Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 08:19:43 -0700
From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: re: Flawed reading


At 12:50 PM 7/18/01 -0700, you wrote:

>The difference between reconstructive and self-reflection follows
>quite straightforwardly from the character of emancipatory
>processes--and is quite overt in psychoanalysis' own dependence on a
>model of development vs. therapeutic catharsis--since articulation of
>a developmental process is essential to reflective distantiation and
>is, when realized by the client, cathartic, which is a keystone of
>therapeutic dissolution of neurosis--the so-called "talking cure".


I'm not sure that psychoanalysis is dependent on a model of development, 
Freud, for instance, didn't start with a model of development... it came 
much later. In fact, psychoanalysis was called a "talking cure" (Anna O., 
circa 1882) prior to Freud's development of a metapsychology (I think the 
term was first used in a letter to Fliess around 1895-97, but it didn't 
quite mean the same thing as it does in 1915).

Also, and I believe you are following Habermas's reading here, the idea of 
the dissolution of neurosis is a significant problem, Habermas also uses 
the term "reversal." It implies that the symptom is an isolated phenomenon, 
and that one is able to monadically reverse or dissolve a neurotic symptom 
through therapeutic means. As far as I can tell, the idea of 'working 
through' or 'traversing' more accurately captures the process. But there is 
a sharp difference with Habermas here. For Habermas, the excommunicated 
word is returned to its proper place (the process of privatization is 
reversed, the neurosis is dissolved). This makes the assumption that the 
proper place of a word/metaphor (whatever) is public to begin with. This is 
in contradiction to the experience of the Freudian clinic, and the notion 
of psychical life, which is eminently ground in a primordial repression: 
the ego emerges only after  a process of internalization. In essence, 
language - which is first encountered as an object, is internalized 
resulting in the splitting of the ego: with one agency separating the 
imaginary ego from the subject of the unconscious and another establishing 
itself within the subject of the unconscious itself and representing its 
original division. In effect, language is not solely public, but it also 
'fixed' at the level of the unconscious, and it is precisely this fixidity 
that permits the subject to speak at all. This radical internalization is 
not at all public (and yet it is public), since at the level of the 
unconscious it is meaningless and yet, at the same time, it determines what 
is and can be spoken. To put it another way, it isn't that language 
mediates the relation between the subject and object, rather, language is 
precisely that which is already 'within' the subject / object that 'frames' 
or 'sutures' their visibility to begin with. To 'dissolve' this 'symptom' 
would entail the dissolution of the subject, likewise, its reversal would, 
in the end, be psychotic. Habermas's comment in MCCA is interesting, where 
he claims that the one who rejects language flirts with schizophrenia or 
suicide... that may be true, but it also is true from the other side, the 
one who embraces language, without a remainder so to speak, also flirts 
with madness.

This is why I'm skeptical about Habermas's notion of the idealizing 
tendencies of language, because it seems to me that the failure to 
internalize an 'anchoring point' and the overcoming of distortions both end 
up in the same place: a radical rejection, or foreclosure, of a 
'blind-spot' in the symbolic network. The idea of idealizations only 
appears from a certain perspective, on that is ground in a particular 
subjective or philosophical orientation, i.e. a fantasy screen. This 
fantasy screen is far from universal...

>But a specific developmentality (enlightening life-historical
>development) is not yet a *theory* of development. One may disagree
>animately with Freud's specific theory of development without
>annuling the centrality of developmental processes in emancipatory
>articulations. Reconstructive reflection becomes a *formal*
>theoretical matter for Habermas, of course, in the "moral
>development" discourse with Kohlberg. But this is not a break with
>the sense of critical social science expressed in KHI, only a break
>with the Freudian exemplar (a break which "Moral Development & Ego
>Identity" addresses explicitly)


What do you make of Habermas's use of his reading of Freud against Foucault 
in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity then? He draws on the Freudian 
exemplar here. Maybe you can correct me here, but it seems to me that 
Habermas does not let go of his Freudian model at all, he maintains it 
throughout the rest of his writing.

ken



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