Gardner Psa and the Distinction

8/3/2019 Gardner Psa and the Distinction

1/25

This article was downloaded by: [Deakin University Library]On: 03 February 2012, At: 03:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Philosophical Explorations: AnInternational Journal for the

Philosophy of Mind and ActionPublication details, including instructions for authors and

subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpex20

Psychoanalysis and the personal/

subpersonal distinction

Sebastian Gardnerab

aLecturer in Philosophy, University College London

bLecturer in Philosophy, Birkbeck College London E-mail:

Available online: 28 Jun 2007

To cite this article: Sebastian Gardner (2000): Psychoanalysis and the personal/subpersonal

distinction, Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and

Action, 3:1, 96-119

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869790008520983

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-

conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. Theaccuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independentlyverified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions,

claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever causedarising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of thismaterial.
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpex20http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869790008520983http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpex20


2/25

Psychoanalysis a n d th ePersonal/Sub-PersonalDistinction

Sebastian Gardner

A b s t r a c t * ' : . - . ' . . . . ' . . ' ' , "

This paper attempts in the first instance to clarify theapplication of the personal/sub-personal distinctionto psychoanalysis and to indicate how this issue isrelated to that of psychoanalysis" epistemology. It isargued that psychoanalysis may be rega rded e itheras a fo rm o f personal psychology, or as a form o fjointly personal and sub-personal psychology, but notas a form of sub-personal psychology. It is furtherargued that psychoanalysis indicates a prob lem w iththe personal/sub-personal distinction itself as under-stood by Dennett A revised view of the dist inction,which is argued to reflect its true metaphysicalsignificance, is p ro po se d. . . , . ' . .

The aim of this paper is to attemptto clarify the application of thepersonal/sub-personal distinctionto psychoanalysis. W hat I will sayinvolves three claims (corre-sponding to the three sections ofthe paper). The first is that the dis-tinction is absolutely central to theunderstanding of psychoanalysisand directly related to the ques-tion of psychoanalysis' legitima-tion. This I will try to show bylooking at selected writings onpsychoanalysis. Second, 1 willclaim that if we attempt to apply... the distinction as formulated byDennett to psychoanalysis, then

we m ay regard psychoanalysis either as a form of personal psychology, or as a form ofmixed (jointly personal and sub-personal) psychology. The option ruled out is thatpsychoanalysis is a form of sub-personal psychology Consequently there is a limit tothe possible integration of psychoanalysis with scientific psychology, to the ex tent thatthe latter takes a sub-personal form. My third claim is that psychoanalysis points to acomplication in the personal/sub-personal distinction itself, and that this is a furtherpart of the explanation of the distinctions problematic application to psychoanalysis.In this context I will claim that the traditional way of understand ing the personal/sub-personal distinction, i.e. that of Denne tt, obscures the true, metaphysical issue whichunderlies argum ents about the propriety of sub-personal psychology, and I will pro-pose an alternative view of the distinction.

I.The Personal/Sub-Personal Distinction at W o rk in the Understandingof PsychoanalysisBefore ad dressing directly the que stion of the correct app lication of the perso nal-/sub-personal distinction to psychoanalysis, I want to indicate how deeply the96 Philosophical Explo rations N r I January 200 0 96-11 9

Downloadedby[DeakinUniversityLibrary]at03:1903Febru

ary2012


3/25

" " Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction ^ i

different views and interpretations of psychoanalysis that may be found arebound up with it, most often in ways that are not made explicit, and to show howimportant this is in directing the verdicts that get passed on psychoanalysis.Pretty much anything that is said about psychoanalysis in general has some or

other implications to be traced for whe ther psychoanalysis is a personal or sub-person al psychology, so in a sense one might start anywhere. But the following setof four quotations provides a good illustration of the point I wish to establish inthis section, namely that psych oanalysis is ambiguous as regards its relation to thepersonal/sub-personal distinction, and that this fact is in some way that it ishard to get into focus - at the heart of the theory.The first quotation comes from Foucault's The Order of Things , in which heattempts to chart successive models of knowledge (what he calls epistemes)inintellectual history. The chapter in question is concerned with the transition fromwhat Foucault calls Classical thought to modern thought, an episode marked on

his account by the invention or constitution of man in a new sense:It seems obvious that, from the moment when man first constituted himself as aposi-tive figure in the field of knowledge, the old privilege of reflexive knowledge, ofthought thinking itself, could not but disappear; but that it became possible, by thisvery fact, for an objective form of thought to investigate man in his entirety - at therisk of discovering what could never be reached by his reflection or even by his con-sciousness: dim mechanisms, faceless determinations, a whole landscape of shadowthat has been termed, directly or indirectly, the unconscious. For is not the uncon-scious what necessarily yields itself up to the scientific thought manapplied tohimselfwhen he ceases to conceive of himself in the form of reflection? [...] The unthought(whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shriveled-up nature or a strati-fied history; it is, in relation to man, the Other [...] This obscure space so readily inter-preted as an abyssal region in man's nature, or as a uniquely impregnable fortress inhis history, is linked to him in an entirely different way; it is both exterior to him andindispensable to him.1

Foucault's idea is that as soon as man makes an empirical object of himself('a positive figure in the field of knowledge'), the self is reconceived in a mannerincompatible w ith the historically earlier conc eption of it as something which canbe adequately grasped in reflective self-consciousness. Foucault makes clear inwhat follows this quotation that what he here identifies as man's Other, theunconscious, is by no means restricted to the Freudian unconscious, which hegroups alongside a number of other notions, among which are numbered Hegel'sFor-itself, Schopenhauer's unconsciou s, and implicit consciousness in Husserl.

Now whatever one makes of this whether these notions really do belongtogether at some level of abstraction, and whether they really are correlated with

1 Foucault (1974), p. 326. Another example, from the same philosophical world: 'The implicit yetcrucial intuition of psychoanalysis, the reason for the immense echo it evoked, despite its insuf-ficient conceptual apparatus, is that [...] the unconscious assures man of a hold on his most inti-mate being: theunconscious is thenam e of life. In this regard, Freud is placed directly in the trainof Schopenhauer and Nietzsche'; Henry (1993), pp. 285-6.

97

Downl

oadedby[DeakinUniversityLibrary]at03:1903Febru

ary2012


4/25

^ ^ S eb a st ia n Gardner ^ ^

the emergence of the object 'man' - it is clear that Foucault takes psychoanaly-sis to be a theory tha t op erates at the p ersonal level. If psychoanalysis were a th eo-ry of the sub-personal, it could not possibly confront man with his 'Other', orimpact upo n the reflective conception of the self - any mo re than d iscoveringthat one h as a nervous system can do so. Foucault thinks it obvious that psycho-analysis belongs in intellectual history to the same family of notions as Schopen-hauer's will.

The interp retation of psychoanalysis as operating at the perso nal level is againabsolutely clear in Lacan: 'Freud's discovery is that of the field of the effects, inthe nature of man, produced by his relation to the symbolic order. To ignore thissymbolic order is to condemn the discovery to oblivion.'2 The symbolic order towh ich Lacan refers is that of language, an d th e relation to language that he h as inmind is the relation that subjects enjoy in speech (rather than any Chomskyansub-personal, tacit-knowledge relation to grammar); so Lacan is clearly readingpsychoanalysis as a personal level theory. And it is only because Lacan readspsychoanalysis in this light that he can say the same sort of things abou t it as Fou-cault does - that the discovery of the unconsciou s impa cts on (decenters) theCartesian cogito, that Freud's conception of the subject is betrayed by ego psy-chology, and so on.

The next quotation comes from Roger Scruton:If we dismiss the metaphor, and say that the 'ego* is not a kind of person but simply a'region' of mental space, we lose all reason for thinking that the 'unconscious' forcesare really mental. Why not say, now, that they are forces which influence the mentalrealm without themselves belonging to it? In particular, why assume (as Freudassumes) that they retain, in their 'unconscious' form, the peculiar intentionality of themental? Only if they do so, can the Freudian explanation illuminate what it purportsto explain; for the influence of the unconscious is (supposedly) the influence of anintentional content. And yet there are no grounds for thinking that a content can beretained in the lower regions. Given the evident fact that neither I nor my 'id' can con-fess to an unconscious state it is hard to see how such an intentional content could bereliably assigned.3

Sermon's claim is that the ego can indeed be the subject of genuinely mentalpredicates so long as the term has the status of a mere personification, but thatwh en we strip out the metaph or - which of course we need to do at some pointin expositing the theory - the ego ceases to be a logically prop er subject of men -tal predicates and reduces to a force which influences the mental realm withoutbelonging to it. This is because, according to Scruton, there cannot be such athing as unconscious intentional content. But of course the theory needs the egoto have intentional content. Therefore the theory is scuppered.Scruton does not make explicit what construction he wishes to put on

psychoanalysis, nor w hat kind of a truth it is supposed to be, that intentional con-

