Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis

Pseudo-Dionysius and C.G. Jung

David Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135098988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How can the psychotherapist think about not knowing? Is psychoanalysis a contemplative practice? This book explores the possibility that there are resources in philosophy and theology which can help psychoanalysts and psychotherapists think more clearly about the unknown and the unknowable. The book applies the lens of apophasis to psychoanalysis,

Chapter 1

Introduction

The lonely cells of the recluses of Egypt have been revealed, by the archaeologist, to have had well-furnished consulting rooms.¹

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? – Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!²

The aim of this study is to identify apophatic elements in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. It will do so by an examination of the works of the sixth-century philosopher Dionysius³ and the twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.

I am using ‘apophatic elements’ as an umbrella term to cover a range of concepts, images, metaphors and behaviour which are characterized by negation or denial. Apophasis can be translated literally as ‘unsaying’. It is ‘away from speech’ or ‘saying away’. Apo is ‘from’ or ‘away’. Phasis is ‘assertion’, from phemi, ‘assert’ or ‘say’. Apophasis, denial, stands in relation to kataphasis, affirmation. The via negativa and negative theology are concerned with the apophatic in philosophy and religion. ‘Unknowing’ as an epistemological problem and as an experience is at the heart of apophatic writing.

Freud described psychoanalysis both as a theory for understanding the mind and culture and as a therapy for neurosis. This mirrors the debate among the interpreters of the writings of Dionysius. Some interpret his work as philosophy, others interpret it as a description of personal experience. Lossky, perhaps, embraces both sides when he describes apophaticism as ‘an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God’.⁴ Coakley asserts that this division, while having ‘some remaining heuristic worth, is far too blunt a tool to account for the historic variety of Dionysian influences down the centuries’.⁵ Psychoanalysis has had a similarly varied influence, albeit for a much shorter period of time. Grinberg observed that ‘[i]n spite of its tremendous impact on mankind, paradoxically enough, it has not yet been possible to place and classify psychoanalysis within any of the existing fields of knowledge’.⁶

The problem of unknowing is central to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. One of the motives behind this research is to explore whether or not there are resources within the discourse of the via negativa and negative theology to help the psychotherapist to think about unknowing in the psychoanalytic setting. Does the apophatic literature provide tools for understanding the process of psychoanalysis? Is it possible that, in the words of Dionysius, ‘If one considers these texts [his own and those of psychoanalysis] with a reverent eye one will see something that both brings about unity and manifests a single empathy?’⁷

Passing reference to the apophatic tradition has been made in a few histories of psychotherapy. Ellenberger⁸ and Whyte⁹ identify Dionysius as one of a number of philosophers who contributed to pre-Freudian concepts of the unconscious:

Plotin and the neo-Platonic philosophers defined God by means of a negative approach: God is not at all what we conceive him to be; he is unimaginable to us. The great mystic known as Dionysios the Areopagite, gave to this concept a Christian formulation: ‘The most godly knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing.’¹⁰

Burke characterizes Freud’s theory as a ‘secular variant of negative theology’.¹¹ Sells and Webb have written a paper about apophatic elements in Lacan and Bion.¹² Goudsmit in a study of the via negativa in psychotherapy compares Merleau-Ponty’s ‘negative philosophy’ and Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘learned ignorance’.¹³ Anderson used the work of Thomas Merton to develop an apophatic approach to psychotherapy.¹⁴ Dourley, in a chapter entitled ‘Toward an Apophatic Psychology’, explores Jung’s understanding of Eckhart.¹⁵ Karlsson observes that:

One of the reasons that psychoanalysis as a science struggles with difficult epistemological problems is that its subject matter – the unconscious – is constituted in terms of negativity. What other science investigates something which is defined by the prefix un-?! The only resembling discipline, in this sense, may be the so-called ‘negative theology’, which claims that an understanding of God can only be reached by stating what God is not.¹⁶

Frank asserts that ‘all “psychology” which really sees its object and really takes account of its peculiar character must be “negative psychology” (by analogy to negative theology)’.¹⁷ If Karlsson and Frank are right, psychoanalysis and negative theology share a concern to clarify how to think about negation.

