Richard Gipps gave an intriguing paper called ‘Ur’. I see
that he has put the notes for it on his blog so I’ll just borrow a couple of quotes
to support the strand that struck me most. The presentation and the blog entry have rather more going on, as well as this strand, including an interesting diagnosis of the various motivations for the position he opposes. (I’m also going to construe the blog entry and
the talk as the same abstract entity.)
The question addressed runs thus:
Posits and Poiesis: Is the core understanding of psychoanalysis
a scientific model? Do our articulations of the being of the unconscious amount
to inferential posits, explanatory of human thought and action? Is their role fundamentally
one of explanation, or is it one which provides us with a new form of comprehension
revelatory of a new dimension of our existence?
On Richard’s view it is a mistake to offer a justification
for the existence of the unconscious. With the assumption that such a justification
needs to be offered, it is offered via inference to the best explanation.
Thus Freud on the unconscious: we need to posit unconscious
desires, emotions and motivations, he says, to make sense of the observable phenomena
of dreams, slips, suggestion effects, and symptoms. It is the best explanation we
have of such phenomena.
Such a need starts from an assumption that it is possible
to grasp the concept of the unconscious and then ask whether that concept is
instanced in the world. This is akin to the idea that one might understand the
concept of the Loch Ness Monster, understand what it would be, and can then
question whether such a monster exists (put aside Kripkean worries about
unicorns). The previous quote continues directly:
The separability of essence and existence, this ‘logical gap’,
allows us to stand back from and put a question to nature without it having already
been answered; the resultant answer will then be the central understanding of 'psychoanalysis'.
Presupposing that the unconscious is like the Loch Ness
Monster, it stands in need of a positive answer to the questin of whether it is
instanciated and inference to the best explanation is the route. But, Richard
suggests, this is a mistake.
By contrast with this I urge that the central understanding
of the unconscious etc., is not an answer to an already articulable question, but
rather a revelation which affords us the possibility of asking new questions.
One reason that the former strategy fails is that the
explanatory gain cannot be neutrally described. The world available with the
description of the unconscious is richer than that before and cannot simply be
presented backwards into the previous, impoverished terms. Further, the
supporting evidence offered for inference to the best explanation suggests a
misunderstanding of its own status.
[P]sychoanalysis gets offered as a ‘theory of how the mind
works’. It is said that its concepts ‘pick out patterns’ in human behaviour. It
supposedly helps us to 'understand' what couldn't otherwise be understood. However
these truths are, I believe, actually disguised truisms, and so the philosophical
discussion therefore too readily runs the risk of an unwarranted ‘smugness’ (this
again is the 'narcissism' I mentioned above). The truth of the propositions gets
proffered as having a justificatory significance for the psychoanalytic endeavour.
However psychoanalysis simultaneously adjusts our understanding not only of the
explanans but also of the explananda. What is meant by mental, what now counts as
an understanding, what a pattern amounts to here, and what now is to count as intentional
behaviour, all subtly change in their meanings. Thus it won’t do to say that the
extensions of folk psychology offered by psychoanalysis can be warranted in terms
of their explanatory payback, since psychoanalysis is also extending our sense of
what here counts as legitimate explanation. Psychoanalysis articulates new experiential
gestalts, new objects, and new modes of comprehension.
As I understood the argument, it might be akin to the
following contrast. We can grasp the concept of the Loch Ness Monster in such a
way that we are prepared for uses of either of the following form:
1: Scientists have today confirmed the Loch Ness Monster
exists!
2: Scientists today confirm, after an exhaustive search,
that the Loch Ness Monster does not exist.
By contrast our grasp of the concept of animal does
not prepare us for a sentence like:
3: Scientists today confirm, after an exhaustive search,
that animals do not exist.
And I guess, and in accord with much discussion of OnCertainty, we are not prepared for the converse:
4: Animals exist! Scientists confirm.
By saying ‘we are not prepared’ I mean: much additional
contextualisation would be needed for us to know what to do with either of
these sentences, though such additional contextualisation may not be impossible
(again, modulo Kripke on unicorns).
The former pair show the gap that Richard calls that
between essence and existence. The latter closes that gap. All of that seems
fine to me. But I would want to account for this distinction by suggesting that
the closest we can come to 4 would be something implicit in the expression of a
rule governing the explanation of the meaning of ‘animal’. Perhaps Little
Ludwig might say to me, after a happy day of me pointing out sheep and cows and
cats and dogs, but not birds or fish, as example animals “Ah, so there are lots
of animals” and hence there are animals.
But Richard is sceptical of this as already too close to
the version of truth as adequation:
It’s tempting to articulate the above critique of a
representational conception of central psychoanalytical truth claims simply by
using a Wittgensteinian discourse of language games, rules, framework
propositions, etc. Charles Elder does this and suggests at times that
psychoanalysis offers us new ways of describing what we already know. The trouble
with this way of trying to spell out the inadequacies of the view of core
analytical concepts as posits is, it seems to me, that it ends up reinstating a
dualism of ‘not always the facts, but rather sometimes how we describe the
facts’. It supposes, one could say, that either we have to do with
representations of what is or with rules of representation; in both cases we
are firmly in the representation game. There is something right, as I see it,
in the impulse to resist the urge to assume it is intelligible to ask ‘but are
dreams really wish fulfillments?’ or ‘are symptoms really compromise
formations?’ But this, I want to suggest, is not because we meet here with
rules for representing what we otherwise know, but rather because we have to do
with a more founding notion of truth as an unconcealment in which there is, as
such, no room for adequation - i.e. no room for the question ‘does what is said
correspond to what actually obtains?’
I would like to domesticate the analogies and
disanalogies (connecting animals and the unconscious and disconnecting the
unconscious from a kind of posit) within a kind of understated natural
ontological attitude in which, for example, truth is a simple univocal notion
given by a minimal disquotational approach. I can imagine that dividing truth into
a more fundamental revealing notion and something that governs truth as
disquotation would be sufficient for the distinction Richard wants but I’m not
sure it is necessary. One potential line of reapprochement was a conversation,
on the way to lunch, that the same sort of factors that govern ‘animals’ might
also cover ‘sacrifice’. I tend to suggest that a way to grasp what the latter
words means would be to steep oneself in the Tarkovsky film of that name. To
grasp the rule for that word, though, requires a profound change in one’s own
character. Rules for the use of words, for the articulation of concepts, may
require profound change, opening one’s eyes to new tracts of the space of reasons. (Richard has responded to this worry here.)
One small point from the final paper: ‘The Unsayable in
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Some Notes on Wittgenstein and Bion’ by Prof.
Victor Krebs connected back to this. In a dense and wide ranging paper, Victor
stressed the idea that the standing possibility of saying more when one tries
to express something or describe something merited the name ‘unsayable’. The
non-linguistic world provided a ground for saying things – for example,
descriptions of it – and its very inexhaustibility suggested that it was
unsayable. This might have resonance with Richard’s more profound sense of
truth: a kind of ontological ground for mere judgement. But I’m not sure. (I
asked Victor if it would matter if we swapped the word ‘sayable’ for the
constantly articulable or describable or sayable features of the world rather
than ‘unsayable’, in a spirit of glass half full rather than a spooky glass
half empty. He looked at me sadly and said it might not matter but that would
be to try to deflate what he wanted to say.)
