Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis

Uncanny Belonging

Teresa Fenichel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351180139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Libre albedrío y determinismo en filosofía

Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis provides a long-overdue dialogue between two seminal thinkers, Schelling and Freud. Through a sustained reading of the sublime, mythology, the uncanny, and freedom, this book provokes the reader to retrieve and revive the shared roots of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Teresa Fenichel examines the philosophical basis for the concepts of the unconscious and for the nature of human freedom on which psychoanalysis rests. Drawing on the work of German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, the author explores how his philosophical understanding of human actions, based as it was on the ideas of drives, informed and helped shape Freud's work. Fenichel also stresses the philosophical weight of Freudian psychoanalysis, specifically in regards to the problem of freedom and argues that psychoanalysis complicates and reinforces Schelling's basic idea: to know reality we must engage with the world empathetically and intimately.

This book also serves as an introduction to Schelling's thought, arguing that his metaphysics—particularly concerning the primacy of the unconscious and of fantasy—can be read as a therapeutic endeavor. Finally, the book offers a deep rethinking of the action and nature of sublimation through both Freud's and Schelling's texts. Fenichel suggests psychoanalytic therapy is self-interpretation—a recognition of our narratives as narratives, without for that reason taking them any less seriously.

Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy.

Chapter 1

Sublimity

Everything that is hidden, everything full of mystery, contributes to what is terrifying and is therefore capable of sublimity.

—Schiller, “On the Sublime”

Despite his claims to the contrary in “The Uncanny,” Freud’s interest in the aesthetic is in no way peripheral to the work of psychoanalysis. Through the aesthetic, Freud explores a reality that encompasses the unconscious, opening up a psychoanalytic Weltanschauung that fundamentally diverges from the scientific. Freud thus inherits a set of issues that pervaded Schelling’s middle and late philosophy, arising from attempts to systematize a subjectivity no longer centered in consciousness. This chapter serves the function of establishing Freud’s place within a larger tradition of aesthetic philosophy, one that includes Kant, Schiller, and the early Schelling, wherein the systematicity of reason collides with the disruptive forces of desire and feeling in important and unique ways. My hope is to show that for Freud and his predecessors, aesthetics becomes the opportunity for reformulating the conflict between freedom and determinism.

Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a sustained meditation on the philosophical import of the aesthetic, opens up the problematic relationship between system and subjectivity that will guide the Idealist project as well as psychoanalysis. In this text, the abyss separating nature and freedom that transcendental philosophy depends upon is given over to the unifying domain of feeling.¹ Although Kant does not posit the unconscious in this regard, as Schelling will go on to do, he reveals a dimension of experience that is similarly irreducible to either the determinism of nature or the determination of reason. This aesthetic encroachment into the Critical Philosophy, a privileging of feeling, and artistic genius that inspires the German Idealist project, implies that pleasure and pain transform the system of reason, as it were, from within:

Hence we must suppose, at least provisionally, that judgment also contains an a priori principle of its own, and also suppose that since the power of desire is necessarily connected with pleasure or displeasure … judgment will bring about a transition from the pure cognitive power, i.e. from the domain of concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of freedom, just as in its logical use it makes possible the transition from understanding to reason.²

It is feeling, and most fundamentally pleasure and pain that, simultaneously challenges and salvages Kant’s rational system. The dangerous possibility that belongs to the Critique of Judgment concerns this notion of “transition”: The centrality of the aesthetic—particularly through returning to the bodily and natural—undermines Kant’s ultimate claims in this work about the realization of freedom.

Kant’s analysis of the beautiful focuses on the harmony of this reflective, aesthetic judgment. In the judgment of the beautiful, it is the unproblematic union of imaginative and cognitive faculties that comes to the fore. However, it is his inclusion of the sublime under the umbrella of aesthetic judgments, while at the same time insisting that the sublime has no real connection to products of nature or of art, which brings into relief the conflict between Kant’s dual conceptions of freedom: the sublime, an experience of pleasure in pain and of transition more generally, is reduced to an expression of reason’s superiority over and absolute rupture from nature (and the body). In this insistence, Kant minimizes the much more radical consequences of aesthetic freedom.

In what follows, I argue that Schiller and the early Schelling develop an aesthetics that is in fact truer to Kant’s own hopes of attending to the transition between nature and freedom, between a concept, and its realization. Specifically, they illustrate the ways in which the insights of the Critique of Judgment illuminate the tensions within the Kantian conception of freedom—as imaginative, productive spontaneity on the one hand, and as repressive prohibition, and refusal of feeling and nature on the other.³ It is with this in mind that my discussion of the Kantian sublime is followed by Schiller’s elaborations of it, primarily in “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and “Concerning the Sublime”;⁴ and Schelling’s incorporation of these views in System of Transcendental Idealism and The Philosophy of Art.⁵ These works share the basic intuition of the Critique of Judgment that art and aesthetics unite the sensible and the supersensible; Schiller and Schelling, however, regard the feeling of the sublime as the disclosure of freedom that is prior to and more fundamental than the law.

