Revival: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the Origins of Meaning (2001)

Pre-Reflective Intentionality in the Psychoanalytic View of the Mind

David Snelling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351738972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2001. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and on considerations of the nature of psychoanalytic theory itself, this book reveals new possibilities which psychoanalysis offers for an understanding of the mind - more broadly, the subject of mental states - and its relation to the world. Entailing a re-examination of an approach embedded in the work of certain Continental thinkers, notably Heidegger and Hegel, the connections between philosophy and psychoanalysis presented in this book represent a fresh departure. Linking Kleinian notions of an "inner world" of unconscious phantasy, to philosophical conceptions of non-linguistic meaning whose significance for the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity has been hitherto overlooked, Snelling argues that psychoanalysis demands a significant place in our philosophical understanding of ourselves.

Chapter One

Cavell, Llein and the Extension of Commonsense Psychology

The pattern of commonsense explanation

The themes which this book sets out to address can be approached through an issue in the current philosophical debate about the nature of psychoanalysis. There is a trend in contemporary thinking about psychoanalysis which sees it as an extension of commonsense psychology. This means that psychoanalysis is continuous with the kind of interpretative understanding of the motives productive of action which enables us to make sense of each other in what we do. So, we see Oliver put salt in the soup, and interpret that action so as to make best sense of it: Oliver put salt in the soup because he believed the soup was too bland, wanted to improve the flavour of the soup, and believed that putting salt in the soup would improve the flavour, thus forming a desire to put salt in the soup.

Such patterns of belief and desire have the following key characteristics. They describe the sequences of mental causes—causally efficacious mental states—which bring about an action.¹ So the belief the soup is too bland causes the desire to improve its flavour; this, together with the belief that salt will improve the flavour, causes the desire to put salt in the soup, which, all else being equal, causes Oliver to put salt in the soup. Secondly, explanation of the action of putting salt in the soup follows the same chain of connections, but in the opposite direction: seeing Oliver put salt in the soup, we ascribe to him a desire to do so, which is likely to be caused by a desire to improve the flavour, itself caused by a belief that the soup it too bland.

Of course, such ascriptions are fallible. Perhaps Oliver wishes to ruin the soup instead of improving it. And this highlights a third characteristic of this sort of explanation: motives are always to some extent hidden. The process of uncovering what is hidden invites further interpretation to fill in the gaps. But we would expect a hidden motive to reveal itself, eventually, through further observation of the agent’s behaviour, observation which is led by what has al-understood.

Finally, ‘making sense’—interpretative understanding—operates by seeing behaviour as rational in the light of certain motives. It is reasonable for a person to act in such-and-such a way—to put salt in the soup, say—if they have certain beliefs and desires, therefore it is reasonable for us the interpreters to ascribe those beliefs and desires in attempting to explain their behaviour. It is also reasonable for the agent to cite those beliefs and desires in justification of their action: the reason why he put salt in the

Patterns of beliefs and desires—mental states conceived of as the causes of actions—are typically encoded in sentences, which have logical relations with each other; and the logical relations enable the transmission of contents—what the sentences are about—between such states, in orderly ways. It is the existence of logically ordered, and thus rational, connections of content, which enables this kind of explanation to be justificatory: ascriptions, including self-ascriptions, of such states are prescriptive, and thus, as we shall see, normative: they lay down what one ought to believe or desire, as well as what one ought to do, to behave rationally in a situation, given what one already believes and desires.

From these premises it is a short step to the thought that it is linguistic encoding and consequent organisation which enable us to say that there is distinct and definite mental content at all. To have a mind, it might be said, is simply to be the possessor of such linguistically articulated mental states.

We have already said that reasons justify the actions they explain. If actions are motivated by reasons then the mental states which cause them must be constrained by the logical relations among the beliefs and desires which are invoked in explanations. Thus, if I believe that p is the case, and I also believe that if p then q, then I should believe that q is the case. Note that the emphasis is on should. Reason-explanation imposes norms of rationality. If beliefs and desires are constrained rationally, then there are relations which they must have; relations of logical entailment. A rational agent’s motivating mental states will conform to such norms. In addition, this means that in ascribing a certain belief or desire to a person in explanation of their behaviour— that is, in entering upon the business of interpretation—we engage with a holistic network of beliefs and desires which is potentially un-bounded; therefore interpretation is potentially open-ended, and cannot be tied to discrete statements of law-governed relations between mental contents and actions.

These notions of the holism and normativity of the mental work together with the idea that mental entities or events have causal roles which are effected in virtue of their content. Reason explanation requires relations of content—relations of meaning—between what the agent does and the agent’s reason for doing it; in fact, what the agent does can only be specified in terms of her reasons for doing it a sequence of bodily movements can only be described as, say, running for a bus, if we ascribe to the person involved the intention of running for a bus.

