch as it has been experienced by the patient and has borne on his psychological development and current difficulties, and of
the treatment, in the narrow sense, embracing the analytic situation, interchanges, relationship, and everything “analytic” that materializes within its spatio-temporal limits.
At a certain point, of course, the “narrow” case history (the content of the treatment) enters into the “broad” case history (that is, becomes a formative event in the patient’s psycho-biography) — provided, that is, the treatment succeeds.
Nonetheless, without distinguishing, especially, between these two notions, let us ask: in what sense are case histories “narratives” or “histories”? For Ricoeur, the “‘narrative’ character of analytic experience” (58-59) is, if never thematized by Freud, nonetheless implied in the latter’s views regarding memory. And if, as we have seen, the “memories” to be restored are, not veridical recordings of “material reality” but, paradigmatically, desire-encoded “fantasies” of early life, this does not diminish in the slightest their “psychic reality,” and thus the necessity of their recollection as fantasies. And this recollection will, Ricoeur now emphasizes, take a particular form:
“But what is it to remember? It is not just the power to recall certain isolated events, but to become capable of forming meaningful sequences, orderly connections. In short, it is the power to give one’s experience the form of a history for which an isolated memory is just one fragment. It is the narrative structure of these ‘life histories’ that makes a ‘case’ into a ‘case history.’” (59)
That Freudian analysis is preoccupied essentially with “remembering,” via whatever paths, is hardly a claim that requires justification. From the early account of Dora to the late “Constructions” essay, Freud unwaveringly insists that a successful analysis releases repressions and repairs memory — that, indeed, these are merely two sides to one and the same action. An analysis arranges for this “remembering” by foreclosing where possible the sorts of behavior, the “repetition compulsions,” whereby repressed memories are unconsciously reenacted. (This technique represents a particular variant of the more general principle of non-gratification, which demands the verbal “expression" of desire rather than its “discharge” in action.)
Let us grant, then, that psychoanalysis induces a “work of memory” and that its materials are, at their core, the unconscious “memories” — however non-veridical — that haunt neurotics. (Ricoeur approvingly quotes the canonical line from Breuer and Freud: “Hysterics suffer principally from reminiscences.”) But again: what does it mean — and what does it contribute — to re-describe the function of memory in analysis in terms of narration? In other words: why does Ricoeur designate this fourth criterion “narrative,” rather than limiting himself to the more familiar, less conspicuous “memory?”
The answer seems to be that the concept of “narrative” effectively isolates either the specific type of remembering encouraged in analysis (as contrasted with other, non-analytic types), or an aspect of all remembering that, nonetheless, analysis brings out particularly well, and deliberately. (Whether it is the one or the other may not matter to Ricoeur’s account.) In either case, we evidently cannot grasp the achievement of analytic remembering without reference to the virtues of narration. What are the virtues of narration, then, which for Ricoeur distinguish the process of analytic memory?
I will continue this account of Ricoeur’s fourth criterion in the next entry.
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.
Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. II. Intersubjectivity
Second Criterion: Intersubjectivity. We are reviewing Ricoeur’s four “criteria” of analytic reality. The second criterion, after “discursivity” or “say-ability” — the next “category” to which the analytic “object” must conform — is the other-directed, dialogical quality of desire. In Ricoeur’s words: “the analytic situation not only screens out what is sayable, but what is said to another” (54). Now, as with discursivity, at a certain level of generality, this second “criterion” wouldn’t distinguish analysis from any other domain of experience: anything “sayable” — the propositions of science no less than the communications of a patient — is by definition sayable to another. Language is simply the sort of thing that is (potentially) public, shareable, social.
For this reason, we should reiterate that “other-directness” is an attribute, not merely of the patient’s words, but of the “desire” that saturates those words. As we saw above, the patient’s many productions, assuming discursive form, are upon examination redolent of “desire.” But this is a desire, Ricoeur now adds, not for this or that thing (appearances notwithstanding), but for another, or more particularly, for the desire of the other. It is above all in the transference that we perceive “the relation to the other constitutive of the erotic demand” (55). As Ricoeur elaborates:
“Transference reveals the following constitutive feature of human desire: not only its power to be spoken about, to be brought to language, but also to be addressed to another; more precisely, it addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it. What is thereby sifted out from human experience is the intersubjective dimension of desire.” (55)
Ricoeur’s discussion here owes everything to Hegel’s treatment of “self-consciousness,” “desire,” and “recognition” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Alexandre Kojève interpreted and promulgated Hegel’s text in an influential series of lectures in Paris during the 1930s. These lectures, attended by French thinkers including Sartre, Beauvoir, and Lacan, became an inescapable point of reference for intellectual life in the continental tradition. Hegel’s Phenomenology, and more so Kojève’s idiosyncratic reading of it, form background necessary for grasping a formula such as “human desire…addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it.” (See Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire for the reception and intellectual post-history of Kojève’s lectures.)