My focus here will be on tracing the different qualities and moments of this feeling, including horror and confusion, which anticipate Freud’s analysis of the uncanny. Schiller and Schelling argue that freedom is not merely exercised in the constraint of desire or nature; they call for an aesthetic freedom that recognizes the human to be in excess of the rational. In Kant, sublimity contracts into the moment in which fear and helplessness in the face of nature disappear into reverence for the supremacy of reason. For Schiller, and to an even greater degree for Schelling, the sublime is human activity—it is the process of holding together alienation and integration rather than what results. The sublime is not a failure of the imagination but evidence of its re-inscription as the root of freedom. In similar fashion, we might consider the development from Kant to Schelling, mediated by Schiller’s emphasis on wholeness and play, in terms of the role played by aesthetics more generally: whereas for Kant art and nature are symbols or tools for recognizing our dutiful, rational, universal freedom, for Schiller and Schelling aesthetic experience is an enactment of our creative, desirous, personal freedom.

The interrupted self

Kant’s Critique of Judgment, like the reflective judgment it treats, is essentially an act of unification—the faculty to which feeling belongs offers a transitional space between deterministic nature in the Critique of Pure Reason, and rational, law-giving freedom in The Critique of Practical Reason.⁶ Kant gives us some reason to believe that reflective judgments not only unify, but also exceed, and even ground, deterministic, and autonomous cause.⁷

Kant’s explorations of aesthetic judgments in particular, a sub-set of reflective judgments, open up a connection between the supersensible and the sensible, the universal, and the individual. Through his explanation of the a priori principle of purposiveness grounding our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, Kant intimates a third way: a form of relating to the world and to ourselves that is fundamentally unlike the theoretical domination of knowing (experiences subsumed under rules of the understanding) and the practical domination of acting (feelings subsumed under the moral law). Ultimately, it is through this capacity of aesthetic judgment for bridging the personal and the universal, rather than collapsing the former into the latter, that Kant exposes the crucial question haunting his Critical Philosophy: How can the noumenal freedom of The Critique of Practical Reason express itself in and indeed alter the phenomenal world of the Critique of Pure Reason? And how could the seemingly ancillary field of aesthetics perform the philosophical task of bridging the noumenal and phenomenal realms?⁸

Kant distinguishes aesthetic judgments from cognitive judgments insofar as they are reflective, rather than determinative.⁹ That is, these judgments do not determine their objects, or subsume particular experiences under already given concepts or laws, but rather create, or seek the universal for the particular. As a form of reflective judgment, the necessity, and universality belonging to aesthetic judgments is not a function of a priori concepts or intuitions; rather, the necessity and universality involved in judgments of taste is attributable to our capacity for a common experience of the ways in which the faculties of imagination, understanding, and reason relate to each other. It is feeling—not knowledge or duty—that initiates us into the universality of reflective judgments. Kant argues that aesthetic judgments offer a form of relating—the form of the hypothetical, of the “as if”—that allows us to feel the transition between the determinism of the first critique and the autonomy of the second. When faced with the workings of genius, or with a living organism, we realize that these opposed forms of causation are inadequate. Through aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, Kant emphasizes a notion of freedom, which not only separates us from sensible nature, but also brings us closer to supersensible nature. That is, the tension between moral and spontaneous freedom in Kant brings into greater relief the disinterested engagement proper to judgments of the beautiful. This tension, which was already evident in the Critique of Pure Reason, could be reformulated in terms of the distinction between the productive and reproductive imagination in that text.¹⁰ Kant’s aesthetics expose and perpetuate a pervasive fault-line in the Critical Philosophy: the need to develop a reflexive space between activity and passivity, whether we are talking about self-consciousness or our knowledge of objects. It is not by chance that this exposure comes about through the artwork—an object that forces us to question where its meaning lies, that dares us to distinguish truth from interpretation.

In the judgment of the beautiful, the form of an object sets in motion our powers of cognition, but in such a way that they remain in “free play” [freien Spiele]: our cognitive faculties do not determine their object, but are engaged harmoniously in their proper functions despite the lack of any attainable goal or end.¹¹ The beautiful form incites a feeling that the world is there for us, and this feeling of an underlying unity between subject and object is pleasure. This is mirrored in Kant’s account of genius, where the creation of an art work—like the pleasurable play that grounds our judgment of the beautiful—is not determined by rules; the activity of rule-making itself becomes playful, creative, and spontaneous without devolving into chaos.¹² Freedom is here understood in its creative capacity, and our vocation is realized through inventing rather than obeying the law. Kant’s invocation of purposiveness in accounting for the pleasure of the beautiful allows a consideration of a subject’s relation to nature (and to art)—both within and external to him—that is neither reducible to the necessity of judgments of fact nor merely analogous to autonomy:

On the other hand, we do call objects, states of mind, or acts purposive even if their possibility does not necess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: twisted beginnings
• 1 Sublimity
• 2 Prophetic times
• 3 The absolute past
• 4 The mythical symptom
• Conclusion: uncanny freedom
• Bibliography
• Index