World, Affectivity, Trauma

Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

Robert D. Stolorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136717710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma.

1

Introduction

Existential Analysis, Daseinanalysis, and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

The aim of this book is to show how Heidegger’s (1927) existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. It is thus intended as a contribution to both psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss were two early pioneers who saw the value of Heidegger’s analysis of existence for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. They both proceeded “from the top down”—that is, they started with Heidegger’s philosophical delineation of essential existential structures (Being-in-the-world,^* care, authenticity-inauthenticity, das Man, thrownness, existential anxiety, existential guilt, potentialities-for-Being, etc.) and applied these to clinical phenomena and the therapeutic situation. Although Binswanger’s (1946) existential analysis produced some brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the “world-designs” underlying various forms of psychopathology, and Boss’s (1963) Daseinanalysis freed the psychoanalytic theory of therapy from the dehumanizing causal-mechanistic assumptions of Freudian metapsychology, neither effort brought about a radicalization of psychoanalytic practice itself or of the psychoanalytic process.

The evolution of my collaborators’ and my post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002), by contrast, proceeded “from the bottom up.” It was born of our studies of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories and developed out of our concurrent efforts to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry and to illuminate the phenomenology of the psychoanalytic process itself. Our dedication to phenomenological inquiry, in turn, let us to a contextualist theoretical perspective, and we subsequently found philosophical support in Heidegger’s existential analytic for what we had illuminated.

Our post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective highlighted three closely interrelated features of the psychoanalytic method. It is phenomenological—its focus is on worlds of emotional experience. It is hermeneutic—it seeks interpretively to illuminate the structures of meaning that organize worlds of experience. And it is contextual—it grasps experience and its horizons as being constituted within formative contextual systems. In Chapter 2, I show that Heidegger’s investigative method in Being and Time is also a unique blending of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and contextualism and thus has great potential for providing a philosophical grounding for post-Cartesian psychoanalysis.

Intersubjective-systems theory, the term my collaborators and I coined to name our evolving perspective, is a phenomenological contextualism. It is phenomenological, as I said, in that it investigates and illuminates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it holds that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the psychoanalytic situation, in constitutive relational or intersubjective contexts. In Chapter 3, I present an overview of the historical evolution and basic concepts of our phenomenological contextualism.

In Chapter 4, I show how Heidegger’s existential analytic can provide a philosophical grounding for an understanding of the phenomenology of emotional trauma. I claim that emotional trauma produces an affective state whose central features bear a close similarity to the central elements in Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety, and that it accomplishes this by exposing the traumatized person to a constituent of our existence heretofore concealed—namely, our Being-toward-death. If the painful affective state produced by such exposure can find a relational home in which it can be held and integrated, I suggest, then trauma can eventuate in an enhancement of authentic existing.

Drawing on a clinical vignette, Harry Potter, Friedrich Nietzsche, and my own experience of emotional trauma, I seek in Chapter 5 to rethink the concept of dissociation in terms of the devastating impact of trauma on our experience of temporality. Dissociation, I contend, just is traumatic temporality.

Having illuminated trauma’s contextuality and its existentiality, I find in Chapter 6 a path for synthesizing these two themes into a broader unity that can encompass them both. Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution (Heidegger), so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as “siblings in the same darkness,” deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Our existential kinship-in-finitude is the condition for the possibility both of the contextuality of emotional trauma and of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement and understanding in which traumatized states can be held, transformed, and integrated.

In Chapter 7, I seek to relationalize Heidegger’s conception of finitude by developing the claims that Being-toward-death always includes Being-toward-loss of the other and that death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. The chapter draws on Derrida’s work on friendship and mourning to support its claims.

In Chapter 8, I show that our kinship-in-finitude and the relationality of finitude, as disclosed in my investigations of emotional trauma, provide a basis for substantially expanding Heidegger’s conception of authentic Being-with, the existential ground of relationality. This enriched conception of Being-with, I contend, holds significant ethical implications.

In Chapter 9, I present a collaborative psychobiographical study of Heidegger’s fall into Nazism, illuminating the salient themes that dominated Heidegger’s personal psychological world and how these themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and his version of Nazi ideology. The chapter illustrates the part played by emotional trauma, even madness, in the creation of philosophical and ideological frameworks. The chapter closes with a section, “A Distant Mirror,” on the importance of psychobiographical studies for a post-Cartesian grasp of philosophical and theoretical ideas.

In Chapter 10, I conclude that the previous chapters show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. The discussion draws on Heidegger’s (1927) use of the interplay of the ontical and the ontological in Being and Time.

^* Throughout this book, I follow the convention adopted by Macquarrie and Robinson, translators of Being and Time, of referring to the intelligibility or understandability of beings (Seiendes) with the term Being (Sein), with an upper case B (see Heidegger, 1927, p. 22, including footnote).

2

Heidegger’s Investigative Method in Being and Time

This nature of scientific method…consists partly in not being separate from the content.

– W. F. Hegel

[A] bare subject without a world never “is.”

