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Global Sharing in Challenging Times
• XVIII World IFTA Congress
• Buenos Aires, Argentina • Friday, 19 March 2010• 8:30 – 10:00 am
Philosophy & Family Therapy
Vincenzo Di Nicola
• Psychologist, Child Psychiatrist, Relational therapist
Université de Montréal
• Doctoral candidate European Graduate School
Key words
• Philosophy and family therapy
• Phenomenology and existential psychiatry
• Ethics and biopolitics
Pedagogical objectives
1. To identify the history of the relationship between family therapy and philosophy.
Pedagogical objectives
2. To offer an overview of areas of mutual interest to both family therapy and
philosophy, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and definitions of the person, identity and what we consider as essentially human qualities.
Pedagogical objectives
3. To review three areas in more detail: (a) intersubjectivity (b) ethics and (c) biopolitics.
Areas of mutual interest
• Philosophy of mind• Philosophy of science • Philosophy of technology• Phenomenology (as a science of the person
and hence a foundation study for psychiatry)• Philosophy as a tool for social exploration
(identity, the definition of the person)• Ethics and biopolitics
Other uses of philosophy
• Clinical philosophy … Consolation as intervention
• Applied philosophy … Bio-ethics Research ethics Professional ethics
What is philosophy?
• Everything is like something, what is this like?
--Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (1982) quoting English novelist E.M. Forster
What is philosophy?
• The purpose of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)
What is philosophy?
• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
--G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820)
What is philosophy?
• One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it...
• When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old.
• By philosophy’s gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.
• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
—G.W.F. Hegel, “Preface,” Philosophy of Right (1820)
What is philosophy?
• Understanding, clarification, edification, reflection, groundwork, foundations …
• Critical theory, deconstruction
What is philosophy?
Two kinds of philosophers …
• Those who build up theories and explanations, carefully, brick by brick --Aristotle, Aquinas, William James, Freud
• Those who tear them down, critically … brick by brick or with a wrecker’s ball--Luther, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault
What is family therapy?
• This can be imagined as a philosophical question
• People often invoke philosophical considerations in their definition of family theray …
What is psychiatry?
• Karl Jaspers … phenomenological psychiatry
• R.D. Laing … existential psychiatry
• Salvador Minuchin … structural family therapy
• Mara Selvini Palazzoli … systemic family therapy
• Samuel Guze … Why Psychiatry is a Branch of Medicine
• Robert Spitzer … architect of DSM … descriptive nosography, atheoretical
What are they?
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Neurologist & neuropathologist
• Founder of psychoanalysis
• Philosopher
What are they?
• Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
• Natural scientist• Genetic epistemology• Philosophy: Jürgen Habermas
What are they?
• Michel Foucault(1926-1984)
• Psychologist• Philosopher:
Structuralism & post-structuralism
• Historian • Critic
Philosophical deconstruction
Alternatives for describing families and family phenomena …
• Relationships, attachment• Interpersonal patterns• Myths, rules, rituals• Family as a structure, system• Family life as a text (to be edited)• The family as a storying culture
Philosophical deconstruction
Why do so many terms for negative psychosocial factors come from hydraulics and materials sciences ?
• Stress• (Mental) fatigue• Tension• Resistance
Philosophical deconstruction
And of course, so do the positive factors …
• Resilience• Bouyancy• Rebound
Philosophical deconstruction
What do we mean by development ?
• Growth (Classical models, Dante)• Evolution
--Convergence, teleology (Teilhard de Chardin)
• Ages & stages (Paediatrics)• IQ as a model (Binet, Dalton)• Unfolding
--Genetic epistemology (Piaget, Kohlberg)
Philosophical deconstruction
Explanatory models are usually based on metaphors
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Cancer Ward (1968)
• Susan Sontag (1933-2004) Illness as Metaphor (1978) Aids and Its Metaphors (1988)
Phenomenology and existential psychiatry
• Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)
• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)
• Karl Jaspers (1883-1959)
• PhenomenologicalPsychiatrist
• General Psychopathology
Phenomenology and existential psychiatry
Phenomenology and existential psychiatry
• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)
• Existential analysis• The Case of Ellen West• with many rereadings
(R.D. Laing, Sal Minuchin)
Phenomenology and existential psychiatry
• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)
• Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
• Existential philosophy and psychiatry
• Pioneer in family studies• Critical psychiatry
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1927, Paris)
• French philosopher • Wrote on Lacanian psychoanalysis• The Inoperative Community (1982)• Being Singular Plural (2000)
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community (1982)
• Traces the influence of the notion of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought.
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community (1982)
• Redefines community, asking what can it be if it is reduced neither to a collection of separate individuals, nor to a hypostasized communal substance, e.g., fascism.
• Hypostatic abstraction: X = Y, X has Y-ness
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community (1982)
• "The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader) ... necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being."
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy Being Singular Plural (2000)
• How we can speak of a plurality of a "we" without making the "we" a singular identity?
• There is no being without "being-with" • "I" does not come before "we" (i.e., Dasein
does not precede Mitsein)• There is no existence without co-existence
Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy Being Singular Plural (2000)
• “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.”
Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Ethics as first philosophy
• Philosophy as the wisdom of love (as opposed to love of wisdom)
• The face-to-face
Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Buber vs Levinas on the face-to-face
• Buber: symmetrical co-presence• Levinas: relation with the other is inherently
asymmetrical
Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Ethics is not morality• Ethics marks the primary situation of the face-
to-face• Morality comes later as a set of rules
Biopolitics
• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942) Italian philosopher
• Key notions:
• Homo sacer/Sacred Man (1998)• Stato di eccezione/State of Exception
(2005)
Biopolitics
• Giorgio Agamben The Coming Community (1993)
• describes the nature of “whatever singularity”
• that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”
Biopolitics
• Key notions: • Biopolitics • Adopted from Foucault (a technology of
power, biopower)
• Biós (a form of life, culture) vs Zōē (mere life, nature)• Biopolitics is the reduction of others to
bare life
Biopolitics
• The ban is the original political relation (the state of exception, zone of indistinction)
• Sovereign power produces bare life (as threshold between zōē and biós)
• The camp is the new biopolitical paradigm of the West
Conclusion
• The history of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis are intimately intertwined with philosophical questions
• Family therapy as a system of thought shares that heritage
Conclusion
• Understanding this history will help us avoid reductive modes of thought
• Contemporary psychology & psychiatry accept the notion of paradigms as evolution and progress
Conclusion
• A full account of mind cannot be provided by an understanding of brain
• No matter how sophisticated the argument for biological psychiatry becomes (cf. Eric Kandel), it will not speak to mind, fully understood.
Conclusion
• Leon Eisenberg put the question as brainlessness vs mindlessness
• or psychoanalysis without brain vs biological psychiatry without mind
Conclusion
• I expand the question to include:
• Mind (the science of mental life)• Body (biological psychiatry,
neurosciences)• Heart (phenomenology, empathy)• Soul (meaning, transcendence)
Conclusion
• The questions for family therapy:
• A model of mind as relational• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity• Appropriating the common
Conclusion
• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity
Our culture is at war with subjectivity
Technopoly is the surrender of culture to technology (Neil Postman)
Conclusion
• Relational ethics
Ethics as therapy (guiding how it is conducted, what its goals are, how it is appreciated)
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