Psychoanalysis, Psycho-dialectics, or Psycho-synthesis? Or, Why Hegel is not Freud is not Lacan

Cain Pinto

My courage fails me, therefore, at the thought of rising up as a prophet before my fellow-men, and I bow to the reproach that I have no consolation to offer them; for at bottom that is what they all demand—the frenzied revolutionary as passionately as the most pious believer.

 —Sigmund Freud

I

The popular reception of psychoanalysis as an alternative, or a supplement, to German Idealism has mistaken the underlying metaphysical commitments of both psychoanalysis and German Idealism. The fascination the discipline holds for philosophers like Žižek in its Lacanian variant is in itself a suspicious development. This development is suspicious because the notion of reality in psychoanalysis is idealistic, which is quite damaging to the claims of Žižek and others inasmuch as they claim to be thoroughgoing “Hegelian materialists” and “psychoanalysts” at the same time.

I. i

What is reality for Freud?

“…[R]eality is first of all the opposite of fantasy—it is facts, such as the normal man sees them; it is the opposite of dreams, of hallucination[1]”. Freud’s crypto-philosophy offers to call reality a god; the god Logos. This move is nothing but Freud inserting “…a bit of irony…in an ad hominem argument[2]”:

“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds…Our god, λόγος, will fulfill whichever wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life… Our god λόγος is perhaps not a very almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfill a small part of what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this we shall accept it with resignation[3]”.

From the iconoclasm of rejecting the mythology of gods Freud takes us to the conservatism implicit in “…a mythology of rational despair[4]”. Reality in Freud has no objective meaning except as a peculiar form of ego-cathexis; it is “…classified with negation and contradiction, the tonic binding of energy, and reference to time” as an end of illusion and the maturity of man[5]: finally, reality is the world without a god which unfolds in the future of science, or λόγος.

This meaning of reality, in Freud, thought of as a suspended revelation bears too much in common with Hegel. One would suspect, then, that Žižek is right to blend Psychoanalysis with Hegelianism. After all, one could say, they both use the ideas of contradiction, negation and sublation, which Freud calls sublimation.

But, this correspondence is not yet a warrant to say that Freud and Hegel are compatible. They are compatible only if we understand that their idea of reality as a gradual but constant unfolding of reason breaks the Kantianism which they propose to break out of.

But, Freud and Hegel reach the same conclusion using diametrically opposite methods of investigation. How can this be?

I. ii

Hegel’s metaphysics holds that all human activity is a manifestation of rationality in some particular aspect. “… [I]ntuition and feeling…” are to him “…unconscious and inchoate forms of thinking themselves[6]…” But, Freud has warned us that reality emerges only after feeling and intuition have been rid of their belief in a transcendental god who makes himself present to reason at his own leisure as the developments of science or λόγος.

For Freud reason is merely the remainder after the conflict between feelings, intuitions and the reality external to these aspects of the psyche have been integrated into consciousness. Hegel’s notion of reason as thought coming to know itself through the forms of ideas in history is compatible with Freud only tenuously. Furthermore, it is compatible only if we disregard his peculiar notions of contradiction, negation and sublation which move in a direction contrary to that of Freud.

I. iii

What is reality for Hegel?

Hegel’s conception of reality is the idea of that which is absolute. What is the absolute? Hegel was loath to define the absolute in a single sentence because he feared it would lose its meaning outside of its philosophical context. For Hegel this philosophical context is thoroughly metaphysical in the Kantian sense[7]: it is the attempt of reason to understand God, who is the embodied form of the infinite and the unconditioned[8].

So, Hegel begins by appreciating Kant’s antinomies of reason in a peculiar way.

Kant’s three antinomies[9]:

(1) Understanding moves through the principles of sufficient reason by finding the “…causes for all events”, so the absolute can be understood only by attributing a cause and condition for what is self-causing and unconditioned; (2) Understanding proceeds analytically treating each part as a whole sufficient itself, so the whole is more than any part and “precedes…” them in thought as that which is indivisible; and, (3) Thought is made up of finite ideas, so to define the unconditioned and indivisible would be to make it “…finite”.

