From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Balancing practicality & self formativity
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 09:04:15 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



On Thu, 11 Jan 2001 09:47:36 -0800 (PST) Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> G: You're exhibiting the common confusion between (1) *nonconscious*: 
competences, background knowledge--the tacit dimension of cognition; and (2) 
*unconscious*: repressed experience, blocked content, willfully motivated 
unawareness.

Ummm... well, yes. But we can't avoid the affective dimensions of the 
unconcsious. It was good of you to bring this distinction up with more than a 
passing reference.

But this aside (I can't address everything all at once) - I have a question - 
or at least something that I'd like to see addressed by anyone interested.

In Habermas's interpretation of Freud, it is clear that he sees psychoanalysis 
as a therapeutic "reveral" of privatized langauge. This is one of the key 
points where I disagree with Habermas - and there are several subtle places in 
which Freud undermines the passage that Habermas quotes on this (sorry, I don't 
have a quote handly although I can look it up if need be) - it has to do with 
the translation of thing-representations to word-representations and it is 
based on the possibility of verbalization / translation of the first 
object-cathexes. In short: Habermas takes Freud to be saying that repression is 
merely a privative process, contributing nothing of its own to the articulation 
of the psyche but only depriving the latter of self-consciousness. This is how 
Habermas reads Freud, and, to be sure, not just Habermas. What is crucial here 
is our understanding of "first object-cathexes." On the contrary (and this is 
supported in other parts of Freud's work) - what if repression far from simply 
blocking the verbalization of conscious discourse is also its indispensable 
precondition? This would render any kind of "undistorted speech situation" a 
conceptual impossibility. In other words: if we can only communicative 
*because* there are certain things we cannot communicate or verbalize, then the 
presupposition of undistorted speech is a logical fiction. However, I'm feeling 
rather sympathetic to communicative theory today - what kind of theory of 
systematically distorted speech might be articulated on this basis? I'm looking 
for a word that means "to skip over" or "eclipse" ... to use a visual example - 
when we look at one thing we cannot 'see' something else... well, to talk about 
one thing also means that we cannot talk about something else... and it seems 
to me that discourse falls into the same trap (I'm tempted to compare 
Freud's 'navel of the dream' and the 'navel' - utterly dark and tangled spot - 
of discourse). The implication being that we can only agree on one topic by 
deliberately (or unconsciously) excluding something central to that very topic 
- a kind of 'vanishing mediator' (back to Hegel's logic of essence as a theory 
of ideology?).

Does anyone have anything thoughts on this? (or have a more coherent way of 
expressing it!).

_________


> G: Whatever. This is an old theme in Analytical psychology (the Jungian vein 
of psychoanalysis), which James Hillman has expressed as a "re-Visioning" of 
psychology, for several decades.

I can't stand Hillman... my apologies to Hillman fans... Gary, can we agree not 
to talk about Hillman's Revisioning of Psychology? (he said with a nod and a 
wink). Although... in Hahn's Perspectives on Habermas there is an interesting 
essay on Vico and Habermas.... (Hillman is big on Vico).

discursively awry,
ken



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