2 Lacan (197 7), p. 64.3 Scruton (1986), p. 198.

98


ary2012


5/25

" " Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction ^ ^

tent is restricted to consciousness; it is unclear whether he holds that the onlymental contents there can be are ones that we can 'confess', i.e. linguisticallyavow, or whether the problem is instead that uncon scious co ntent cannot b e reli-ab l y assigned. But at any rate, we have in Scruton a clear example of one whothinks that personal psychology is the only possible kind of psychology, andfur thermore that the only kind of states that personal psychology can traffic in areconscious and linguistically avowable; from which he infers that psychoanalysisis ill-conceived (it is conceived as personal but contradicts one of the conditionsof personal psychology). Which shows that the construal of psychoanalysis aspersonal is not confined to those like Lacan who take a positive view of Freud.So far, then, we have had interpretations that more or less straightforwardlyfix psychoanalysis at the personal level. It will be agreed that this is not a pecu-liarity of any particular school of philoso phy - that it is not pecu liar to recentFrench philosophy is shown by Scruton - but rather the most natural way of

understanding psychoanalysis. The same conception of psychoanalysis as per-sonal psychology is seen if one looks at the hermeneutic tradition represented byHabermas,4 at Wittgenstein's remarks on Freud,5 and at analytic philosophy allthe way down from the earliest who worried about the relation of psychoanalyticto causal and practical reason explanation, to contemporaries like Richard Woll-heim, Donald Davidson, James Hopkins, Jonathan Lear and Marcia Cavell.6 Adocumentation of the influence of psychoanalysis from the point of view of thehistory of ideas would show that the humanities have had no scruples aboutassimilating Freud's ideas ,7 whereas the hard sciences, and the medical establish-ment, have tended not to take psychoanalysis seriously precisely because itseemed to them to stick closely to the level of personal psychology and to beremo te from the brain and so-called behav ioural sciences. So it can safely be saidthat psychoanalytic theory allows itself to be experienced as a theory at the per-sonal level.The next two writers, however, show that this is not necessarily, or straight-forwardly, the right view, and begin to bring out the pressures that exist to inter-pret psychoanalysis as a sub-personal psychology.Sartre's position on Freud is very similar to that of Scruton, but the argumenthe gives is more complex. Sartre grants for the sake of argument that there may

be m ental structures which are unconscious and yet possess intentional co ntent.The problem then comes, for Sartre, when the theory gets them to interact. Thevarious systems into which Freud breaks up the mind cannot of course be inde-pendent of one another: there must be, as Sartre puts it, 'communication'4 Habermas (1971).5 Wittgenstein (1978).6 See Wollheim (1984) and (1991), Davidson (1982), Hopk ins (1988) and (1992), Lear (1990 ),

Cavell (1993), and Gardner (19 93).7 The approach to Freud which puts him at the centre of cultural history is found in the num er-

ous literary discussions of the significance of psychoanalysis, e.g. those of Thomas Mann, W H.Auden and Lionel Trilling; in studies that trace the Freudian unconscious back to romanticismand earlier, such as Whyte (1979) and Ellenberger (1970); and in the explicit attempts to reclaimFreud for humanism of Bettelheim (1982), Rieff (1979) and others. One of the most vigorousattempts to expunge any trace of non-personal elements from psychoanalysis is that of Schafer(1976); see also the Wittgenstein-influenced writings of Dilman, e.g. (1984).

99

Downl


ary2012


6/25

^ ^ Sebastian Gardner ^ ^

between them if the psychoanalytic model is to explain phenomena like resis-tance. But Sartre claims that if the explanation of (for example) resistance is fullyand explicitly set out, then we find that all that has been done is to relocate thefacts of the person's behaviour that were already given to us prior to psycho-analytic redescription, at the level of one or other of these mental systems (thepseudo-scientific terminology of psychoanalysis, Sartre thinks, helps to disguisethis fact). The poin t that Sartre is ma king is strongly reminiscent of the objectionput by Locke to faculty psychology:8 just as the postulation of a faculty of will orunderstanding is according to Locke explanatorily vacuous, so too according toSartre is the postulation of a censor mechanism or sub-personal system whichscreens contents from consciousness. In his own w ords:

It is a fair question to ask [in the case of an analysand who manifests resistance] whatpart of himself can thus resist [...] The only level on which we can locate the refusal ofthe subject is that of the censor. It alone can comprehend the questions or revelationsof the psychoanalyst as approaching more or less near to the real drives which it strivesto repress - it alone because it alone knows what it is repressing [...] how could thecensor discern the impulses needing to be repressed without being conscious of dis-cerning them? [...] These various operations in their tu rn imply that the censor is con-scious (of) itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must bethe consciousness (of) being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely inorder not to be conscious o fit [...] Psychoanalysis has not gained anything for us since inorder to overcome bad faith, it has established between the unconscious and con-sciousness an autonomous consciousness in bad faith. The effort to establish a veri-table duality and even a trinity (Es, Ich, Uberich expressing themselves through the cen-sor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology.9

On Sartre's diagnosis, then, psychoanalysis is founded on a systematic confusionof the personal and sub-personal levels. His point is that psychoanalysis is tryingto have it both ways. It is premised on a conceptual move from the level of theperson as a whole to the sub-personal level, but it ends up having to re-importthe personal level at the sub-personal, in order to get all the sub-personal bits todo w hat they are supposed to do. It is an unsuccessful endeavour to aban don thepersonal level for the sub-personal.The fourth quotation comes from a discussion of the problem of self-con-sciousness by Ernst Tugendhat. Tugendhat offers a more nuanced and tentativeview of the topic than the authors quoted earlier:

8 Locke ([1670] 1975), bk. II, ch . 21, 17-18: 'For if it be reasonable to suppose and talk of Fa -cult ies , as distinct Beings, that can act, (as we do, when we say that the Will orders, and the Willis free,) 'tis fit that w e shou ld m ake a speaking Facul ty , and a walking Facul ty , and a dancing Fa -cul ty , by wh ich tho se Actions are prod uced , wh ich are but several Modes of Motion; as well as wemake the Will an d Understanding to be Faculties, by which the Actions of Chusin g and Perceivingare produced, which are but several Modes of Thinking: And we may as properly say, that 'thisthe singing Faculty sings, and the dancing Facul ty dances; as that the Will chuses, or that theUnderstanding conceives [...] This way of talking, nevertheless, has prevailed, and, as I guess,produced great confusion [...]'.

9 Sartre (19 58), pp . 51 -4. Thalberg (198 2) alleges similar absurdities in psychoanalysis.

100

Downl

oadedby[DeakinUniversityLibrary]at03:1903February2012


7/25

Psychoanalysis an d thePersonallSub-Personal Distinction

[... ] it isstriking that Freud notonly does notrefer to theordinary way of talking aboutthe T but also does noteven speak of a relation of oneself to oneself. The ego' is anobjective power within the psychical reality, just like the 'id' and the 'superego'; theonly difference is that incontrast to thelatter it is an organisation' andhas a syntheticfunction [...] Since Freud grasps not only (like Plato) sensuality andnormative con-sciousness butalso what hecalls the ego as an objective power, the ego is reduced toan anonymous organization with anintegrative function. In so doing hediscards pre-cisely that aspect which was thebasis for the orientation toward theexpression I: therelation of oneself tooneself. Since Freud simply left this aspect out of consideration,he avoided the structural absurdities that result ifone is intent upon understanding therelation of oneself tooneself in accordance with the traditional model of the subject-object relation. Hence, Freud's own theory of the ego has the advantage of not con-taining absurdities, and it hasonly the disadvantage that it is in no sense a theory ofthe relation ofoneself to oneself. But such a theory would have tofollow from his ownassumptions assoon as oneattempted to translate the substantives id, ego, and super-eg o into terms that are behaviourally relevant, that is, as soon as one specifies themodes ofbeing of the person forwhich thesubstantives stand. In thecase of the termego this would mean examining the relation of the person to himself, andwithout aconcept of the relationship of oneself tooneself it does not appear possible tounder-stand something like self-determination.10

This passage locates a puzzle. Unlike Foucault and everyone else who construespsychoanalysis as a straightforwardly persona l psychology, Tugendhat thin ks thatit is not at all obvious that Freud should be construed as aiming to produce atheory pitched at the personal level. As Tugendhat notes, Freud conspicuouslyleaves out of consideration the phenomena of self-consciousness and self-deter-mination; there is on Freud's map of the psyche only something that correspondsvery loosely to self-consciousness, viz. the egowith respect to its integrative func-tion. Andyet, asTugendhat indicates, psychoanalytic theory has an interest in thephenomenon of self-consciousness or self-determination: the data that providethe theory's primary explananda are structured by it, and clinical practice itselfaims at restoring a degree of autonomy.