Hegel’s reply to this triad of Kantian antinomies[10]:

(1) The immediate sense certainty of thought is metaphysical: it posits that things can exist independently for themselves “…without other things”; (2) The terms of thought that understand things as independently existing objects are found to be dependent on other terms “…outside…” themselves; (3) The terms seemed independent only because they were dependent on a notion of the whole which was available to reason only as parts, and so on…

I. iv

Hegel’s view of reality holds that reason becomes complete by understanding the always suspended relation of the terms of understanding in relation to an unconditioned and indivisible idea. This reality is very much the transcendental idea of Kant seen from the part of the absolute instead of from a moment of understanding in relation with itself through its history.

Between Hegel’s view of absolute reason and Freud’s view of reason as λόγος the difference is one of perspective. Hegel goes through the stages of reason and looks back on them as parts of a transcendental whole or λόγος; Freud begins by denying any resemblance between reason, its stages of development and the transcendental whole or λόγος. For the former all ideas in their finitude and dependence on other ideas are a coherent whole as reason only because they can be seen as whole from the perspective of the Kantian transcendental intuition; for the latter λόγος or transcendental reality is only an adequation of reason caught up between desire and necessity at a specific point in personal pre-history.

II

Why Hegel is not Freud and Freud is not Hegel?

We have already discussed the formal gulf of perspective between Hegel and Freud. Hegel grasps God or λόγος in its transient moments as the shape which prefigures rationality outside the grasp of its self-consistent moments.

The difference between psychoanalysis and phenomenology[11]:

Phenomenology begins by with an epochȇ of objects given to consciousness as sense certainty, in the first stage of the dialectic. Psychoanalysis begins by putting this givenness of consciousness and its objects and the epochȇ of the conscious thinker into doubt. “…[T]he true situation of consciousness is discovered” to be the motivating principle Eros and its instincts which clamour for satisfaction through feelings and intuitions in the analytical movement of Psychoanalysis. But, the synthetic movement of the dialectic takes the absence of visibly motivating instincts in feeling and intuition to be a proof for reason’s right to “…self-determination”. The suspicion of psychoanalysis and phenomenology is directed towards entirely different aspects of conscious thought.

The Freudian conception of original repression is what the Hegelian dialectic cannot conceive of because that would be to make the first step of sense certainty impossible[12]. The moment which is not visible to phenomenology because it is “…unconscious…” and given is what psychoanalysis calls the “preconscious…”, or, “…an unconscious that is descriptive and not yet topographic”. This idea of a topographic barrier between preconscious thought and its object is the same absolute whole which phenomenology calls up in the affirmative or speculative moment of the dialectic. Psychoanalysis calls this need for affirmation repression because outside of the analytic method of free association this conditioning whole, or indivisible idea, is not available to consciousness.

A phenomenology of intentions cannot answer the psychoanalytic problematic of repression adequately because in addition to the assumed location of the whole in relation to its partial idea it cannot give us a complementary understanding of the energy which makes this movement possible. We must recall Freud’s notion of reality as a particular cathexis of the libido at this point. What, then, is this problem of energy and topography which cripples phenomenology against psychoanalysis?

II. i

“We see that in the inner world of appearances, the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but appearance, but not in the shape of a play of Forces, but rather that play of Forces in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement; in fact, the Understanding experiences only itself. Raised above perception, consciousness exhibits itself closed in a unity with the supersensible world through the mediating term of appearance, through which it gazes into this background [lying behind appearance]. The two extremes [of this syllogism], the one, of the pure inner world, the other, that of the inner being gazing into this pure inner world, have coincided just as they, qua extremes, have vanished, so too the middle term, as something other than these extremes, has also vanished. This curtain [of appearances] hanging before the inner world is therefore drawn away, and we have the inner being [the ‘I’] gazing into the inner world—the vision of the undifferentiated selfsame being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for which equally these moments are immediately not different—self-consciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen. But at the same time it is evident that we cannot without more ado go straightaway behind appearance. For this knowledge of what is the truth of appearance as ordinarily conceived, and of its inner being, is itself only a result of a complex movement whereby modes of consciousness ‘meaning’, perceiving, and the Understanding, vanish; and it will be equally evident that the cognition of what consciousness knows in knowing itself, requires a still more complex movement…”

—Hegel, Georg. W., F., § 165. Phenomenology of Spirit.