Psychoanalysis adds to this picture of the mind in two ways: it proposes the existence of mental states of which the possessor is not normally aware, or, under ordinary conditions, capable of being aware; and it suggests that there are ways in which mental states can be combined which are not governed by the rational connections which prevail among conscious mental states.² Controversy arises over whether these two additions to the picture of the mind just sketched violate the basic requirements of that picture. Freud had a way of conceiving how the mind accommodates these features which may be problematic. He proposed the existence of special mental functions which are different in kind from the linguistically articulated, rationally structured operations typical of conscious thought, and which require a vocabulary of instincts, mechanisms, mental energy, mental topography, and the like. Such a vocabulary seems problematic because it departs so radically from the features of mind which seem definitive of it from the commonsense perspective. Yet the basic pattern of rationality sketched above is too simplistic to capture the whole of the commonsense notion of mind. In particular, that commonsense notion recognises the existence of various sorts of irrationality, although the pattern above, as it stands, gives no clue how irrationality can be fitted in to the picture. Various additions to that picture will have to be made if irrationality is to be explained.³ The claim will be that such additions still leave us with the basic commonsense picture intact. A further claim, against Freud, would be that his theoretical picture, with its radically non-commonsensical features, does not.

Appreciation of the possible conflict between the commonsense and the Freudian conceptions of mind can motivate the following responses. We can reject psychoanalysis wholesale. We can argue that it is not commonsense psychology itself which give rise to the problem, but a certain philosophical understanding of the mind which incorporates it, and go on to deny that the commonsense view commits us to the philosophical account of the mind which causes the difficulty. Or we can accept the philosophical account of the mind and attempt to re-cast psychoanalysis so as to purge it of the problematic features bequeathed by Freud. (I shall disregard a fourth possibility, that of rejecting commonsense psychology wholesale; this would naturally leave psychoanalysis as an extension of commonsense psychology with nowhere to go, and end our discussion now).

Of the first response I have nothing to say. The basic cogency of the psychoanalytic depiction of the mind must be assumed if we are to proceed further. The second depends on a minimal construal of commonsense psychology which resists the conclusion that its basis in language is the defining feature of mind. A version of this position is assumed by Sebastian Gardner (1993). My discussion, insofar as it connects with commonsense psychology, also belongs here. The third response is taken up by Marcia Cavell. She subjects the basic sketch of commonsense psychology as a grounding for psychoanalysis to the following philosophical expansion in her book The Psychoanalytic Mind (1993).

Marcia Cavell’s reconstruction of psychoanalysis

Cavell sees two conflicting assumptions underlying Freud’s misconstrual of his own discoveries. The first is an ‘internalist’ (1993 p.12), ‘Cartesian’ (ibid. p.14) view of the way in which meaning, the relation to content, comes about. The second, ‘anti-subjectivist’ assumption portrays mental life as essentially interpersonal: meaning arises in the relation between subject, other and world; broadly, in interpretative activity making sense of what others say and do. This second feature of Freud’s thinking provides the structure of Cavell’s argument, and corresponds to the sort of commonsense-psychological inference we have been looking at.

Freud’s Cartesianism comes out, she thinks, through his emphasis on ‘psychic reality’, an inner realm accessible, insofar as it is accessible, only to the subject. The external world is known, for Freud, only through its internal representation; this despite his anti-Cartesian rejection of the separation of mind and body, which he seeks to bridge with the concept of instinct (ibid. p.18).

What is the nature of the alternative which Cavell finds implied within psychoanalysis alongside its unacceptable internalism? A clue comes from our descriptions of action. Making sense of actions necessarily involves reference to the agent’s beliefs and desires. Description of beliefs and desires will specify their propositional content. So a link is forged, via action, between mental content and language. The beliefs and desires which are ascribed in the understanding of behaviour are what bring that behaviour about. Thus, there is a necessary link between mental states and action, between inner and outer. This ‘third-personal’ or ‘interpreter’s’ perspective (ibid. p.20) denies that mental contents are more directly knowable to their possessor privately than to others publicly. Thus both behaviour and thought are public; though thought has a private aspect, meaning is on display in both.