One might add the following. Tugendhat is surely right to think that there issomething odd about the idea that psychoanalysis can simply dispense with thewhole notion of self-relation, and side-step all the issues which it raises. Forexample, the family of concepts of Freud's which includes the splitting of the egoand disavowal - concepts which centre on the notion of ownership of mentalcontents and a corresponding alienation from them - seem to refer directly tothe standpoint of the T and the relation of oneself to oneself. Similarly, it is notclear tha t one can make real sense of Kleinian notions like identification, projec-tive iden tification and so on, unless one construes the subject that phantasises ashaving at least a rudimentary grasp of itself as self-determining. Again, it is astriking thing about Winnicott's development of psychoanalysis that it seems tobroach the psychological plane at which the senseof self is constituted (or want-ing). There is, then, a host of psychoanalytic themes and concepts that seem to10 Tugendhat (1986), pp. 131-2.

101


ary2012


8/25

Sebastian Gardner " -

require the theory to be (at least in part) personal. If so, it follows, as Tugendhatsays, that we need to understand the relation between the ego and the person,something that Freud himself does not supply, and to ask if the concept of theego is consistent with an adequate conceptualisation of self-consciousness andself-determination.At this point one might start on the task suggested by Tugendhat, of attempt-ing to square psychoanalytic theory with metaphysical features of persons. Alter-natively, wh at one migh t think it appro priate to do - either because one findsthis prospect daunting, or because one is impressed by Sartre's argument, or forother reasons (e.g. scepticism regarding the notions of wish and phantasy) in thelight of wh ich psychoanalysis may be considered shaky - is to have psy cho -analytic theory cu t itself loose from the personal level altogether; in effect, have itdo just what on Dennetts account scientific psychology necessarily does. Toquote one proponent of this view, Michael Moore:

Freud's metapsychology and its theoretical unconscious is caught in a dilemma: thementalistic vocabulary of persons in terms of which clinicians prompt patients torecapture unconscious wishes and so on is not a vocabulary in which it makes senseto construct a deep theory such as the metapsychology purports to be [...] themetapsychology should be seen as an exercise in homuncular functionalism [...] Toconstrue the metapsychology as an exercise in homuncular functionalism provides aplausible enough insulation of the theory from any metaphysical embarrassment.11

Of course, on this account the practice of psychoanalysis remains located at theperson al level - the analyst does not act on the analysand like a surgeon re-mov ing a gall blad der - bu t, as Moore insists, it does not follow that the theo rymu st also be so.Now arguably there would be little motivation for this exercise if one did notthink that psychoanalysis had reasonably good prospects as a sub-personal psy-chology, but this is something that many have thought. These commentatorsinclude those who try to reconstruct psychoanalytic theory in terms of conceptsand methods drawn from the natural sciences, such as Merton Gill and KarlPribram, J. R. Maze, Emmanuel Peterfreund, and David Rapaport.12

Alternatively one might hold that, irrespective of the question of psycho-analysis' legitimation, the historical evidence shows it to be, in intention, pre-cisely a form of sub-personal psychology. This is the position of Patricia Kitcher,whose recent book Freud's D r ea m represents Freud's theoretical development asan attem pt - albeit a prem ature and unsuccessful one - to fulfil the am bitionof contemporary cognitive science to develop a 'complete interdisciplinary sci-ence of the mind'. Kitcher provides detailed support for this claim, situatingFreud's ideas systematically in the context of the history of science.13

11 Moore (1988), pp . 148, 154, 156.12 See Gill and Pribram (19 83), Maze (1983), ch. 6, Peterfreund (197 1), and Rapapo rt (1960) and(1967). Erdelyi (1985) reworks Freud's theories in contemporary cognitive-psychological terms.Glymour (199 1) defends Freud's anticipation of mo dern computationalism.

13 Kitcher (1992). Kitcher's orientation towards the history of science is found also in Sulloway's ear-lier (1979).

102

Downl


ary2012


9/25

^^ Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction ^^

On the evidence of this brief survey, psychoanalysis allows itself to be under-stood readily as either a personal or a sub-personal psychology. The spectrumruns from those who take it as self-evident that psychoanalysis is located on thepersonal plane (Foucault, Lacan, Scruton) to those who with equal confidenceaffirm its sub-personality (Gill et al, Kitcher). In between are those w ho regard itsposition on the personal/sub-persona l line as equivocal - as in some way con-fused, theoretically under-clarified, or requiring revision (Sartre, Tugendhat,Moore). Evidently, this diversity of views is no accident: psychoanalytic theoryappears to be systematically ambiguous, a kind of theoretical duck-rabbit. It ishard to think of another psychology that finds itself in anything like the sameposition.The same conclusion can be reached by looking directly at particular psycho-analytic concepts. Th e ego and repression provide good exam ples. Freud gives anextended account of repression in terms of what he calls word- and thing-pre-

sentations, cathexes and suchlike,14 strongly suggesting that the c oncept is a sub -personal one. This seems the most obvious way of doing justice to its differencefrom the mere suppression or putting-out-of-mind of an unwelcome thought. (Itis noteworthy that attempts to translate Freudian theory into computationalterms typically focus on repression.15 ) Yet repression also allows itself to beunderstood as 'a kind of intentional action':16 Freud himself describes it as 'som e-thing between flight and condemnation'.17 A similar ambiguity (to whichScruton, Sartre and Tugendhat all draw attention) surrounds the concept of theego. On the one hand, talk of the ego appears to be Freud's way of referring tothe person as a whole in con tradistinction to any of their parts (id, superego), an dthus an approximation to the T; on the other hand, the ego has the logicalappearance of a part like any other, distinguished only by its laws of operation.This ambiguity is well-known and institutionalised in the difference of meaningthat the term has for Kleinians (or Lacanians) and ego-psychologists. 18

Also evident is the importance of the personal/sub-personal issue for psycho-analytic theory's legitimation. From the standpoint of some who maintain theexclusive validity of personal psychology, psychoanalysis is condemned eitherbecause it is assumed to be personal but ill-formed (Scruton) or because it isregarded as aiming at sub-personality (Sartre). From the standpoint of those whofavour sub-person al theorising, it has been held that a sub-person al reading givespsychoanalysis its best shot at legitimation (Moore, Gill et al, Kitcher), thoughopinion s the n divide as to how close it gets. Directly opposed to both is the posi-tion of those who regard psychoanalysis as achieving insights into the nature ofhuman subjectivity which belong to the human rather than natural sciences, per-haps to philosophy itself (Foucault, Lacan). It is no exaggeration to say that thedebates concerning personal versus sub-personal psychology which have oc-cupied recent philosophy of mind were run through earlier, though not under

14 See 'Repression' and 'The unconscious' in Freud (195 3-74), vol. 14, pp. 141-68 and 159-215.15 E.g. Boden (19 77) .16 McGinn (1979), p. 37.17 Freud (1953-74), vol. 14, p. 141 .18 Indicating some of the concept's ambiguities, see the entry 'Ego' in Laplanche and Pontalis

(1983), pp. 130-43.103


ary2012


10/25

Sebastian Gardner ""

that nam e and often w ith a want of explicitness, in the context of psychoanalysis.The personal/sub-personal ambiguity of psychoanalysis is neglected in muchof its philosophical scrutiny. Epistemological evaluation of psychoanalysis hasbeen predominantly in terms set by the philosophy of science, the central ques-tion being, What conception of scientificity, if any, does psychoanalysis satisfy?Those who have addressed this question (such as Karl Popper and Adolf Griin-baum 1?) have in the main not asked what kind of psychology psychoanalysis isoffering. However, once it is recognised that the epistemology of personal andsub-personal psychology need not be the same, it becomes clear that the episte-mological evaluation of psychoanalysis cannot be independent of the questionwhether psychoanalysis is a personal or sub-personal psychology. Nor, converse-ly, can the latter issue be decided independently of the former, so long as it isaccepted that Freudian theory, like any other problematic intellectual edifice,deserves charitable treatment (i.e. ought to be interpreted in a way that does as

much as possible within the bounds of exegetical plausibility to advance itsclaims to knowledge). Psychoanalysis thus provides a case where it is necessaryto co-determine the theory's logical nature and epistemological standing.Matters are in consequence fairly complicated. In order to determine fullyhow the personal/sub-personal distinction applies to psychoanalysis, a settledview of the respective claims of personal and sub-personal psychology would beneed ed; the ex planatory claims of psychoanalysis canno t be relied on to hold con-stant while different views of its theoretical nature are considered, both becauseto take a particular view of psychoanalysis' personal or sub-personal character isto com mit it to a particular epistemological source , and because general positionson the merits of personal and sub-personal psychology have direct implicationsfor the legitimation of psychoanalysis.

2. Psychoana lysis in th e Light of th e Personal/Sub-Personal DistinctionW ith the problem set out, we can now attempt to determine if psychoanalysis isa personal, sub-personal, or mixed psychology. Because, as I have just argued,this question engages ultimately some very general and far reaching issues inmetaphysics and the philosophy of mind, the account that I will offer in this sec-tion of how the personal/sub-personal distinction applies to psychoanalysis willbe based on relatively restricted considerations. It also proceeds on the assump-tion that we possess an adequate unde rstanding of what the distinction amo untsto. In the third section I will return to this assumption, and reconsider the issuein less restricted term s.