This is where Hegel comes pretty close to the Freudian idea of the topography of conscious experience and the interplay of preconscious impulses inside consciousness which impel it. But we must admit, here, Hegel does not get beyond the hurdle because he fails to see it as something independent of consciousness. This failure is evident when Hegel draws the perilous conclusion which results from a dialectic that affirms the absent whole of Understanding in the inability to get beyond the ‘I’ while also assuming sense certainty at the outset; the subject of the ‘I’ who affirms sense certainty is taken as given. Due to this failure to rectify a faulty premise, that the I is absent throughout the dialectic, except as the appearance of a whole which is integrated as the contingent and continually experiencing ‘I’, Hegel commits himself to an ethical turn devoid of a conception of the self which goes through the same stages of development.

“The universal unity into which the living immediate of individuality and substance withdraws is the soulless community which has ceased to be the substance—itself unconscious—of individuals, and in which they now have the value of selves and substances, possessing a separate being-for-self. The universal being thus split up into to a mere multiplicity of individuals, this lifeless Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as persons. What in the world of the ethical order was called the hidden divine law has in fact emerged from its inward state to actuality; in the former state the individual was actual, and counted as such, merely as a blood relation of the family. As this particular individual, he was the departed spirit void of a self; now, however, he has emerged from his unreal existence. Because the ethical substance is the only true Spirit, the individual therefore withdraws into the certainty of his own self; he is that substance as the positive universal, but his actuality consists in his being a negative universal self. We saw the powers and shapes of the ethical world swallowed up in the simple necessity of a blank Destiny. This power of the ethical world is the substance reflected into its simple unitary nature; but that being which is reflected back into itself, that very necessity of blank Destiny, is nothing else but the I of self-consciousness. This, therefore counts as a being that is in and for itself. To be so acknowledged is its substantiality. But it’s an abstract universality because its content is this rigid unyielding self, not the self that is dissolved in the substance”.

—Hegel, Georg, W. F. § 477- 478. Phenomenology of Spirit.

This is where psychoanalysis comes in to establish its deflationary project against the preconscious ‘I’ of phenomenology. After the iconoclasm of denying the transcendental a priori we are offered an autoimmune movement of an abstract idea of ‘I’ which cannot be made concrete without the archaeology of instincts that psychoanalysis can offer us. This archaeology of psychoanalysis, in turn, can only give us a concrete ‘I’ provisionally, and mediated by a commitment to the transcendental a posteriori which fails to arrive.

So, the Hegelian phenomenology begins and ends with the ‘I’ that goes through stages of consciousness tied to the perception of the object; it situates the ‘I’ behind appearances, and also before them, as an interpretant. Psychoanalysis questions how this ‘I’ came about in the first place; is it an energy which exists in the preconscious experience of objects, or a topography where the various parts of the always partial object project an ‘I’?

Let us leave hanging for the moment the specific meaning of contradiction, negation and sublation as Hegel means them in his discourse. It will be taken up more beneficially after we go through Lacan’s revisionism in respect to Freud and Hegel about the same question.

II. ii

Why the dialectic needs psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis needs the dialectic.

The shape of the idea in phenomenology is the same as that of meanings, intentions and aims of the ‘I’; psychoanalysis problematises this consciousness of the given I and its meanings, instincts and aims[13]. The psychoanalytic project of an archaeology of instincts is deflationary for the phenomenological reduction because it can conceive of a topography and an energetics which precedes the given ‘I’ of the dialectic. In fact, it treats meanings, aims and instincts as the propositions which in the course of time obtain an ‘I’, showing the phenomenological dialectic to have been mistaken at the outset.

The psychoanalytic project needs to develop a schema for the genesis of the ‘I’ from “[c]onflicts, formations of compromise, facts of distortion…” that can be inferred only against a hermeneutics and energetics “…of dream-work, displacement, condensation[14]…”. The Lacanian answer to this problem, treating the unconscious as a language, is correlative to but not eliminative of the problematic of energetics and hermeneutics posed by Freud. Language precedes the phenomenological account of consciousness precisely because the ‘I’ who witness the suspended epochȇ is taken to be present in whatever capacity the object of its observation is present. Also, it is absolutely misleading to compare the illogicality of dream symbolism, the timelessness of the id and the chaotic cauldron of impulses it holds with the formal and immanent structure of language[15] which is regardless of our awareness determined by laws of generative grammar, semantics, pragmatics and logic. The problem is deeper than Lacan can account for, in this analysis, because the laws of language again demand an energetic explanation which accounts for the predetermination of language by a formal system that is not already apparent to consciousness. At its strongest moment, Lacanian logocentrism can be seen as a step that prevents the reification of the economic view of cathexis propounded by Freud[16].

