File spoon-archives/marxism-psych.archive/marxism-psych_1997/marxism-psych.9706, message 6


Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 15:16:31 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Habermas and Freud


G'day Chris,

You quote me:

>Any thoughts on Habermas's utilisation of Freud: as an exemplar of
>communicative action, where both doctor and patient enjoy a self-reflective
>hermeneutic; or as support for his own theory of cultural domination as
>distortion/repression of the (I think) essentially human?

And ask:
>I wonder if Rob could come
>back on this with his own observations then it would
>be easier to comment on what is meant by a "self-reflective
>hermenutic". Perhaps if Rob copied his reply also to
>marxism-psych, we could see if anyone wanted to develop
>a thread there.

I'll try - although I guess I was hoping you'd unpack some of this for me.
I'll  pinch the point of departure from Habermas himself, and the
explication from Giddens's account of the argument - they do it better than
I could.  Certainly, the two gentlemen are agreed that human self-knowledge
is necessarily involved in emancipatory solidarity - to a degree they think
Marx tended to underestimate (I think H. and G. underestimate a couple of
salient criteria themselves, but let's not get into that here).

It all comes down to what Habermas thinks we should expect of critical
theory.  For Habermas, domination is the problem and understanding about
the relationship between the source of human behaviour and the
institutional settings that contextualise and are contextualised by that
behaviour is the road to emancipation.

In chapters 10-12 of *Knowledge & Human Interests*, H. employs a
psychoanalytic (pa) model to make this point - he calls pa 'the only
tangible example of a science incorporating methodical self-reflection'.
Of pa's relationship to hermeneutics, H. says 'the interpretive effort of
the analyst ... requires a specifically expanded hermeneutics, one that, in
contrast to the usual method of interpretation in the cultural sciences,
takes into account a new dimension ... (H. goes on to explain) ... The
reconstruction of the structure of a life history that can be remembered is
the model for the interpretation of symbolic structures in general ...
Here, in the focus of remembering life history, historical life is
concentrated as "that which is known from within; it is the place of last
resort."  For Freud, in contrast, biography is the object of analysis only
as what is both known and unknown from inside, so it is necessary to take
resort to what is behind manifest memory.'

To quote Giddens's reading of these chapters: 'After all, the task of the
analyst is to interpret the meaning of what the patient thinks and feels.
Interpretation of meaning - as in decoding the content of dreams - is
inherent in pa therapy.  But the analyst reaches the limits of
interpretation where repressions block off access to the unconscious.
Psychoanalytic language then tends to shift to talk of "unconscious forces"
etc.  It tends to become more like the language of the natural sciences.
Why?  Because the analysis at that point becomes concerned with things that
happen to the individual, rather than things which the individual is able
autonomously to control.  It is in such circumstances, and only such
circumstances, H. argues, that concepts analogous to those of natural
science are relevant to the explication of human conduct.  The more
successful the psychoanalytic procedure is, the less these kinds of
concepts are appropriate, because the individual is able to expand the
scope of rational control over his or her behaviour.  The appropriate
language then becomes hermeneutic.  Note a further very important
consequence of all this.  PA therapy aims to change behaviour, by the very
process of transmuting what happens to the individual into what the
individual makes happen.'

Giddens has long been critical of Marxism on grounds of perceived
inadequacies re. the requisites of social change.  In this he has H. on
side (I suspect the Frankfurters in general would be too - and Lukacs'
*H&CC* - the bit about proletariat as subject and object of history -
implicitly makes the same point).  At any rate, I know of many quotes
concerning the scope and necessity of human agency, from both Marx and
Engels, but so do you, and let's not get off the track ....

Giddens goes on (as he tends to do), 'Marxism is inadequate as a basis for
accomplishing social change, insofar as it is solely concerned with 'iron
laws', 'inevitable trends', etc. it is then only the science of human
unfreedom.  A philosophically more sophisticated critical theory must
recognise that an emancipated society would be one in which human beings
actively control their own destinies, through a heightened understanding of
the circumstances in which they live.'

H. then goes on to classify (implicitly exhaustively) human knowledge
forms:  which we might call (1) instrumental ('scientific'/subject/object
relations), (2) practical (communicative/negotiated meaning - which is
where hermeneutics is complicit) and (3) emancipatory (issues of
'domination' and agency).

That's the crash-course version of it all, anyway - still, plenty of scope
for response, I should think ...

Cheers,
Rob.







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