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.
Paul Ricœur, Concluding Comments (I)
Before concluding this lengthy series of entries on Ricoeur and psychoanalysis, I would like to revisit some of the ideas we’ve considered which may deserve additional comment.
Regression: Explanation or Process
There is an persistent, though largely unremarked ambiguity in Ricoeur’s use of “regression” in Freud and Philosophy. On the one hand, the term may characterize a form of argument or account. I construe what is highest and latest as essentially manifestations — more or less concealed — of what is lowest and earliest.
Ricoeur flags some such meaning where he describes “the analytic character of psychoanalysis and the ‘regressive’ (in the technical sense of the word) character of its economic interpretation” (463-4).
But of course, and on the other hand, regression may equally designate a certain process. This is a “moment” when, under the impact of some stressful circumstance, an item — an adult mind, say, or an organized group — reverts to an earlier, simpler phase of its development. So: a mind is dysregulated and breaks down from an intolerable demand, from trauma, and finds itself reduced to some point of libidinal fixation it had — seemingly — long since overcome. Or: a highly-structured collective, united by bonds of libido, dissolves into an anarchical, formless multitude when its members intuit that its chain of command has been severed, along with its promise of protection and security.
Yet these distinct uses of “regression” — a property of “argument” and of “organic life” — are on some level mutually reinforcing. The viability of a regressive argument, which explains the higher by the lower, seems to be premised upon some such notions as the following:
the object really is enduringly constituted by, or built up out of, simpler elements that remain simple, whatever “sophistication” reached by their organization; and for just this reason,
there is no guarantee against that object’s “regressing” to a less refined expression of those simple “elements” it has all the while essentially remained.
Teleology: Addendum
At crucial moments — I am tempted to say, “when it counts” — the meaning for Ricoeur of a Freudian “teleology” is relatively straightforward. As I discussed in previous entries, this teleology has essentially to do with the advance or enlargement of self-consciousness. This is the end or “telos” imparting intelligibility to human mentality (together, that is, with the “arche” of primitive desire.
Occasionally, though, Ricoeur’s use of the concept deviates from this narrow “object” and loses definition. This makes a certain amount of sense. As Ricoeur continuously reminds us, we are accustomed to “archaeological” images of the psychoanalytic project, which are therefore far from controversial. Yet the very suggestion of a necessary “teleological” aspect in Freud may strike us as strange and untenable. Small wonder, then, that this latent, unacknowledged, even repressed “teleology” is not always perfectly clear.
In fact, the trope might cover a range of meanings, of analytic ideas, practices, and phenomena, and I don’t see why this should count against its use. We may distinguish several “classes” straightaway. And here I will leave aside the “letter” of Ricoeur’s text in order to make use of the full history of psychoanalysis:
the particular, concrete “ends” uncovered during an analysis. The patient does and does not desire certain things — money, fame, love, sex — and the analysis itself helps elicit the existence, identity, meaning, and (potentially conflicting) implications of these “ends”
the generic “ends,” not of this or that analysis, but of all analyses, that is, of analysis-as-such. “Classically,” of course, these include the ends of insight, enlarged self-consciousness, and the greater freedom these afford. But we might add other “ends” — additionally markers of analytic progress — introduced by more recent iterations of the psychoanalytic project, such as: a greater sense of “meaning,” or perhaps “interpersonal skillfulness”
relatedly, the “ends” implied in accounts of developmental phases. These include Freud’s psychosexual stages, of course, but also (arguably) the “positions” of Klein, as well as Margaret Mahler’s phases of infancy. Each scheme involves items “toward which” an ostensibly fixated or regressed patient ought to “progress.” These, on my understanding, are somewhat more concrete than “generic” ends such as self-awareness, freedom, or meaning, but rather help “fill out” the latter with content.
Where and how does teleology enter into psychoanalysis? Or again, what ingredients in psychoanalysis — however “tacit,” even suppressed —would qualify for the designator, “teleological”? And what, in a more clinical register, are the “ends” of an analysis? Our answer to these questions will determine the particular form the archaeo-teleological principle assumes in our discussion.