Taking the systematic ambiguity of psychoanalysis as a clue, we might optimmediately for the mixed view. This comes in two forms. One says that psycho-analytic attributions are both personal and sub-personal, the other that psycho-analysis attributes both personal states and sub-personal states.Let it be agreed that there is a unified stock of conce pts belonging to p sycho -analysis - concep ts wh ich may appea r individually in other psychological theo -ries, but which are integrated in a distinctive way in psychoanalytic theory and

19 Popper (1963) and Gr nb au m ( 1 9 8 4 ) .

104

Downl



11/25

^^ Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSuly-Personal Distinction

on which psychoanalytic explanation draws. Aplausible list of core psychoana-lytic concepts would include: unconscious mental content, repression, defence,anxiety, resistance, transference, wish-fulfilment, phantasy, primary and sec-ondary process thinking, the reality and pleasure principles, instinct, sublima-tion, symbol-formation, cathexis, Cs. /Pcs . /Ucs . and ego/id/superego.The first form of the m ixed view says that theapplication of each of thesecon-cepts involves attributing both a personal and a sub-personal state. The secondsays that s ome of these concepts are personal and that others are sub-personal.The first version of the mixed view envisages a kind of sustained parallelism inpsychoanalytic explanation, each attribution leading a double life. Thesecond bycontrast regards psychoanalysis as alternating between the personal and sub-per-sonal levels.Freud's clinical and theoretical w ritings suggest at times each of these views.It is doubtful that the double life view is tenable, however. If the notion that

psychoanalytic attributions lead a double life is left unexplicated, then the viewamounts to a restatement rather than resolution of the personal/sub-personalambiguity ofpsychoanalysis. The whole point of operating with thepersonal/sub-personal distinction is to discriminate between different sorts of - personal orsub-personal concepts of psychological states; so to say that psychoanalyticconcepts lead a double life is really to saythat each psychoanalytic term expressestwo concepts, the one referring to a personal state and the other to its sub-per-sonal counterpart. Now to suppose this is evidently to make an enormouslystrong claim for the theory - namely tha t psychoanalysis is in possession of type-type identities or necessary co rrelations of personal and sub-personal states. Evenif this possibility is granted, it is extremely hard to see on what basis psycho-analysis can be credited with a general conception of personal and sub-personalunity: on the most charitable reading, psychoanalysis is very far from offering acomprehensive map of the sub-personal realm; nor does it contain anygeneral,regulative principles foreffecting a systematic unification of the personal and sub-person al levels.The most that reasonably can be maintained is that psychoanalysis containssuggestions about what a personal/sub-personal unification might look like withrespect to s ome of its concepts. This is true of, for example, repression and wish-

fulfilment, where Freud provides both what looks like a personal-level descrip-tion of a 'doing' and an account of a corresponding mechanism. Other concepts- including resistance, transference andsublimation - do not seem tohave beenfitted out byFreud with double characterisations, and these seem tobelong to theperson al level.In sum, the concepts w ith respect to which it is most plausible to claim thatpsychoanalysis achieves a co-conception of the personal/sub-personal are oneseither treated in the text of Freud's early 'Project for a scientific psychology'20 orsubsequently discussed in its 'economic' vocabulary. Other core psychoanalytic

concepts - including those, such as phantasy, which receive intensive develop-ment in Kleinian theory - receive only a single characterisation. What may ofcourse be true is that every personal-level psychoanalytic attribution involves a20 Freud (1953-74), vol. 1, pp. 281-397.

105

Downl



12/25

^^ Sebastian Gardner mm m'

commitment to some or other corresponding sub-personal state, and vice versa,but this is a long way from the claim that psychoanalysis provides a determinateco-conceptualisation of the personal and sub-personal; at most it means thatpsychoanalysis is committed to seeking after personal/sub-personal parallelisms.The second form of the mixed view may therefore agree with the first that when-ever Freud postulates som ething at one level, he is making a correspon ding spacefor it at the other level, but it denies that this space always gets filled by Freud.The first form of the mixed view thu s resolves itself into th e seco nd, w hich ismuch more plausible and tallies with the fact that Freud employed a logicallymixed (neural, economic, functional, practical-reason) vocabulary.21Considered in its own terms, the chief misgiving that one might have aboutthis form of the mixed view is the disunity with which it arguably threatenspsychoanalysis. Since psychoanalysis does not identify su b-persona l coun terpartsfor all of its concep ts, and there is no clear principled basis for Freud's advanc ing

them for some but not other psychoanalytic concepts, the force of the view is todeclare psychoanalytic theory radically incomplete. In itself this does not matter- indee d it coheres with the image of Freud as breaking op en a new dom ain ofhu m an knowledge for future exploration - bu t there are further co nsiderationswhich do give grounds for worry. Because the sub-personal level is filled in sosketchily by Freud, the authority of his sub-personal speculations, which fail tobe mutually supporting, is rendered questionable. Psychoanalysis begins to looklike a mere patchwork of theories, or rather fragments of theories, without sys-tematic interconnection; or a blueprint for a theory that was never constructed.In a mo re critical mo de , and in th e spirit of Sartre, it might even be asked if alter-nating between personal and sub-personal levels is not really a sign of explana-tory failure, sub-personal elements being introduced ad hoc whenever personal-level explanation runs aground, and vice versa. (Points where it may seem par-ticularly likely that psychoanalysis attempts to use sub-personal posits to salvagebad personal-level explanations are those where appeal is suddenly made to the'economic factor'.)It should also be noted that the history of psychoanalytic writing in no waysuggests that the theory is en route to sub-personal completeness. None of thefew proposals that have been made after Freud in this area have been met with

enthusiasm; on the contrary, the most vigorous and influential post-Freudiandevelopments have not extended Freud's rough map of the sub-personal at all.Considered as a research programme, then, it looks rather as if psychoanalysis'sub-personal elements are inessential to it. One might of course, with the adventof cognitive science and more so phisticated neurological theory, maintain that thesub-personal completion of psychoanalysis is now imminent. But it is uncertainthat this would not mean really that Freud's own sub-personal ventures haveturned out to be hopelessly premature (vindicating Kitcher's assessment); to sup-pose otherwise would require confidence that future cognitive science will ap-propriately subsume Freud's sub-personal theorising.This is not to say, however, that the mixed view is wrong, first because what

21 A very well worked out example of the mixed view in this form is provided in C um mins (1 983 ),ch. 4.

106


ary2012


13/25

Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction

has b een said leaves unchallenged the view's claim to exegetical accuracy, and sec-ond because it remains to be seen whether there is any better view.We can now turn to the other two possibilities, and ask whether there are anyfundamental considerations that rule out either a person al or a sub-perso nal read -ing of psychoanalysis. This returns u s to the statements of the a uthors q uoted inthe first section.A reading of psychoanalysis as personal and coherent is said to be impossiblebecause putative unconscious contents fail both to qualify as mental and to meetthe condition of avowability (Scruton), and because the explanatory power ofpsychoanalysis turns on mental partition (Sartre; Moore refers indeterminately tothe 'metaphysical embarrassment' which results from formulating the meta-psychology in a 'mentalistic vocabulary'). Now, although a full reply would takemuch space, it is fairly clear that both of these objections can be challenged.Immediate avowability is not in general the unique epistemological ground of

psychological attribution s, and it simply begs the qu estion to m erely assert, in theface of a detailed theoretical elaboration of the contrary proposition, that inten-tional states cannot b e unco nscio us. As regards partition, w hile it is of course truethat psychoanalysis postulates mental divisions which are not recognised as suchin commonsense psychology, it is a further question altogether whether thisentails a drop from the personal to the sub-personal level: commonsensepsychology already applies the language of parts to persons and incorporates avariety of modes of discriminating elements within people, including functionaldivisions into faculties of memory, attention and so forth, divisions into differentmotivational sources, and differentiation of aspects of character. That the psy-choanalytic division Cs. /Pcs . /Ucs . or ego/id/superego is so different from any ofthese ways of mapping the mind as to compare more closely to the modules ofcognitive science may be doubted.Suppose it can be shown contra Scruton that psychoanalytic attributions arenot arbitrary and need not reduce to talk of non-mental forces acting on themind, and contra Sartre that psychoanalytic explanation imputes mental partitionin roughly the same spirit as commonsense psychology. It will also be necessaryto show that psychoanalytic explanation avoids the incoherence into which Sartrebelieves its commitment to mental partition leads it, and (to address a point per-

haps lying behind Scruton's misgivings) that its conception of unconscious men-tal con tent - wh ich it wo uld be most implausible to regard as having the famil-iar propos itional attitude form - is coh erent.22 The way would then be open toa personal view of psychoanalysis. The next question is whether anything can besaid to compel that view.Here there is an obvious point to be made, which carries much force. Theentire motivation for engaging in psychoanalytic thinking is on the face of it lo-cated cleanly at the personal level. The enterprise of offering explanations of men -tal disorder in the sorts of terms supplied by psychoanalysis, rather than those of

neurophysiology, is staked on a demand for understanding which is solidly per-sonal, namely the desire to grasp dissonant and irrational aspects of the actionand experience of oneself and others in terms that conform to the intentional,22 I attempt to defend these claims in Gardner (1993).