I’ll present the basic idea in a compressed and schematic way. Biological, so-called animal desire — say, for nourishment — can be satisfied by a “thing” — for instance, a bit of foodstuff. Characteristically human desire, by contrast, requires another self — hence another desire — for its satisfaction. “Desire” thus implicitly acquires a more expansive meaning: not the thirst for a cup of water, but a “will” to determine what is the case generally, via recognition. This revision elicits the thin sense of normativity, of “ought,” belonging to the concept of desire. Accordingly, to say that “I desire the other’s desire” means something like: “I want the other to regard me — my desires, orientation, behavior, and way of valuing reality — in a certain way, namely, with approval, validation — as praiseworthy, legitimate, and the like. This is why, in this context and the discourse inspired by it, the terms “desire” and “recognition” — on the face of it bearing rather different meanings — become practically synonymous. To desire the other’s desire is to desire the other’s recognition: the validation that what I am, believe, will, and do is desirable, or is what I ought to be, believe, will, and do.
In its Hegelian origin, then, the idea that “human desire…addresses itself to another desire, one that may refuse to recognize it,” is rather broad. Once appropriated by psychoanalysis, though, this idea (unsurprisingly) receives an erotic twist. Psychoanalysis, as Ricoeur now conceives it, thematizes desire along these lines: the patient’s desire for another’s desire is, at is core, an erotic quest for another’s “recognition” which is itself no less erotic. Yet it conserves the Hegelian dimension, inasmuch as desire is still the desire for a kind of recognition, a wish that the other regard me (including my wishes) as “desirable,” valid, acceptable, and so on.
There is more to say about this aspect of desire, though. For the “sayable,” communication-inflecting desire of the patient is not merely “other-directed” in some generic sense. To count as analytic, it seems, this desire must
originate in the earliest, dialogical configurations — pre-Oedipal and Oedipal — from which it acquires its enduring cast, however unconscious; and
become concentrated on the person of the analyst, in that dimension and phase of the analysis designated “transference”
The “desire” that is drawn out in analysis and inflamed, especially, in the transference-neurosis, is stubbornly indexed to these early configurations. And this means that, unconsciously, the patient never renounced the “object” — the sort of unqualified, erotic recognition — it sought in that phase. It need hardly be said that the “recognition” demanded by the infant of, paradigmatically, the mother — a demand still lodged by the adult unconscious — contains a practical, bodily, and gratifying moment as well. (The mother demonstrates that she “recognizes” the child and his urges as good, legitimate, and lovable, precisely by ministering to them, “in the flesh.” Hans Loewald captures the “materiality” of this recognition vividly.)
Now this parent-indexed desire has of course been repressed; the patient in analysis is unaware of harboring any such desire. But just because this desire is unconscious — hence subjected to the primary process of plasticity, mobility, fungibility, and so on — it may gradually “attach” to the analyst and analytic situation. After all, from the unconscious standpoint of infantile wish, there is no difference between the original object (the mother’s desire) and its contemporary avatar (the analyst’s).
What matters, again, is that there is no way intelligibly to abstract from the other-directed “structure” of analytic desire. Just as “non-discursive” desire — hence non-semantic, meaningless, uninterpretable — is of no earthly concern to analysis, likewise, a desire that is not other-directed — that is not essentially a desire for recognition, for some validating attitude on the other’s part — would ultimately have no place in an analysis.
This restriction is of course perfectly compatible with the emergence of desires that appear as entirely lacking in intersubjective import: “innocuous” desires to sleep past an appointment, to eat during a session, to dispute a payment. While masquerading as mere “monological” impulses, such desires inevitably — on this conception of psychoanalysis — possess, more or less remote from awareness, an other-directed structure, that is, tacitly “implore” the other for some determinate type of recognition.
Again, as I emphasized in connection with the first criterion, we need not commit ourselves to the strong, ontological claim that all desire necessarily possesses this structure — though we might, eventually, like to defend such a position. It is enough for Ricoeur’s purposes that we acknowledge: to count and matter as analytic, to be admitted into an analysis, a desire must be so-constituted; while analysis is in principle indifferent to any “genus” or “level” of desire that lacks this dialogical valence.
In the next entry, I will discuss Ricoeur’s third “criterion.”