Psychoanalytic Criteria: The “Kantian” Reading
In several of the last entries, I underscored the Kantian, “transcendental” structure of Ricoeur’s account concerning psychoanalytic criteria. In fact, we find intimations of both this Kantian structure and the four criteria themselves in Ricoeur’s early essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” and especially its middle section, “Critique of Freudian Concepts”:
“In short, we exercise a critique of the concept of the unconscious, in the wide sense of the term critique, i.e. as a justification of the concept’s meaningful significance and a rejection of all claims to extend the concept beyond the limits of its validity. We can say, therefore, that the unconscious is an object in the sense that it is ‘constituted’ by the totality of hermeneutic procedures by which it is deciphered.” (107)
The “object” of a particular order of experience or observation — one encountered, in this case, in a psychoanalysis — posses an identity “relative to,” that is, dependent on, certain synthetic functions of mind. In other words, one can experience that object at all only the condition of organizing it according to certain “categories” to which it must conform. In this respect, at least, as Ricoeur emphasizes at the close of the quoted passage, the analytic object (unconscious desire) is no different that any other item of knowledge, which always involves some orderly synthesis of the “manifold” — concrete experience — according to principles, laws, categories, and the like, which are never themselves directly apprehended objects of experience.
Indeed, in this section, Ricoeur anticipates, not only much of the general Kantian principle of a transcendental idealism which holds of psychoanalysis, but much of the specific “contouring” undergone by the analytic object. But I will leave this thread for another entry.
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.
Paul Ricœur, Archaeology and Teleology (IV)
Our last entry concluded with a schematic interpretation of Ricoeur’s gnomic “identity thesis” (as I have taken to calling it). This thesis states that, in the Freudian program, the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness — hence the archaeological and teleological “hermeneutics” organized around them — are somehow “identical.” Yet this idea has been systematically overlooked in the self-understanding of Freudianism. The latter’s “teleological” ingredient has remained merely implicit, as has — naturally — the relation of that ingredient to the explicit and more familiar “archaeological” meaning of Freudianism.
So Ricoeur writes: “Freud links a thematized archaeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becoming conscious” (FaP 461). Incidentally, I think this formulation ought to be held firmly in mind in all discussions of Ricoeur’s conception of the “archaeo-teleological principle.” For it fixes in a perspicuous way that “end” toward which analysis, the patient — indeed, the human animal per se — implicitly strains. A “teleology of the process of becoming conscious” tacitly subordinates other ends “for the sake of which” a human being might act — say, power, love, pleasure, fame. This is not to deny that such ends may figure, and prominently, in a given life (albeit in varying degrees and proportions). It is to claim, however, that — so far as the true “final cause” of Freudianism is concerned, indeed, the consummation of its very archê, desire — every rival human end receives its significance from advancing this “process of becoming conscious.”
This is perhaps Ricoeur’s analytic twist to the “teleology” promoted by Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics famously begins: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” Of course, Aristotle himself quickly establishes that “the highest of all goods achievable by action” is that Eudaimonia (flourishing, fulfillment, happiness) studied in ethics and political science. This condition, in short, is the “final end” or “highest good” for human beings — “it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do.”
The hidden telos that Ricoeur excavates from the Freudian program and its grounding concepts is scarcely “flourishing” per se — an unlikely proposition given the dim prospects that Freud allows to human beings for ever satisfying the “pleasure principle.” It is rather, again, self-consciousness.
Ricoeur and Hegel
These comments on Aristotle raise the question of philosophical “influence" in a way I have avoided until now. In fact, both the “form” and the “content” of Ricoeur’s procedure in these areas is quintessentially, self-consciously Hegelian. Ricoeur openly credits Hegel with inspiring his ideas, and Freud and Philosophy contains several expositions of passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit. (At other times Ricoeur appears to be drawing from the Philosophy of Right, without citations.) Here I would like to elaborate on the Hegelian substance of the “archaeo-teleological principle,” in particular:
Form. As we have seen, Ricoeur claims that, upon examination, the two positions or modes of reflection designated “archaeology” and “teleology” — seemingly irreconcilable alternatives — form a kind of “identity.” This sort of gesture is supremely Hegelian. That is, Hegel has become closely associated with the philosophical effort to demonstrate that the “poles” of some abstract dichotomy — say, subject and object, or freedom and necessity, or fact and value — are in fact mutually-determining, “identical.” In Hegel’s language, philosophy involves constructing “speculative identities” between ostensibly antithetical terms. Moreover, the demonstration of these “identities” assumes a particular shape that, again, Ricoeur knowingly echos. That is: following Hegel, Ricoeur attempts to show that one pole of a dichotomy will “realize” itself as the opposite pole; that, so to speak, an item can only become “what it is” by inverting itself into its conceptual antithesis. This method constitutes, as Hegel’s disciples have named it, a type of “immanent criticism,” since one derives the entire “movement” or “action” out of resources internal or “immanent” to the object of analysis. In the context of Ricoeur’s project, this means: upon analysis, we discover that the archê of desire only “realizes” itself, becomes properly what it is, in the telos of self-consciousness.