10 7

Downl


ary2012


14/25

m^^ Sebastian Gardner * "

manifest image of persons. This means a number of things. First, our irrationalaspects must be explanatorily integrated to some degree with our personal his-tory, i.e. shown to belong to the set of psychological material which grounds ourindividual identity. Second, and correlatively explanation must show our irra-tional aspects to bear an internal relation to the stream of consciousn ess, i.e. makeit possible to think of certain events in the stream of consciousness as manifesta-tions of our irrational aspects in roughly the same sense that, paradigmatically,our occurrent thoughts manifest our beliefs. When these requirements are met,irrationality can be thought of as an expression of one's individual nature orcharacter, and it will then be possible to conceive the task of resolving our rela-tion to our irrational aspects as a matter of achieving self-control or self-mastery.The demand for a form of explanation which fulfils these conditions is perm anentlyin the background of psychoanalysis, at both the clinical and theoretical levels. Itbrings together our cognitive and practical orientations on the basis of a conceptionof ourselves as self-determining beings with an interest in self-knowledge, i.e. in away that fuses indissolubly the theoretical task of forming true representations of thegroun ds of one's action an d psychological life, and the practical task of achieving ormaintaining autonomy. Forms of explanation which assign to our irrational aspectsa status which is essentially no different from that of physical pathologies will notmeet these conditions, and will represent explanation and therapy as logically sepa-rate matters.

Less obvious, but connected to what has just been said and, if correct, of cru-cial im portanc e, is a point a bout th e logical natu re of psychoanalytic explanation.Again this is a matter which there is no space to go into in any detail, but it ishighly plausible to hold that psychoanalytic explanation is best regarded as anextension of commonsense psychology, in the following senses: first, it takes overfrom comm onsense psychology the broad no tion that con nections of mental con-tent of appropriate kinds are indices of causal relations; second, it constructs itscentral forms of explanation - wish-fulfilment and phan tasy - throug h m odi-fication of the practical reasoning schema of belief and desire explanation; andthird, in so doing it draws on a large number of psychological generalisationsemb edded in comm onsense psychology, concerning such matters as the possibil-ity of failures of self-knowledge, the susceptibility of belief-forming processes todeformation under the influence of desire and emotion, the various imaginativemodes in which desire manifests itself, the role of human biology and bodilyexperience in mental life, the role of the phenomenological dimension of themental, and the fundamental content of human motivation. So for example anattack of anxiety wh ich lacks any rational relation to its objective context m ay beexplained in terms of the way that some feature of the situation (e.g. the identityof som e other perso n) is thematically related to - symbolises - an element ina powerful unc onsc ious p hantasy (e.g. of sexual attack), this phantasy deriving inturn from wishes with an instinctual (e.g. sexual-aggressive) content and creatinga disposition in the subject to form false beliefs about the (e.g. retaliatory, puni-tive) motivation of other people. In such a case the explanation clearly draws onou r ordinary conce ptions of the workings of imag ination and of the kin d of affec-tive and motivational configurations associated with emotional states, whileequally clearly - in view of the way that the operations of theoretical and pra c-108

Downl


ary2012


15/25

" " Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction ^ ^

tical reason are suspended - going beyond anything that comm onsense psy-chology alone could supply.Viewed in this light, it may be argued, psychoanalysis is not u p for assessmentin standard inductive terms, any mo re than is comm onsense psychology, and m aysimply base itself on the epistemological security of com mo nsense psychology -which is not absolute, but good enough to make hitching itself to the fortunes ofcommonsense psychology a much better strategy for psychoanalysis than enter-ing itself as a candidate among the sciences.Now if a philosophical reconstruction of psychoanalysis along such lines isindeed the best available, then it is enormously plausible to hold that psycho-analytic attributions lie on the same plane as those of commonsense psychology,i.e. are personal. It may be poin ted out, by critics of the 'm entalistic' view of psy-choanalysis such as Moore, that none of this is binding: it remains possible thatthe essence of the theory is (under philosophical reconstruction) sub-personal,

even though its initial formulation is personal. To take this position is, however,to draw a peculiar line between the theory itself and what are presumably held tobe the merely accidental circumstances of its conception and employment, and toru n the risk of leaving psychoanalysis w ithout sup port (by virtue of detaching thetheory from the epistemological roots supplied by the personal level). There is,furthermore, no positive reason for taking this approach if (as I am here as-suming) psychoanalytic theory can be shown not to generate the absurditiesalleged by Sartre and Moore.According to the personal view, the sub-personal elements in Freud's writings

are strictly inessential to psychoanalytic theory (thoug h of course, the im portan ceof Freud's original ambition to provide a sub-personal model of the mind for thedevelopm ent of his ideas may be co nced ed). Also, all logical connection w ith thedecompositional analysis of cognitive psychology is severed: thoughpersonal/sub-personal correspondences may be admitted in principle and evenheld to be theoretically desirable - it is no t ruled out that sub-pe rsonal psy-chology will duplicate Freud's me ntal topog raphy - they are not regarded asbelonging to the content of the theory, correctly construed; psychoanalysis is nocloser, logically, to sub-perso nal psychology th an is comm onsense psychology. (Astronger line, taken by some who read psychoanalysis as personal, such as Haber-mas, is to regard the sub-perso nal elements in Freud's theorising as reflections ofa scientistic misconception which contradicts the true nature of psychoanalysis;this presupposes, however, a particular stand on the relation of the personal tothe sub -personal.)

Finally, regarding the puzzle identified by Tugendhat - his point tha t psycho-analysis appears to be conceptually un coordinated with the T -based thinking ofreflexive subjectivity - two things may be said on behalf of the person al view.First, the difficulty that Tugendhat alerts us to is in fact present in commonsensepsychology too : there is a general difficulty in co m prehe ndin g h ow the object ofany explanatory psychological description is connected with the phenomena ofself-consciousness and self-determination. Second, to the extent that Tugendhat's23 This account of psychoanalysis and its epistemology may be found in the work s of the au thors

listed in note 6 above.

109

Downl


ary2012


16/25

^ ~ Sebastian Gardner " "

difficulty is peculiar to psych oanalysis, what it amo unts to is simply the n ecessityof grasping new ways, different from those of commonsense psychology, of 'trans-lating' psychoanalytic attributions into, as he puts it, 'modes of being of the per-son', and this is not something that there can (or need) be a philosophical theo-ry of; it is a ma tter internal to the experience of psychoanalysis.In sum, bo th the personal view and the second form of the mixed view app earviable in the light of the considerations reviewed here. The sub-personal viewremains available in the sense that it is logically possible to extract from Freud'stheorising its few bona fide, indisputably sub-personal elements and to identifypsychoanalytic theory with these alone, discarding personal-level mentalism as afunction of the theory's contingent links with clinical practice; but there are nogrou nds for preferring this view to e ither of the others. In so far as the choice liestherefore between the personal and mixed (second form) views, the formercarries the advantage that it provides a straightforward sense in which psycho-analysis forms a single, unified theory, and side-steps the issues that arise for psy-choanalysis if its claims are regarded as presupposing a (unattained and doubt-fully attainable) personal/sub-personal unification. A comparative weakness ofthe personal view may seem to be that it fails to address the question of system-atic ambiguity: it may seem to offer no good explanation of why interpreters ofpsychoanalysis shou ld have assigned it a consistently different person al/sub-per-sonal status. In the following section I will try to remedy this by saying how thesystematic ambiguity of psychoanalysis may be und erstoo d in the light of the p er-sonal view.

If we attempt to pursue any further the argument between the personal andmixed views, the issue becomes impossible to settle without undertaking adetailed and comprehensive examination of psychoanalytic theory. The argumentgiven above for the personal view - conc erning the basis of psychoanalysis in ademand for understanding, and the logical nature of psychoanalytic explanation- does not refute the mixed view. Even if the explana nda that, so to speak, getpsychoanalysis up and running belong to the personal level, it may be thatpsychoanalysis can only complete itself by venturing into sub-personal territory;perh aps its endeavo ur to extend com mon sense psych ology eventually forces it offthe perso nal plan e. In other terms , even if the first layer of attributions in psyc ho-analytic explanation is necessarily personal, there may be others, essential for itscompleteness, which are not; their epistemological dependence upon prior per-sonal attributions would not count against their sub-personality. It may be doubt-ed that there is any way to show that this possibility is realised without placingon psychoanalytic explanation inappropriate demands for completeness, oneswhich we do not place on commonsense psychology, but here the point may beleft open to dispute.

