From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: HAB: Habermas & Freud: creation, discovery, genesis
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 12:13:44 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)


Some notes on self-reflection

In 1965 Habermas initiated a research project with the aim of a radical 
critique of knowledge, one with sweeping implications for social theory. 
Habermas argues that there are links between three distinct theoretical 
attitudes and specific corresponding human interests which require a 
transformed understanding of the "disinterested contemplation" or "value-free" 
notions of science preserved in positivism and historicism. Habermas outlines 
his general theoretical framework as follows: "There are three categories of 
processes of inquiry for which a specific connection between
logical-methodological rules and knowledge-constitutive interests can be 
demonstrated. This demonstration is the task of a critical philosophy of 
science that escapes the snares of positivism. The approach of the 
empirical-analytic sciences incorporates a technical-cognitive interest; that 
of the historical-hermeneutic sciences incorporates a practical one; and the 
approach of critically oriented sciences incorporates the emancipatory 
cognitive interest" (Habermas, KHI, 308). Habermas is concerned here with the 
articulation of a critical social science that goes beyond 
historical-hermeneutic and empirical-analytic interests and, in fact, provides 
insight into their genesis. Habermas's tripartite distinction places the 
interest of critical theory squarely in an emancipatory camp, and is understood 
to be a social theoretical, self-reflective means of transforming ideologically 
frozen relations of dependence found in the former (Habermas, KHI, 310). As 
long as philosophy remains caught in the realm of ontology, in the form of 
either positivism or historicism, Habermas argues, "it is itself subject to an 
objectivism that disguises the connection of its knowledge with the human 
interest in autonomy and responsibility [Mündigkeit]" (Habermas, KHI, 311). To 
this end, Habermas cites two examples, which remain paradigmatic, of such 
processes of inquiry: psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology. Scientific 
self-reflection, in other words, is precisely what connects knowledge with 
autonomy and responsibility - a recognition and a responsibility for the 
relations between science and ethics. In reflection, then, we not only become 
aware of the 'rules' which are constitutive of our practices, but we also find 
ourselves ethically attached... we recognize ourselves in the other, and the 
other in us as constitutive of our interest in knowledge (in general) and 
self-knowledge (in particular). Language, then, is the medium through which all 
possible knowledge, is mediated: the only thing whose nature we can know is 
language.

Habermas introduces his discussion of Freud with the claim, "psychoanalysis is 
relevant to us as the only tangible example of a science incorporating 
methodical self-reflection" (Habermas, KHI, 214). Beginning with a comparison 
between the philology of Dilthey and the psychoanalysis of Freud, Habermas 
remarks that criticism "sets right" the mutilated "text" of tradition 
(Habermas, KHI, 216). However, psychoanalysis exceeds philology because the 
concerns of analysis are not restricted to a language in which conscious 
intentions are expressed. Psychoanalysis is a procedure which operates "behind 
the back" of the speaking subject, since the symbolic structures that 
psychoanalysis seeks to comprehend are corrupted from "within." Unlike 
empirical or hermeneutic interests, psychoanalysis provides cognitive resources 
to extricate the Hegelian "causality of fate" and reverse or dissolve its 
determinacy. At the same time, psychoanalysis works with its subject matter in 
a concrete and therapeutic manner, simultaneously, in Habermas's view, 
rigorously scientific and (intersubjectively) self-reflective.