Content. But it is not only the form of argument that Ricoeur has assimilated from Hegel — the mere type of immanent or dialectical analysis that issues in “speculative identities” between seemingly antithetical concepts. Beyond this, Ricoeur capitalizes on the content of Hegel’s thought, that is, a specific instance of this analysis from the Phenomenology of Spirit. The very conceptual dichotomy we have now examined at length, between the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness — Hegel centers, analyzes, “works through” this same dichotomy in the Phenomenology’s celebrated chapter “Self-Consciousness.” The most incisive statement of Ricoeur’s identity-thesis, that “self-consciousness is desire” (466) — for arche and telos are one — is not merely “inspired” by Hegel; it is written by him: “self-consciousness is desire itself” (¶167). Of course, the meaning of this identity — let alone its concrete demonstration — will naturally look rather different in the context of 20th century Freudianism than it does in Hegel’s 1807 text. What matters is that, notwithstanding the strictly “archaeological” appearance of Freud’s naturalistic architectonic of the primitive, “desiring” mind, still, it cannot be coherently grasped without reference to its “teleological” consummation in self-consciousness. In both cases, we are effectively told that “desire,” properly conceived, is always the desire to become self-consciousness, to experience the sentiment of self and thus “know oneself.”
There is at least one additional step to this interpretation of Ricoeur’s archaeo-teleological principle — that human desire is finally a desire for the “end” of self-consciousness, hence that archê and telos are one. Fortunately, we already made a start in our commentary on the second “criterion” of a psychoanalytic fact: that in analysis desire is always other-directed, a plea for recognition.
Now, in endorsing the Hegelian trope that human “desire” is essentially a desire for recognition, Ricoeur likewise revises the meaning of human “satisfaction.” After all, one cannot revise a concept of desire without also revising the concept of satisfaction which answers to that desire. A biological urge or need — hunger, say — admits of biological satisfaction — foodstuff. By contrast, an interpersonal need demands a correspondingly interpersonal satisfaction — something on the order of acceptance, approval, validation, recognition, and the like.
But Ricoeur does more than this. For along with the Hegelian notion of a desire for recognition, he has appropriated the “epistemic” implications Hegel derives from it. Our drive for the other’s recognition — literally, re-cognition — is itself an aspect or phase of the quest for knowledge, “the task of consciousness,” and finally self-consciousness. We are “conscious” of ourselves, we know what we are, in and through our experience of others. Thus — assembling the different pieces of Ricoeur’s picture — we may retrospectively construe all human behavior as accessory to this drive for “self-recognition in the other.” I think the following syllogism roughly captures the thought:
In the psychoanalytic context, human desire is always at bottom a desire for recognition;
The desire for recognition is itself best understood as a desire for self-knowledge — my self-concept, my idea of myself, is only fully possessed when it is “validated” by another. (Indeed, in the first instance I only “know” myself through the other — one’s self-concept originates here.); therefore
In this rather expanded sense, human desire is essentially the desire for self-consciousness
For these reasons, teleology will necessarily figure in precisely those psychoanalytic explanations that seem most archaeological.
Now, one may justify a “weaker" version of Ricoeur’s claim in a straightforward way, a strategy that would obviate much of the forgoing discussion. For surely teleology of some sort is inseparable from analysis inasmuch as its central locus, desire, by definition presupposes an “end.” Even the earliest, infantile desire — which lives on as unconscious fantasy, contouring the full sweep of adult experience — is a desire for something: to possess the mother and eliminate the father.
Yet Ricoeur’s claim, again, is not merely that psychoanalysis implicitly contains some end or another. The telos he identifies is a quite specific one, namely, “the task of consciousness,” “the process of becoming conscious,” and the like. So, for evidence of his thesis, Ricoeur would not be content to point out the desire-indexed “ends” that pervade every analysis. (These would surprise no one.) His point is rather that, alongside Freudianism’s regressive “reduction” of these ends to their archaic prototypes, and precisely through this reduction, one advances the supervening, teleological “task of consciousness.” Paradoxically, it is just this “archaeological” work that realizes our “aptitude for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which the theory does not thematize” (492).