At its weakest moment it situates language as exterior to consciousness in a manner that is eerily Kantian. Is Lacanianism a Kantian transcendentalism without a transcendental subject?

II. iii

Lacan’s take on psychoanalytic topography can be seen in his formulation, indeed reinterpretation, of the Hegelian dialectic replying to the Kantian antinomies discussed above. We will eliminate the specific form of the problem which Lacan superimposes on the original in the same spirit as he performed this action upon § 165 in the Phenomenology of spirit. The relevance of this operation will become obvious as we proceed, it will offer us an overview of all of the reasons Lacan must be suspected of repeating Hegel’s mistake. It deserves citation at length where we take directly Lacan’s formulation as it calls into question the Hegelian subject. The subject who posits himself both forward and afterward as the subject of understanding without satisfying the problem raised by Kantian transcendentalism, and which Hegel also did not:

“Is it justifiable to integrate into the sophism the two suspended motions which have thus made their appearance? In order to decide, we must examine their role in the solution of the logical problem.

In fact, they take on this role only after the conclusion of the logical process, since the act they suspend evinces this very conclusion. One thus cannot object on that basis that they bring into the solution an element external to the logical process itself.
Their role, while crucial to the carrying-out [pratique] of the logical process, is not that of the experience in the verification of an hypothesis, but rather that of something intrinsic to logical ambiguity.

For at first sight the givens of the problem would seem to break down as follows:

(1) Three combinations of the subjects’ characteristic attributes are logically possible:…” the subject who poses the sense certainty of his experience is the one who affirms himself as the positer of the meaning of the first sense certainty; the subject who experiences sense certainty is different from the two who posit the sense certainty as consciousness and affirm the difference between sense certainty and absolute knowledge, respectively; or they are three different subjects. “Its answer derives from:

(2) the experiential data provided by the suspended motions, which amount to signals by which the subjects communicate with each other—in a mode determined by the conditions of the test” [the occulted and revised dialectic?]“—what they are forbidden to exchange in an intentional mode, namely what each sees of the other’s attributes…”.

“But this is not the case at all, as it would give the logical process a spatialized conception—the same spatialized conception that turns up every time the logical process appears to be erroneous, and that constitutes the only objection to the solubility of the problem.

It is precisely because my sophism will not tolerate a spatialized conception[17] that presents itself as an aporia for the forms of classical logic, whose “eternal” prestige reflects an infirmity which is nonetheless recognised as their own—namely, that these forms never give us anything that cannot already be seen all at once”[18].

The solution, boldly, proffered need not be quoted at length but only where it is indicative of the relative merit of the “sophism” in question. Here too, we will hazard a replacement of Lacan’s particulars with Hegel’s original, selfsame subject and his consciousness through the stages of the test.

“(1) Being opposite two…” putative subjects, “…one knows that one is…” the subject in question himself.

“We have here a logical exclusion which gives the movement its basis. The fact that this logical exclusion is anterior to the movement, that is, that we can assume it to be clear to the subject[s][19] with the givens of the problem…which forbid a combination involving three…” subjects.

Lacan now develops the specifics of the sophism to reach an ambiguity which he has inaugurated by implicating multiple subjects where there was only one.

“…(II) Were I the…” subject “…the two…” subjects “…that I see would waste no time realizing that they are…” not the subjects implicated in the test of consciousness knowing itself.

“…how can we measure the limit of this time whose meaning has been thus objectified? The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending. The objectivity of this time vacillates with its limit. Its meaning alone subsists, along with the form it engenders of subjects…” that are defined by their mutuality with Lacan’s sophism which posits three subjects where there is one, “…and whose action is suspended by mutual causality in a time which gives way due to [sous] the very return of the intuition that it has objectified. It is through this temporal modulation that, with the second phase of the logical movement, a path is blazed which leads to the following evidence:

(III) I hasten to declare myself …” the subject “…so that all these…” subjects, “…whom I consider in this way, do not precede me in recognizing themselves for what they are.

We have here the assertion about oneself through which the subject concludes the logical movement in the making of a judgement”. The very return of the movement of comprehending, before [sous] which the temporal instance that objectively sustains it has vacillated, continues on in the subject of reflection. This instance reemerges for him therein in the subjective mode of a time of lagging behind…” the subjects Lacan interposes with dexterity and sleight of hand “…in that very movement, logically presenting itself as the urgency of the moment of concluding[20]”.