3. The Personal/Sub-Personal Distinction in the Light of PsychoanalysisThroughou t the previous section the sou ndness of the personal/sub-personal dis-tinction was taken for granted. In this section, which aims to turn mattersaround, I will argue that further reflection on psychoanalysis points to a respect110

Downl


ary2012


17/25

" ^ ~ Psychoanalysis and the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction ^ ^

in which the distinction is problematic and show how this leads to a revision ofthe conclusion reached in the previous section.The discussion so far leaves untouched one deeply puzzling aspect of psycho-analysis. Consider the following. As indicated above in connection with the

demand for explanation underlying psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic states are tobe regarded asbelonging to or owned by oneself in the fullest sense: the proposalthat psychoanalysis be regarded (in Scruton's word s) as attributing 'forces whichinfluence the mental realm without themselves belonging to it', is precisely theopposite of what is required; to look on one's unconscious motivation in themanner that one might contemplate involuntary bodily processes is to misunder-stand the nature of psychoanalytic explanation.24 And yet, there are undoubted-ly a number of natural criteria according to which the distinguishing features ofpsychoanalytic states situate them outside the bounds of the self: their uncon-sciousness precludes them from participating in the spontaneity of mental lifeand thus from reflective engagement and rational revisability; the basic content ofunconscious motivation derives from instinctual, biologically grounded sourcesthat are impersonal and resistant to rational appropriation; unconscious repre-sentation is indifferent to reality and discrete from propositional attitudes; and soon. We are consequently distant from our psychoanalytic states in a way that weare not from, for example, memories w hich we cannot presently retrieve or othermental contents that we have difficulty in bringing to mind. In these respects ourrelation to our unconscious does bear comparison with our relation to parts ofour bodies that we can neither perceive nor control. The tension that results isregistered in Foucault's statement that m an's unconscious is 'both exterior to himand indispensable to him'. If pushed, the tension would become a paradox, thatof psychoanalytic states' being both internal and external to the self. Sartrebelieves the paradox is unavoidable: I both am and am not the psychic factshypothesised by psychoanalysis.^ But psychoanalysis has an answer: it says thatthe scope of the personal mu st be expanded, in a way that has no parallel, beyon dthe limits of commonsense psychology. It requires us to take a view of the extentof the self which is to a degree unnatural. In this way it may be claimed thatpsychoanalysis functions as a source of philosophical insight: it allows us to seethat personal status and commonsense psychology, which we standardly treat asone because they coincide in all contexts except that of psychoanalysis, are in factconceptually different things.

Assuming psychoanalysis' relocation of the bounds of the personal to becoherent,26 it follows that the personal level encompasses both commonsense andpsychoanalytic attributions, and this raises the question of the unity of the per-sonal level. What grounds are there for regarding psychoanalytic states as owned- as internal to the relation of oneself to oneself, in Tugendhat's language - in away that those of cognitive psychology are not? To say that commonsense and24 Anyone who doubts this should look at Freud's statements concerning the question of moral

responsibility for dreams, (1953-74), vol. 5, p. 620, and vol. 19, p. 133.25 Sartre (1958 ), pp. 50-1.26 All that strictly needs to be assumed here, note, is that the move is at least conceivable - one

that we maywant to make whether or not the actual empirical data ad duced by psychoanaly-sis warrants it.

I ll

Down

loadedby[DeakinUniversityLibrary]at03:1903Febru

ary2012


18/25

" " " Sebastian Gardner **

psychoanalytic attributions comprise a single form of psychological explanation,given the differences just indicated, would be to trivialise the notion, and in anycase, there are countervailing similarities between commonsense and cognitive-psychological attributions : bo th are, for instance, un de r the control of objectivityand information-carrying, in a way that psychoanalytic states are not. If we askwhat criterion of personal status psychoanalysis is relying on, it is not clear thatany answer can be given: as the writings discussed in the first section showed,there is nothing self-evidently correct about drawing the personal/sub-personalline in a way that leaves psychoanalytic states on the same side as those ofcommonsense psychology; and many quite natural criteria of sub-personality,such as non-conceptuality of content, or putting explanatory weight on mentalpartition, w ould yield the opp osite conclusion. Plausibly, any criterion of perso n-al status which is sufficiently liberal to include psychoanalytic states will alsoinclude cognitive-psychological states, and any which is sufficiently narrow toexclude the se will also exclude psy choanalytic states. Yet, with out an ac coun t ofwhat holds together psychoanalysis and commonsense psychology as personal,the classification of psychoanalytic states as personal and those of cognitive psy-chology as sub-persona l will be arbitrary and it will then be hard to resist theconclusion (of Fodor) that the distinction of a so-called p ersonal level, whateverits virtues in some contexts, lacks philosophical significance outside ethics .27

The difficulty of finding a ground for the unity of the personal level invites areconsideration of the personal/sub-personal distinction. When introduced origi-nally by Dennett, it was meant to do two things. First, it was intended as a dis-tinction be tween different forms of psychological exp lanation a distinction ofthe same logical sort as those that philosophers draw between causal and non-causal, or ideological and non-teleological forms of explanation. Second, it wasmeant to provide a way of formulating the opposition between the (then) con-servative position in the philosophy of mind occupied by Wittgenstein and Ryle,and the position of those who wished to press the claim of cognitive psychologyto philosophical significance, su ch as D ennett himself. The personal/sub-person-al distinction could consequently be employed in two ways: it allowed the for-mulation of a new set of questions, concerning the criterion for distinguishingpersonal from sub-personal states, and the relation between the personal and sub-personal levels of psychological explanation; and it allowed the differencebetween the Wittgenstein-Ryle position and that of proponents of cognitive psy-chology to be expressed by saying that the former affirms, whereas the latterdenies, the exclusive validity of psychological explanation at the personal level.

Dennett's distinction thus served to put into focus, in a single philosophicalterminology, a num be r of key issues that arise as soon as the philosoph y of min dis confronted with the fact of cognitive psychology's empirical success. It has also,however, I will now try to show, the effect of recasting discussion between theconservative and anti-conservative positions in the philosop hy of min d - here-after, Personalism and Sub-Personalism respectively - in a way that eclipses oneof its fundamental dimensions.

Dennett's formulation of the difference between Personalism and Sub-Person-27 Fodor (1976), pp. 52-3.11 2

Down

loadedby[DeakinUniversit

yLibrary]at03:1903Febru

ary2012


19/25

Psychoanalysis an d the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction i

alism makes it seem as if both sides share a conception of the personal/sub-per-sonal distinction. However, to suppose this is to circumscribe heavily the scopeof the Personalist position. If Personalism accepts the personal/sub-personaldistinction as understood by Dennett, then it commits itself to the idea that per-sonal status is something the essence of which can be grasped in terms of aparticular mode of psychological explanation. But it may be doubted that thePersonalist should accept this commitment.It is true that som e philosoph ers classified as Personalists by D enn etts c riteri-on may stake their opposition to sub-personal explanation on a conviction con-cerning the explanatory com pleteness and self-sufficiency of the mo de of psy-chological explanation which operates at the personal level. A Personalist of thisstripe will not regard this fact - conce rning the explanatory comp leteness, self-sufficiency etc. of persona l-level psycho logical exp lanation - as requ iring (andperhaps not even as allowing for) any further, metaphysical support or explana-

tion. Ryle is an ex amp le of a Personalist of this so rt.However, it is difficult to see how this non-metaphysical form of Personalismcan be sustained undogmatically, especially in circumstanc es w here scientific psy-chology is making advances by means of incursions into sub-personal territory:it will always be a good question what its a priori claim regarding the explanato-ry properties of personal and sub-personal psychology can possibly be based on;we are bound to ask what ground there can be for holding Personalism to be truein advance of having run through all of the intricate, empirical issues raised bypsychological theory.It is for this reason far more plausible to suppose that the Personalists animusagainst sub-personal psychology is based on a conception of personhood ground-ed directly on some metaphysical, trans-psychological fact or consideration. ThePersonalist may no t wish to enter any claims at all regarding the properties of mo desof psychological explanation: he may regard with scepticism the notion that m odesof psychological explanation can be identified and considered in themselves, inindependence from how we relate ourselves to them. In so far as the Personalist iswilling to employ the notion of a mode of psychological explanation distinctive ofthe personal level, he w ill regard it as grounded on and determined by, and as no tgenuinely intelligible independently of, the relevant metaphysical fact or consider-

ation. He will deny that the notion of a mo de of psychological explanation can beemployed to provide an analysis of the personal level.In this light, to accept th at the person al level allows itself to be elucidated ade -quately in terms of a mod e of explanation w ould b e to adopt a kind of reduct ion-ism for it would be to suppose that personal status is essentially a matter ofhuman behaviours being explicable in a certain set of terms.28 Of course, inDe nne tts (now highly familiar) perspective it makes no sense to question the equa-

28 Denn ett himself does not of course think that there is a straightforward eq uation here : see Den-nett (1978 ), ch. 14, 'Conditions of personhoo d'. But he does think that the notion of personh ood,to the limited extent that it is coherent, is constructed upon that of an intentional system, whichhe construes in terms of a mode of explanation. Much writing in the philosophy of mind followsthis approach. On my alternative account, the opposition between Personalists and Sub-Person-alists should be regarded as much less like the argument between those who deny and those whoaccept that psychological explanation is causal, and much more like that between Anti-Reduc-tionists and Reductionists in the personal identity debate.