For this reason, the desires expressed in analysis are never simply distorted repetitions of archaic prototypes — though they are surely that as well. One may reduce the patient’s “ends” (a promotion, a lover, a mansion), to their infantile precursors (the breast, the phallus). But that very interpretation, in the analytic setting, will then constitute the more-or-less conscious appropriation of these prototypes. It activates our “aptitude for progression” by escorting the infantile desire to its proper terminus in self-consciousness.
Hence the archaeological explanation, interpreted to the patient in the analytic context, itself enables and demands the complementary teleological explanation. The archaeological interpretation, “your desire for a mansion is unconsciously a desire for a phallus” — provided it hits the mark, “takes roots” — will license the teleological conception, “my desire for a mansion has served the “end” of making my infantile desire self-conscious.
Paul Ricœur, Archaeology and Teleology (III)
In the last entries, we stipulated the characteristics of “archaeological” and “teleological” styles of explanation, as Ricoeur understands them. His central claim is that, while Freudianism's explicit “archaeological” gestures are universally recognized, its implicit “teleological” contents have been basically disregarded — where they have not been denied altogether.
We have described, moreover, the particular forms these two “hermeneutics” take in the Freudian context. Whereas
archaeology explains, regressively, human mentality with reference to its “origin” in infantile desire, or its archê,
teleology explains, progressively, this same mentality with reference to its “end” in an emerging self-consciousness, or its telos. (According to this latter approach, we have only grasped something when we perceive the end “for the sake of which” it exists or occurs.)
In short, as Ricoeur writes: “Freud links a thematized archaeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becoming conscious” (FaP 461).
It is also part of Ricoeur’s argument, however — indeed, the most significant part — that these hermeneutical “antipodes” are, in reality, internally-related or even identical. This is naturally a counterintuitive proposition. We might suspect, after all, that archaeological and teleological explanations are mutually exclusive: in a given instance one practices one or the other, but never both at once. To be sure, I may explain a given item both by what precedes it and what follows it — its arché and telos — at different times, with the aid of different proposition-types. (On the one hand: “The behavior, x, is an unconscious manifestation of infantile desire.” On the other hand: “The behavior, x, promotes the growth of self-consciousness.”) In that case, though, there is hardly any question of which one I am doing.
Yet Ricoeur is not merely claiming that Freudianism contains both hermeneutics — as though some of Freud’s assertions about human mentality are archaeological, while others are teleological. Rather, in a way that may strike the reader as paradoxical, Ricoeur is arguing that these two hermeneutics are mutually-dependent. The very thrust of Freudianism that appears most “archaeological” is itself grounded in, or presupposes, a “teleology” inseparable from it, and vice versa. Or again: upon reflection, the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness are finally the same.
But what do these gnomic phrases mean, exactly? Ricoeur dedicates much of the last sections of Freud and Philosophy to substantiating this puzzling “identity” thesis — that is, the “archaeo-teleological principle” as such. Already in “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” though, he’d projected such an identity, albeit cautiously and in schematic form. We already quoted a relevant passage from this essay in the last entry, and I want to reproduce it here:
“[W]hat is at stake is the possibility of a philosophical anthropology which can take up the dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious. What world view and vision of man will make this possible? What must man be to assume the responsibility of sound thought and yet be susceptible of falling into insanity, to be obligated by his humanity to strive for greater and greater consciousness and yet remain a product of topographic or economic models insofar as ‘the id speaks through him?’ What new vision of human fragility…is required by the sort of thought which has allowed itself to be decentered from consciousness through reflecting on the unconscious?” (100-101)
While at the time of this essay Ricoeur had evidently not yet settled on the terms “archaeology” and “teleology” to canvass his concerns, their operation here is unmistakable. When viewed under his or her archaeological aspect, the human being is “a product of topographic or economic models insofar as ‘the id speaks through him.’” But this same human being is defined by a telos, namely, “to strive for greater and greater consciousness” and in this way “to assume the responsibility of sound thought.”