Cavell invites us to take from Wittgenstein the idea, in opposition to traditional views and to his own early work, that language gets its meaning by figuring in our activities. This is in opposition to the traditional conception, that words are meaningful because they stand in relation to inner concepts or pictures, which represent the referent of the word. For Wittgenstein these latter exist, but do no work. The use of language in interior monologue is derived from language’s public use.⁴

An account of meaning-holism supplements the picture: there is no privileged vocabulary which gives us access to meaning. How language as a whole intersects with the world in our practices and activities determines how we ascribe meaning to particular items of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. Interpretative ascription of meaning therefore aims at making best sense of what someone is saying or doing. Beyond this, there is no further question of what they mean. Such ascriptions, therefore, are permanently subject to revision in the light of further evidence; there is no final settlement upon ‘the true meaning’. Meaning is always indeterminate, in that there is no further fact of the matter about meaning which could decide between two rival and complete schemes of interpretation. From this we progress to a conception of interpretation which assumes that the interpreter can know when someone is asserting something, and that some of what is asserted is true. States of affairs are linked to assertions through the further claim that we share a common world, that there is a causal connection between the world and some of the interpretee’s beliefs, and that what is being uttered relates to some state of affairs of which the interpreter can be aware.⁵ Psychoanalytic interpretation comparably involves extension from a shared body of beliefs, here between analyst and patient, to the imaginative enlargement of that body. The analyst’s understanding of the patient’s self-understanding and its derangements can thus proceed, by way of coherence of what is learned with what is already shared, and correspondence of those shared beliefs to the shared, public world.

Thus far, however, we do not have a complete account of interpretative meaning: something more must be involved than the production of the ‘correct’ response to a verbal stimulus. What else is needed? The interpretee must have the intention to communicate the relevant meaning to the hearer. This requires that the interpretee be aware that what she means by her expression is the same as what the interpreter means. The object must mean the same for the two communicators—it must be a public object, in that it must be something that speakers can agree about. The object must be recognised as existing for another. There must be common ground for agreement about states of affairs; so there must also be an understanding of what makes a belief, or statement of belief, true or false. Thus belief, truth and meaning all hang together. A theory of interpretation must be part of a larger theory of action and thought. Thinking and speaking are inseparable—a thinking being must be an interpreting being, and for this it must have language. In contrast to the ‘Cartesian’ demand for foundational certainty, the interpreter’s perspective begins from the acknowledgement of our intersubjectivity and access to a common world.

The internalist bias to Freud’s thinking comes out in his giving priority (temporally and genetically) to an instinct-based inner world. How does Cavell think Freud’s ‘Cartesian’ assumptions manifest themselves in his theories? In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) Freud proposes his theory that all dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Wishes arise from the earliest (physical) needs, which produce tensions discharged physically if not immediately satisfied. Experience of past satisfaction prompts a representation of that satisfaction in the mind when the need reasserts itself: this is hallucinatory wish fulfilment. Cavell notes that the modified need or wish, unlike the purely physical kind of need which precedes it, is an intentional state (Cavell 1993 p.45). As it arises from interaction with the environment it hints at externalism. But as the infant cannot have a sense of the continuous existence of objects until about eighteen months, where does the content come from?

Instincts place mental development in a purely internal context, Cavell thinks. Freud sees linguistic thought as preceded by imagistic thinking. The former comes to represent the latter, but the latter is already a form of representation for him. It is this ‘internalist’ view which underlies Freud’s early account of the central psychoanalytic mechanism: repression. ‘Secondary’ repression acts on secondary process thought, which typifies consciousness and has the rational, logically connected characteristics we have identified in our discussion of commonsense psychology, which in addition depends upon a grasp of the reality of a shared world and the linguistic articulation of mental life. But secondary repression itself depends on primary repression, in which the ‘psychic representative’ of an instinct is denied access to consciousness. This, Cavell thinks, seems to imply that the mental is at its basis physical, and could be characterised, ideally, in physical terms (ibid. p.48). The ‘innerness’ of the physical—i.e. its capacity for being characterised by descriptions of internal states—can be conflated with mental internalism, she thinks (and has been by Freud); but mental states, on the externalist view Cavell advocates, are of such characterisation.

A further difference between Cavell and Freud lies in their conflicting accounts of a central cognitive operation: judgment. Judgment, according to Freud, has its origin in an infantile discriminatory response: spitting out or swallowing (Freud 1925h). But, argues Cavell, Freud fails to separate the primitive response from the cognitive operation. There is a distinction which must be maintained between a mental operation (judgment) and its (for Cavell, merely) causal antecedent (the discriminatory response). Judgment properly requires a grasp of an interlocking system of concepts: truth and falsehood; justification; intersubjective world—some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Cavell, Llein and the Extension of Commonsense Psychology
• 2 Unconscious Phantasy and Mental Life
• 3 From Freud to Phenomenology
• 4 Hegel and ‘Being-in-the-World’
• 5 Wilfred Bion and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Thinking
• 6 Psychoanalysis, Psychosis and Being: ‘Falling-out-of-the-World’
• 7 Internal Objects and Ontology
• 8 Hegel and Holism
• Bibliography
• Index