113

Downl


ary2012


20/25


tion of Personalism with a commitment to the explanatory completeness etc. of acertain mode of psychological explanation, or to regard this as an instance ofreductionism; but attention to the motivation of Personalism suggests that thismust be the right position for the Personalist to take. 29If this is correct, then the Personalist position will n o t share the Sub-personalist's conception of the personal/sub-personal distinction: on the contrary,a repudiation of Dennetts conception of the distinction will be integral to theposition. It will hold that wh at it is for a psychological state to be person al is nota psycho logical fact - in the sense of a fact abo ut a psycho logical state con sid-ered with respect to its conten t or form - and that there could not be a criteri-on for whether a piece of psychological explanation is personal or sub-personalexpressible in terms of the form or content of the states which it attributes.In this light the personal/sub-personal distinction appears less as a neutralpiece of philosophical terminology and more as a strategic device, since to con-

ceive the opposition of Personalism and Sub-Personalism in Dennett's terms is topresuppose that personality and sub-personality may be analysed in terms of con-trasting m odes of psychological explanation, a nd so to already conceive the issuein a manner congenial to the Sub-Personalist. Talk of the personal/sub-personaldistinction thus obscures the true character of the disagreement between the Per-sonalist and the Sub-Personalist. It leads the Sub-Personalist to understand thePersonalist to be u pho lding the exclusive validity of a particular m ode of psycho -logical explanation, whereas the Personalist's true claim is that personal status isnot something that can be grasped at all in terms of conceptions of psychologicalexplanation.

30Similarly, when Dennett employs the distinction to formulate thenew question of the relation between personal and sub-personal levels of psycho-logical explanation, the real issue which separates Personalism from Sub-Person-alism has, appearances to the contrary, been left behind, for the very formulationof that question makes it internal to the programme of Sub-Personalism, in whichcontext it refers simply to the Sub-Personalist's task of determining the relationbetween the kinds of (propositional attitude, phenomenological etc.) explanationoffered in ordinary psychological talk and those offered in scientific psychology

The relation between the respective attitudes of the Personalist and Sub-Per-sonalist to commonsense psychology is consequently complex. Both agree ofcourse that commonsense psychology is personal in the sense of pertaining topersons, but they disagree on how this is to be understood. The Personalistregards com monsense psychology as essentially u nderp inned by a con ception ofpersonhood which cannot be grasped simply in terms of the content or form ofcomm onsense psychological exp lanations.3! This commitment will consequentlyremain invisible to the Sub-Personalist, whose requests for proof of its existence29 It will emerge in what follows that the m etaphysical form of Personalism h as the better chance of

succeeding in the argument with Sub-Personalism, but only in the sense of being able to hold outagainst Sub-Personalism, not in that of refuting it. As I will go on to indicate, due to the struc-ture of the whole d ebate, it is a mistake for the Personalist to expect to be able to refute Sub-Per-sonalism by any direct means: this would require the Personalist to engage Sub-Personalism onits own territory, i.e. participate in the debate on the terms formulated by Dennett, and for Per-sonalism to do that is for it to misunderstand itself.

30 For an outline of this alternative, see McCulloch (19 86) , esp. pt. 2 (pp. 69-8 5).31 In this context see the extremely interesting paper by Fricker (1993 ).11 4

Downl


ary2012


21/25

^ ~ Pjychoanolysis and the Persono//Sub-Personal Distinction ^ ^

- which will take the form of dem ands to be show n how this putative com mit-m ent shows itself in psychological explanation will necessarily go un m et, w hilethe Personalist can only insist that the measure of proof employed by the Sub-Personalist begs th e q uestion. In the eyes of the Personalist, th e Sub-Personalist'sconception of commonsense psychology strips it of its genuinely personal cha-racter and reduces it to a mere shell. From the viewpoint of Sub-Personalism, th ePersonalist has simply confounded the psychological matter at hand with anotherissue which is properly non-psychological and pertains to some other domain,most prob ably that of ethics. The Personalist an d Sub-Personalist are thus a w orldapart, and the disagreement between them goes too deep to be resolved by reflec-tion on the nature of psychological explanation.What I have called Personalism is not so much a metaphysical position of itsown, as an account of how the personal/sub-personal distinction may be viewedby certain sorts of metaphysical position. Although any comprehensive examina-

tion of the sorts of metaphysical positions that may support Personalism is out ofthe question here, there are some relatively obvious things to be said on thisscore, which should help to make Personalism less elusive than it may otherwiseseem. In the first place, it is clear that Personalism is anti-naturalistic: since thePersonalist holds that the concept of personhood transcends that of an object sus-ceptible to a certain sort of psychological explanation, where the force of'psychological' is to imply some degree of connection with the objective causalorder, and that being a perso n is a fact that transcend s psychological facts so c on-ceived, Personalism is necessarily opposed to any naturalism worth the name. Inview of the limited resources available to contemporary anti-naturalism, the Per-sonalist may be expected to assign personhood a transcendental status, and tohold that self-consciousness/-determination is a primitive, unanalysable an d irre-ducible datum, underived and underivable from any other, external source. Per-sonh ood is accordingly regarded as a conce ption w hich can be grasped o nly fromthe perspective of self-conscious, self-determining subjectivity, i.e. from withinthe manifest image.32 This explains why its relation to forms of explanationshould be oblique.An implication of Personalism is that the notion of sub-personality cannot beexplained simply by saying that it is what we get when we drop in the explana-

tion of human behaviour below the personal level of psychological explanation.That it is possible to explain the concept of sub-personal psychology in theabstract, as a wholly general philosophical concept, without reference to cogni-tive psychology, may in any case be doubted: plausibly, there is no relevant con-cept of the sub-personal which is indepen dent of the programme of naturalism in32 Such a conception may be traced in the line of philosophical reflection wh ich run s from K ant

through absolute idealism to existential phenomenology and other schools of European philoso-phy. Examples of relevant wo rks, where awareness of the pressure exerted by naturalism leads tothe formulation of debates in terms very similar to those of Dennett, are Husserl (1970) and Mer-leau-Ponty (1962). The conception is also present in Habermas' theory of communicative ratio-nality, according to which considerations of psychological explanation (as construed by writerssuch as Dennett) pertain to strategic rationality rather than the distinctive, non-strategic form ofrationality which is constitutive of intersubjectivity. A contemporary statement of a Personalistposition may be found in Sturma (1995). I take Personalism to be in the spirit of Nagel's (1969)comments on cognitive psychology.

115


ary2012


22/25


the philosophy of mind (though it may be independent of any specific attempt atnaturalisation).If the alignments are as I have jus t suggested, th en the argum ent betw een Per-sonalism and Sub-Personalism is simply (and unsurprisingly) equivalent to the

question of wh ether hum an beings can be naturalised, and it may be denied thatthere is any w ay of resolving th e Personalist/Sub-Personalist issue short of a prio rand independent resolution of the argument between philosophical naturalismand anti-naturalism. The Personalist/Sub-Personalist issue cannot be regarded(contrary to what Dennett may be presumed to have intended) as providing anew way of taking up the old metaphysical question of whether we are beingsthat can be comprehended within the natural order, for reasons already given: thedefining com mitm ent of Personalism m ust strike the naturalistic Sub-Personalismas inherently groundless and indefensible, while the Sub-Personalist's questionconcerning the relation between personal and sub-personal levels of explanationrests up on a presupposition that anti-naturalistic Personalism is bo un d to reject,viz. that any reasons there m ay be for resisting Sub-Personalism mu st derive fromconsiderations of a non-metaphysical kind pertaining to the nature of psycho-logical explanation.

The account that I have offered of the personal/sub-personal distinction andof the argument between Personalism and Sub-Personalism can be advanced, asI have just presented it, without any reference to psychoanalysis. But psycho-analysis points towards this account, because it suggests that what makes a psy-chological state count as personal is not its belonging to some particular schemeof explanation, and so that the equation assumed by Dennett to define Personal-ism is incorrect. What I have claimed to be the correct formulation of Personal-ism is, moreover, suggested b y psychoanalysis w hen it is traced back to its source:psychoanalytic states are personal not because of the mode of explanation towhich they belong, but because of the nature of the reflexive demand to whichthey answer, a demand that plays no role in cognitive psychology. The accountexplains in turn why psychoanalysis should be unable to supply a criterion bywhich the states that it attributes should be counted as personal, since it impliesthat n o criterion for the personality of psychological states expressible in terms oftheir form or content can be given. The account thereby makes sense of the non-identity, which psychoanalysis requires, of commonsense psychology and per-sonal psychology.