Later in the essay, Ricoeur redescribes this definitive telos — of the human being and, by extension, of psychoanalysis — as a “task.” Perhaps, in a Kantian spirit, this is an unendliche Aufgabe, an “infinite task,” an unending end:
“Everything that can be said about consciousness after Freud seems to me to be contained in the following formula: Consciousness is not a given but a task.” (108)
And a moment later, Ricoeur indexes the possibility of progress in self-illumination — the task of that agency designated simply “consciousness” — to the unconscious:
“Our question is the following: What is the meaning of the unconscious for a being whose task is consciousness? This question is related to a second: What is consciousness as a task for a being who is somehow bound to those factors, such as repetition and even regression, which the unconscious represents for the most part?” (108-109)
What begins to emerge in these passages is the indissoluble bond between teleology and archaeology, such that
one must realize the “task” of enlightenment or “consciousness” in and through what is unconscious; while
unconscious life — its meaning, its very existence — is at the same time dependent upon the realization of this “task” of consciousness
Which is to say: consciousness, in the sense Ricoeur has in mind, simply is this vexed relation to the unconscious, and vice versa. Hence archê and telos, one’s “foundation” and one’s “end,” define one another just as consciousness and the unconscious do. Indeed, these polarities are merely two iterations of the same basic problem or “task.”
Now it seems to me we can give compressed form to Ricoeur’s “identity” thesis as follows: one’s “end” is nothing but a (more or less conscious) appropriation of one’s foundation; and, alternatively, one’s “foundation,” desire — as a moving force in one’s life — exists at all only as something (more or less consciously) appropriated as one’s end.
After all, what kind of “end” could a human being pursue, including the “task” of consciousness, if it is not one appointed by desire — a desire whose shape has been contoured beginning in the remotest past? And what is “desire,” the moving force of a life, if it is not something manifested in ends as various as the many projects constituting a life — above all, finally, the “analytic” end of self-consciousness?
This last remark raises an ambiguity I have deliberately bracketed until now. We have been drawing on some distinction between
the sundry “ends,” the projects, of a given human life — sex, family, money, fame, etc. — and
that meta-teleological “end” posited in analysis, even as analysis: the enlargement of self-understanding, or the “task of consciousness.”
There seems to be some important, albeit obscure relation between these “ends” of life and the proper “end” of analysis. And while Ricoeur is in no hurry to clarify this conceptual nexus, it is arguably crucial to the position he is defending. I want to consider two ways of conceiving this relation between the mundane ends of life and the privileged end of analysis. For they may throw light on our central issue: the purported “identity” between the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness.
The “end” of analysis overall, the thoroughgoing self-reflection on unconscious life and thereby the expansion of self-consciousness, draws attention to the patient’s “ends,” to the adult projects in which he or she is enmeshed, and to their largely unconscious meaning. And this “meaning” coincides with their origin in, and determination by, their infantile predecessors — that is, the archê of desire. In the course of investigation, which gradually imparts to these mature ends a conscious significance and value for the patient they formally lacked, these ends are (potentially) weakened, strengthened, or otherwise “revised.” At the same time, new ends are originated, refined, and so on. All of which suggests: the universal, meta-teleological “end” of self-consciousness, when successful, may alter — undermine, promote, or otherwise scramble —the particular “ends” of that patient in whom the “task of consciousness” takes hold.
But there is another, perhaps more satisfying way of considering this relation between the analytic “end” of self-knowledge and the many “ends” constitutive of anyone’s life. In Love and its Place in Nature, Jonathan Lear, drawing equally from Aristotle and Hans Loewald, glosses unconscious desire as “archaic mental functioning,” and argues that the “symptoms” encountered in an analysis — bodily episodes and complaints, ritualistic habits, confusing patterns of interaction — are precisely the mind’s way of pressing for self-expression when other, “mature” channels are obstructed, with the goal, viz. the end, of being known, understood, recognized. From this perspective, the “task of consciousness” (the meta-teleological “end”) is not something superimposed, externally, upon the patient’s behaviors and projects (and the “ends” embedded in them) — as though these latter were merely “objects” of reflection, over which one may subsequently exert conscious control. On the contrary, self-reflection is precisely the “end” of these phenomena, the final stage toward which they unconsciously strain.
This second interpretation, in particular, gives us a way of grasping Ricoeur’s broad identity-thesis. For in this case, the archê of desire “is” the telos of self-consciousness, in the following sense: the most primitive, infantile wishes are “manifested,” more or less unconsciously, in adult projects. Hence a desire for anything at all — a mundane end — is always also, inter alia and most significantly, a desire to “manifest,” that is, to be perceived, known, or recognized.
I will continue my exposition of this difficult thought in the next entry.