Psychoanalysis has been widely and effectively used as a tool to study religious experience and mystical thought. However, Essai sur l’Introversion Mystique: Etude Psychologique de Pseudo-Denys l’Areopagite et de Quelques Autres cas de Mysticisme is, as far as I am aware, the only sustained psychoanalytic study of Dionysius. It was written by Morel in 1918 and dedicated to Flournoy. In his introduction Morel references Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung, Bleuler and Bergson. He concludes that:

le ‘systeme’ de Denys offre cette double analogie essentielle avec la pensée autistique: 1. Il est égocentrique. 2. Le critère de la vraisemblance est totalment exclue et remplacé par le seul critère de la jouissance. […] Or, cette confusion de la réalité objective interne et d’un égocentrisme métaphysique est une forme particulière et tres répandue de mythomanie: création, réalisation de fictions, et confusion pseudo-hallucinatoire de celles-ci avec la réalité.¹⁸

The approach taken here turns the tables on psychoanalysis. It asks what sort of a practice and theory is psychoanalysis, and where is it located within the history of the European contemplative tradition, by use of the concept of apophasis. It asks in what ways, if any, the language of apophatic writing can illuminate the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. This process necessarily alters our perceptions of both ancient apophasis and modern psychoanalysis. As Turner observes:

One understands a tradition when one understands how that past lives in the present … to call upon a tradition is always to reread it, that is to say, to access a tradition is already to have changed it. Therefore the past is alive as tradition in so far as we transform it, so the normativity of the tradition is the product of what it yields to us by way of given achievement in the past in conjunction with our present strategies of rereading those achievements, that conjunction of past and present constituting its character and life as tradition.¹⁹

In addition to the theoretical and historical objectives and motives for this study, it has a philological dimension. In the section on Dionysius I will describe ways in which apophatic themes appear in his texts. This is the first time that these features of his writing have been identified in such detail. In the section on Jung, I can claim to have identified his use of the notion of opposites in a more thorough manner than has been attempted before.

Chapters 2 and 3 of this study focus on Dionysius, the sixth-century Syrian writer whose works are often portrayed as the zenith of apophatic thought. He brought together the Greek and biblical currents of negative theology and the via negativa. Apophatic elements can be found in the writings of Plato, Philo, the Gnostics, Plotinus, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa and Proclus, all of whom predate Dionysius. Dionysius’ thought has been interpreted and made use of in a variety of ways by philosophers and theologians from his own time up to the present, including Eriugena, Aquinas, Cusa, Eckhart and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

In the last thirty years there has been a resurgence of interest in apophatic literature. Mortley,²⁰ McGinn,²¹ de Certeau,²² Carabine²³ and Sells²⁴ have written historical studies of apophatic philosophy, theology and mysticism. In debates related to deconstruction and postmodernism, Derrida²⁵ and Marion²⁶ have written significantly about Dionysius. Yannaras²⁷ and Carlson,²⁸ who develops what he calls the ‘apophatic analogy’, have compared Heidegger and Dionysius. Boeve uses the concept of ‘cultural apophaticism’ to reflect on contemporary relations between theology and culture.²⁹ Fitzpatrick³⁰ and Walker³¹ have used apophasis within the context of the social sciences. Zembylas³² and Abunuwara³³ argue for the importance of ‘the unknowable’ in education. Wolosky has explored apophasis in Eliot, Beckett and Celan.³⁴ Franke has used the theme of apophasis to compile an anthology, which includes work from literature and the arts.³⁵ He observes:

As a newly emerging logic, or rather a/logic, of language in the humanities, this new (though also very old) quasi-epistemic paradigm for criticism, as well as for language-based disciplines and practices in general, can help us learn to read in hither to unsuspectedly limber and sensitive ways.³⁶

Saward developed the concept of ‘apophatic anthropology’ based on patristic texts, especially Gregory of Nyssa, which he links with Wittgenstein’s ‘silence’.³⁷ Independently, Bernauer described Foucault’s ‘apophatic anthropology’.³⁸ Carlson³⁹ and Otten⁴⁰ use the notion of ‘negative anthropology’. Caputo argues for a ‘generalized apophatics’:

So to the theologia negativa, one could add a anthropologia negativa, an ethica negativa, politica negativa, where of the humanity, or the ethics, or the politics, or the democracy to come we cannot say a thing, except that they want to twist free from the regimes of presence, from the historically restricted concepts of humanity, ethics and democracy under which we presently labor. Humanity, ethics, politics – or whatever, n’importe – would belong to a general apophatics […] The effect of this ignorantia is to keep the possibility of the impossible open, to keep the future open, to have a future.⁴¹

While these varied uses of apophasis are not referred to explicitly in what follows, they provide part of the wider context of this study.

In the context of his discussion of the relationship between continental philosophy and the via negativa, Bradley asks whether the relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Corpus Dionysiacum
• 3 Apophasis in Dionysius
• 4 Jung, Neoplatonism and Dionysius
• 5 The opposites
• 6 The transcendent function
• 7 Jung and contemporary theories of apophasis
• 8 The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and the psychotherapeutic process
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index