In addition, the account of Personalism/Sub-Personalism which I haveadvanced explains why a puzzle about the application of the personal/sub-per-sonal distinction to psychoanalysis should remain even after the uncertaintyregarding its status created by the conceptual diversity of (economic, neurologi-cal, functional, practical-reason) elements in Freud's theorising has been resolved.Even when all of the considerations raised in the previous section have beenworked through to provide a stable and well-motivated account of the person-al/sub-personal status of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic states continue to seemprecariously located at the personal level. The explanation for this, according toPersonalism, is that the personal status of a psychology is not inscribed or inher-ent in it: rather it is a matter of how we take it, ho w we relate ourselves to its mo deof explanation. Hence the possibility of taking psychoanalysis either way:116

Downl


ary2012


23/25

Psychoanalysis an d thePersonallSub-Personal Distinction

psychoanalysis is sufficiently akin to commonsense psychology to allow us totake it aspersonal, though also sufficiently heterogeneous with it for us not to doso au tomatically; and it contains enoug h naturalism to allow us to take it sub-per-sonally, though not so much that wehave no choice but to do so. Anti-naturalistPersonalists like Sartre and Scruton are consequently able without difficulty tomake a target of psychoanalysis, andnaturalist Sub-Personalists like Gill eta l andKitcher to appropriate it.The upshot is that psychoanalysis finds itself caught in thecrossfire betw een Personalism andSub-Personalism, anti-naturalism and naturalism.What, then, is to be concluded ultimately regarding the personal/sub-person-al status of psychoanalysis? To recapitulate: In the first section I argued thatpsychoanalysis exhibits a systematic ambiguity, and in the second that this ambi-guity could be resolved in favour of either theview that psychoanalytic states arepersonal or theview that they aremixed. However, the third section showed thatthis conclusion is insufficient to account for the deeper puzzle presented by

psychoanalytic states, which requires personal status to beprised apart from com-monsense psychology This raised the question of what personal status can thenamount to, and mysuggestion has been that it is answered by Personalism, whichalso provides the systematic amb iguity of psychoanalysis with a deeper and com-plete explanation. The alternative position of Sub-Personalism will, I suggested,end up having to deny the significance of the personal/sub-personal distinction.In the view of Personalism, the conclusion of the second section needs to berevised: what should have been concluded there, the Personalist will say, is thatthe personal view of psychoanalysis alone is viable.I have of course not offered any reason for thinking that Personalism is true,nor Sub-Personalism. This is, as I have indicated, a high-level metaphy sical issue.My primary aim hasbeen to explore the interrelations between thephilosophy ofpsychoanalysis - its task of providing psychoanalysis with a charitable recon-struction and thepersonal/sub-personal distinction in thephilosophy ofmind.If my argument is correct, then anyone who thinks that Personalism is an inde-fensible or unintelligible position has three options: attempting to provide a dif-ferent account (compatible with maintaining the significance of thepersonal/sub-personal distinction) of whypsychoanalytic states are personal while cognitive-psychological states are not; defending the sub-personal view of psychoanalysis;

or denying that psychoanalysis is coherent.33

Sebastian Gard ner isLecturer inPhilosophy atUniversity College London, having previously been Lec-CV turer inPhilosophy at Birkbeck College London. Hispublications include Irrationality and the Philosophy

of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Kant's 'Critique ofPure Reason' (Lon-don: Routledge, 1999), and articles on the philosophy of psychoanalysis and thehistory of philosophy.His current research interests areconcerned with developments inEuropean p hilosophy since Kant.Email: [email protected].

33 1 am grateful to Jim Hopkins and others at the University of London Philosophy of Psychoanaly-sis seminar for discussion of some of the ideas in this paper, and to Jos Bermdez for extreme-ly helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

117

Downl


ary2012


24/25


ReferencesBettelheim, B. (1982), Freud a n d Man's Sou l , London: Fontana.Boden, M. (1977), "Freudian mechanisms of defence: a programming perspective", in Philosophers on

Freud: New Evaluat ions , R. Wollheim (ed.), New York: Aronson, 24 2-70.Cavell, M. (1993 ), The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Ph i lo sophy , Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press.Cummins, R. (1983), The Nature of Psychological Explanat ion, Cam bridge, M ass.: MIT Press.Davidson, D. (1982), "Paradoxes of irrationality", in Philosophical Essays on Freud, R. Wollheim and

J. Hopk ins (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 289-305 .Dennett, D. C. (1978), Brains torms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology Hassocks: Harvester

Press.Dilman, I. (1984), Freud and the Mind,Oxford: Blackwell.Ellenberger, H. (1970 ), Th e Discovery of the Unconsc iou s : Th e History an d Evolution o f Dynamic Psychia-

try, Ne w York: Basic Books.Erdelyi, M. (1985), Psychoana l y s i s : Freud's Cognitive Psycho logy , New York: Freeman .Fodor, J. (1976), Th e Language o f Thought, Hassocks: Harvester Press.Foucault, M . (1974), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sc iences , London: Tavistock.Freud, S. (1953-74), Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, trans, under

the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Stra-chey and Alan Tyson, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Flicker, E. (199 3), "The threat of eliminativism", in Mind and Language 8, 253-81.Gardner, S. (1993), Irrationality and the Philosophy o f Psychoana l y s i s , Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-

ty Press.Gill, M., and K. Pribram (1976), Freud's 'Project' Re-Assessed, London: Hutchinson.Glymour, C. (1991), "Freud's androids", in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, J. Neu (ed.), Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 44-85.Grunbaum, A. (1984), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Berkeley: University of California Press.Habermas, J. (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon.Henry, M. (1993), The Genealogy o f Psychoana l y s i s , trans. Douglas Brick, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-

versity Press.Hop kins, J. (1988) , "Epistemology and dep th psychology: critical notes on The Foundations o f Ps ycho -

analys i s" , in Mind, Psychoanalysis an d Science, P . Clark and C. Wright (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 33-60 .

Hop kins, J. (1992 ), "Psychoanalysis, interpretation, and science", in Psychoana l y s i s , Mind and Art: P er -spectives on Richard Wollhe im, J. Hopkins and A. Savile (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 3-34.

Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis o f European Sciences a nd Transcendental Phenomeno logy: An Introduction toPhenomenological Ph i lo sophy , trans. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Kitcher, P. (1992 ), Freud's D ream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science o f Mind,Cam bridge, M ass.: MITPress.Lacan, J. (1977), Ecrits: A Selection , trans. Alan Sheridan, L ondon: Tavistock.

Scruton, R. (1986), Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis (1983), The Language o f Psychoana l y s i s , trans. Donald Nicholson-

Smith, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.Lear, J. (1990), Love an d i ts Place in Natur e: A Philosophical Reconstruction o f Psychoana l y s i s , London:

Faber.Locke, J. ([1670] 1975), Essay Concerning H um an Understanding,P.H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Claren-

don.McCulloch, G. (1986), "Scientism, mind and meaning", in Subject, Thought and Context, P Pettit and

J. McDowell (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon, 59-94.McGinn, C. (1979), "Action and its explanation", in Philosophical Problems in Psycho logy , N. Bolton(ed.), London: Methuen, 20-42.Maze, J. R. (1983), The Meaning o f Behaviour, London: Allen and Unwin.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of P ercept ion , trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.

118

Downl


ary2012


25/25

^ ^ Psychoanalysis an d the PersonallSub-Personal Distinction Moore, M. (1988), "Mind, brain and unconscious", in Mind,Psychoanalysis and Sc ience , P Clark and

C. Wright (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 141 -66.Nagel, T. (1969), "The boundaries of inner space", Journal o f Philosophy 66, 452-8.Peterfreund, E. (1971), Informat ion, Sys tems and Psych oan alys i s : An Evolutionary Biological Approach to

Psychoanalytic Theor y , Psychological Issues 7, monograph 25/6, New York: International Univer-sities Press.

Popper, K. (1963), Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth o f Scientific Knowledge, London: Routledge& Kegan Paul.

Rapaport, D. (196 0), The Structure o f Psychoanalytic Theory , Psychological Issues 2, no 2, monograph6, New York: International Universities Press.

Rapaport, D. (19 67), "The conceptual mod el of psychoanalysis", in The Collected Papers o f David Rapa-port, M. Gill (ed.), New York: Basic Books, 405-31.

Rieff, P (1979), Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Sartre, J.-P. (1958), Being and No thingness : An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , trans. Hazel E.

Barnes, London: Methuen.Schafer, R. (1976), A New Language fo r P s ychoan

Documents

Gardner Psa and the Distinction