In this sense, self-reflection, for Habermas, equally includes two moments: the 
cognitive and the affective and motivational. These two aspects are necessary 
since "critique would not have the power to break up false consciousness if it 
were not impelled by a passion for critique" (Habermas, KHI, 234). With the aim 
of psychoanalysis to reverse the process of split-off symbols, the subject coes 
to be motivated by a ‘passion for critique' along the lines of an  interest in 
self-knowledge (Habermas, KHI, 234-235) which further entails that the subject 
take moral responsibility for this internalized otherness (i.e. psychoanaysis 
is normative and scientific). Because analysis expects the patient to undergo 
the experience of self-reflection it demands "moral responsibility for the 
content" of the "illness." Indeed, the insight to which analysis leads is this: 
"that the ego of the patient recognize itself in its other, represented by its 
illness, as in its own alienated self and identity with it" (Habermas, KHI, 
235- 236). By analogy, Habermas follows Hegel's dialectic of moral life here, 
where the criminal "recognizes in his victim his own annihilated essence" 
(Habermas, KHI, 236). In effect, we are constituted by ‘the other' (autonomy 
can only be conceived, Habermas maintains, through mutual recognition). The 
"dissolving" of the patient's attachment, then, is not accomplished by 
bracketing his or her subjectivity, but precisely by its controlled employment 
(Habermas, KHI, 237). This idea picks up the Kantian theme whereby the subject 
self-reflective guides their autonomy through obedience to an autonomous rule 
structure which, Habermas argues, is presupposed in the logic of communication 
but given content only through practical forms of discourse - this does not 
lose sight, however, of the Hegelian critique of Kant which understands 
self-reflection to be a coming to self-knowledge that one must have known in 
order to "know" something else: "only something already known can be remembered 
as a result and comprehended in its genesis" (Habermas, KHI, 9).

Psychoanalysis, by merit of its capacity to makes sense of internal 
corruptions, "unites linguistic analysis with the psychological investigation 
of causal connections" (Habermas, KHI, 217). As a depth hermeneutics, in 
contrast to philological hermeneutics, psychoanalysis charts the "internal 
foreign territory" of the subject which captures the alien and alienated 
character of something that belongs to the subject (Habermas, KHI, 218). The 
scientific character of psychoanalysis is preserved in its search for cause and 
effect, while its dialogical and self-reflective aspects are preserved in the 
therapeutic relation itself. As a science, psychoanalysis appropriates 
instrumental forms of action through the use of language integrated 
monologically, reconstructing the manipulation of signs according to autonomous 
rules, divorced from experience. As self- reflection, according to Habermas, 
psychoanalysis unites analytic technique with the self-formative processes of 
both the analyst and the analysand - then equated with Hegel's struggle for 
recognition.

Habermas argues that the radically intersubjective experience of reflection 
induced by enlightenment is precisely the act through which the subject frees 
itself from a state in which it had become an object for itself (Habermas, KHI, 
247). Reading Freud's theory as a depth-hermeneutics which explicates the 
conditions of the possibility of psychoanalytic knowledge, Habermas argues that 
metapsychology unfolds the logic of interpretation in the analytic situation of 
dialogue (Habermas, KHI, 254). Habermas understands the transference situation 
as the condition of possible knowledge, which is at the same time is the 
vehicle for a comprehension of the pathological situation (Habermas, KHI, 254) 
[this, I think, is precisely what needs to be explored in more detail]. 
Metapsychology, establishing connections between language deformation and 
behaviourial pathology, thereby presupposes a theory of ordinary language. A 
theory of ordinary language, which remained to be adequately developed in 
Freud's day, has two tasks: to account for the intersubjective validity of 
symbols and the linguistic mediation of interactions on the basis of reciprocal 
recognition and, to render comprehensible socialization, the initiation of the 
subject into the grammar of language games, as a process of individuation 
(Habermas, KHI, 255). According to this model, the structure of language 
determines both language and conduct, where motives of action are comprehended 
as linguistically interpreted needs (shared by the collective). For Habermas, 
motivations are not instinctual impulses that operate from behind subjectivity 
but are subjectively guiding, symbolically mediated, and reciprocally 
interrelated intentions (Habermas, KHI, 255).

To sum up a bit: Habermas identifies in Freud a route that positivism closes 
off, a line of inquiry which does justice to two moments of self-reflection: 
the rational reconstructive and the emancipatory-cognitive. Self-reflection, 
then, has several characteristics: discovery (the production of 
scientific knowledge), creation (the production of a new means of 
self-knowledge and self-identity within a larger community), and genesis (the 
question of origin and the thematic possibility of making meaningful 
distinctions between discovery and creation).

ken



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