– Martin Heidegger

As I indicated in the first chapter, in our post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective, my collaborators and I (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002) have emphasized three closely interrelated features in our view of psychoanalytic method. It is phenomenological; it is hermeneutic; and it is contextual. I see Heidegger’s investigative method in Being and Time (1927) as also being a unique blending of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and contextualism and thus as having great potential for providing a philosophical grounding for our psychoanalytic approach. In this chapter I explore Heidegger’s investigative method and its relationship to its subject matter, “the question of the meaning of Being” (p. 19). I show that the relationship between his investigative method and its subject matter is a circular one in which the guiding aim of elucidating the meaning of Being leads to an initial formulation of the proper “way of access to it” (p. 26), which results in a beginning articulation of the kind of Being to be investigated, which in turn brings about a further refinement of the method of investigation, and so on. I also show that the unity of Heidegger’s investigative method and its subject matter can be seen to mirror a basic theme of his analytic: the closing of the ontological gap between human Being and its world.

Heidegger (1927) makes the unity of his investigative method and its subject matter quite clear early in the introductory chapter:

In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being—that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood [i.e., are intelligible]…The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity…Hence Being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered. (pp. 25–26, emphasis added)

As I understand this passage, Heidegger is claiming that because the Being-question pertains not to entities but to the Being of entities—“that on the basis of which entities are already understood”—it requires a method of investigation distinctly different from all of those that merely investigate the entities, neglecting their intelligibility as entities. Developing this distinctive investigative method, in turn, “requires us to prepare the way for choosing the right entity for our example, and to work out the genuine way of access to it” (p. 26). We must, that is, choose the right entity to be interrogated as to its Being. Heidegger notes that our ways of investigating are themselves “modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves” (pp. 26–27).

Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being…This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term Dasein. If we are to formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give a proper explication of an entity (Dasein), with regard to its Being. (p. 27, emphasis added)

Before proceeding, I wish to make three points about the foregoing passage. The first concerns the characterization of Dasein as an “entity.” The translators of Being and Time note that Seiendes, the German word they translate as entity or entities, means literally “something which is,” and that, contrary to their favored translation, “There is much to be said for translating [it] by the noun ‘being’ or ‘beings’” (p. 22, fn. 1). In my view, there is especially “much to be said” for this latter translation when speaking of Dasein, because “being” does not have the reifying, dehumanizing connotation that “entity” does (at least for me). Thus, I will henceforth substitute “being” for “entity” when quoting from text that refers to Dasein, “the being which each of us is himself.”

Second, it does not seem to me that the “Thus” and the “must,” which I have given in bold italics, are really warranted by what Heidegger has presented so far. Rather, their justification awaits his preliminary characterization of the human kind of Being. Here, Dasein’s priority as what is to be investigated has not been demonstrated; it has only “announced itself” (p. 28), in the recognition that investigating what is not fully understood is itself a mode of Dasein’s kind of Being. To choose the right being to be interrogated as to its Being, we must inquire into the phenomenon of interrogating or investigating, which means inquiring into the Being of the interrogator or investigator, which is inquiring into the Being of Dasein (William Bracken, personal communication, March, 2005). Dasein’s priority as the being to be interrogated as to its Being is thereby announced. Also announcing itself is the “remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ which what we are asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of a being” and the “very special” way “in which beings with the character of Dasein are related to the question of Being” (p. 28).

Third, I wish to make note of an ingenious linguistic device that Heidegger employs when he denotes “the being which each of us is himself,” the human being, by the term Dasein (William Bracken, personal communication, February, 2005). The literal meaning of the German word Dasein is “to-be-there” or “there-being.” This literal meaning seems to me always to be present when the term Dasein is used. Thus, in Heidegger’s usage, the word Dasein can serve two distinct linguistic functions simultaneously. In one, in the usual sense of linguistic reference, Dasein refers to us human beings as the beings to be interrogated as to our Being. In the other, Dasein, with its demonstrative, da (there)—which does not refer to anything except in particular contexts of use—serves as a “formal indicator.” In this second function, Dasein does not refer to or stand for anything; rather, it directs or points the reader in a non-referential way toward what is to be illuminated—the situatedness (da) or contextuality of our kind of Being. So, with this linguistic device, Heidegger is able to use one word, Dasein, both to refer to the being to be interrogated as to its Being, and to formally indicate non-referentially the kind of Being (to-be-there) to be disclosed by the interrogation.

Heidegger’s (1927) initial characterization of the human kind of Being sets the stage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Existential Analysis, Daseinanalysis, and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 2 Heidegger’s Investigative method in Being and Time
• Chapter 3 Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis as Phenomenological Contextualism
• Chapter 4 Existential Anxiety, Finitude, and Trauma
• Chapter 5 Worlds Apart: Dissociation, Finitude, and Traumatic Temporality
• Chapter 6 Our Kinship-in-Finitude
• Chapter 7 Relationalizing Heidegger’s Conception of Finitude
• Chapter 8 Expanding Heidegger’s Conception of Relationality: Ethical Implications
• Chapter 9 Heidegger’s Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being: A Distant Mirror
• Chapter 10 Conclusions: The Mutual Enrichment of Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis
• References
• Index