After these lengthy substitutions, which fail to cite Hegel as their express interlocutor, we are offered Hegel’s own presupposition concretised as a new proof:

“…(1) A man knows what is not a man.

(2) Men recognize themselves among themselves as men;

(3) I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.

This movement provides the logical form of all “human” assimilations, precisely insofar as it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism, but it nonetheless reserves the essential determination of the “I”[21]. ”

Now, let’s re-read the above excursus in light of the Hegelian version, again:

“We see that in the inner world of appearances, the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but appearance, but not in the shape of a play of Forces, but rather that play of Forces in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement; in fact, the Understanding experiences only itself. Raised above perception, consciousness exhibits itself closed in a unity with the supersensible world through the mediating term of appearance, through which it gazes into this background [lying behind appearance]. The two extremes [of this syllogism], the one, of the pure inner world, the other, that of the inner being gazing into this pure inner world, have coincided just as they, qua extremes, have vanished, so too the middle term, as something other than these extremes, has also vanished. This curtain [of appearances] hanging before the inner world is therefore drawn away, and we have the inner being [the ‘I’] gazing into the inner world—the vision of the undifferentiated selfsame being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for which equally these moments are immediately not different—self-consciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen. But at the same time it is evident that we cannot without more ado go straightaway behind appearance. For this knowledge of what is the truth of appearance as ordinarily conceived, and of its inner being, is itself only a result of a complex movement whereby modes of consciousness ‘meaning’, perceiving, and the Understanding, vanish; and it will be equally evident that the cognition of what consciousness knows in knowing itself, requires a still more complex movement…”

—Hegel, Georg. W., F., § 165. Phenomenology of Spirit.

Attentive readers will quickly realise that the conclusions derived in the Lacanian version are the same as that of Hegel. That one’s “…cognition of what consciousness knows in knowing itself…” requires a still greater movement that can account for the whole subject which precedes the cognition of parts belonging to a whole, and which Freudianism truly problematises.

Lacan fails to escape the Hegelian mistake of implicating the subject wholly in his instinctual cognition of immediate objects; consequently the dialectic suffers the same fate as does the Lacanian psychoanalytic superimposition. This movement glosses over the transcendental subject who must be implicated partially in his partial cognitions of parts, and thereby become less than transcendental. Hegel and Lacan fall into Kantian transcendentalism without remainder. It cannot be emphasised more vehemently that what Jacques Lacan calls the “…imaginary spatiotemporal complex…[22]” that allows desire to act in a specific way in response to a cognition is precisely the suspended epochȇ of the Kantian transcendental intuition. This intuition which is nevertheless the same transcendental subject of Hegel is also the constitutive form of mental objects, and then they, are “…the subjective forms of the unity of understanding[23]”

Read the next part here :      http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/why-hegel-is-not-freud-is-not-lacan-pt-2/

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[1] Ricoeur, Paul. 2008, p. 324.

[2] Ibid. p. 326.

[3] Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion, Ch. 2.

[4] Irving Kristol, “God and the Psychoanalysts: Can Freud and Religion Be Reconciled?” Commentary Magazine November 1949 .  February 28, 2013.

[5] Ricoeur, Paul. 2008, p. 268.

[6] Beiser, Frederick. 2005, p. 149.

[7] Kant, Immanuel, in his Critique of Pure Reason, says that representations of objects can only be transcendentally intuited as objects since they are not given to the sensory experiences that constitute empirical concepts about them. The constitutive form of these mental objects, then, are “…the subjective forms of the unity of understanding” (p. 230).

[8] Beiser, Frederick. 2005. P. 54- 55.

[9] Ibid. p. 163- 165.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ricoeur, Paul. 2008, p. 390- 418.

[12] Ibid. p. 392.

[13] Ricoeur, Paul. 2008. p. 393.

[14] Ibid. p. 394.

[15] Ricoeur, Paul. 2008. p. 396- 97.

[16] Ibid.

[17] My emphasis.

[18] Lacan, Jacques. Trans. Fink, Bruce. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. §202.

[19] My emphasis.

[20] Ibid. Lacan, Jacques. §204- 206.

[21] Ibid. §206- 213

[22] Ibid. §188, p. 153

[23] Ibid. Kant, Immanuel. p. 230.