Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 20:12:23 -0800
Subject: HAB: Re: A Little More on Disclosure




Antti asks:

“Besides KHI and 'The Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality', where does
Habermas deal with psychoanalysis?”

In a programmatic essay, “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,”
in _Recent Sociology 2_, Hans-Peter Drietzel, ed., New York: Anchor,
1971, Habermas attempts to apply speech act theory to the therapeutic
scene. Though he didn’t choose to pursue this model further (for reasons
I will guess below), some German psychoanalytical theorists have
attempted to develop this model in some detail, with Habermas in mind.
As I mentioned in a posting last October, an example, from researchers
at the University of Münich, is _Psychoanalytic Practice_, 2 vols.
Helmut Thomae and Horst Kaechele, New York: J.Aronson Publishers, 1987.
One volume is theoretical; the other is a report of clinical and
experimental research.

Psychoanalysis is only addressed by Habermas as an actual example of
reconstructive inquiry and discourse (as clinical theory) that serves an
emancipatory interest. The emancipatory interest serves a self-formative
interest (clear in Habermas’ very early work, e.g., “Labor and
Interaction,”), which, in KHI, is a practical interest. But the
practical (cooperative) interest does not capture the self-formative
motivation of the emancipatory interest. This belief on Habermas’ part
is expressed in his later (mid-1970s onward) focus on cognitive
development. In the wake a emancipation (or for a lifeworld inasmuch as
it is not dominated by distortion and abuse in the first place), the
natural disposition toward learning and development is a keynote of
Habermas’ thinking.

This associates to why, in part at least, the discussion of
psychoanalytic ego psychology in “Moral Development and Ego Identity,”
_CES_, becomes entwined with an interest in Piaget, another example of
reconstructive inquiry, as is Kohlberg (and regardless of what one
thinks of the latter’s basic assumptions, his work remains an exemplar
of reconstructive scientific inquiry).

But the hallmark of Habermas’ concern for internality, I think, is his
model of reflection as an internalization of dialogue roles. The
profound implications of this is that precisely *in* discourse about
communicative action and argument, one is also modeling, to some
significant degree, the dynamic of thinking, *insofar* as thinking (or
deliberation) *can* be modeled in accord with discourse. One does not
have to claim that thinking can be fully comprehended as virtual
dialogue (for, to me, its mirrorplay is surely, at heart, *not*
primordially dialogal) in order to still gain great insight into, first,
essential features of reflection / thinking / deliberation and, second,
the place that  communicative action (and, ideally, discourse) can have
in the growth of thinking and deliberative action, by dwelling with the
theory of communicative action and discourse ethics. As far as public
life goes, *only* that thinking which can be communicatively organized
can possibly have significance for others.

To what degree communicative action can affect others’ thinking is
always a contingent issue. Texts can only do so much, while they work
best in living scenes of dialogue and embodied discursive interchange.

So, I wouldn’t reduce Habermas’ sensitivity toward a disclosure of
internality or internality of disclosure to his indication of
psychoanalysis as an exemplar of reconstructive inquiry that attends to
systematically distorted communication.

But all this belongs together: emancipatory reflection, developmental
learning, and internalization of communicative interaction.

Yet the most obvious, the most compelling, the greatest example of an
appreciation of the internality of disclosure is to be found here, in
reading. One might easily take for granted the silent internality of
this presence, and the sensitivity to internality that one hopes to find
reflected.

Gary



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