Delving more into psychoanalysis
than philosophy, Marcia Cavell explores certain issues on memory, anxiety,
emotion, thought, judgment, self, self-knowledge and freedom in her attempt to
look into the reflections made in philosophy and psychoanalysis on the problem
of becoming a subject. She advances a neo-dualism that argues for the mutual
irreducibility of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ and, at the same time, proclaims
the inevitability of the social dimension as well as that of the external world
for the constitution of a human subject. Cavell understands a human subject as
to be a creature that can see and be seen ‘both from a third-person point of
view and from a first person point of view’ (p. 3). She grounds this
understanding on the indispensability of a triangulation- of the self, other
selves and objects of external world- for our becoming the subjects that we are
in this world. Cavell attempts to show how certain neurological, philosophical
and psychoanalytic reflections (findings) on the nature and functions of
emotions, anxiety, memory etc. display the validity of her said understanding of
human subjects.

Cavell claims it to be a running
theme of her work that the ‘psychological space demands physical space; that
the inner world is embedded in, and fabricated from, interactions between world
and mind’ (p.1). With an endorsement of philosophical frameworks of later
Wittgenstein and Davidson, she claims the constitution of human subject to be impossible
without its social and inter-subjective dimensions. She attempts to uphold this
claim in theoretical as well as clinical psychoanalysis. The viewpoints from
psychoanalysis on varying issues that she has discussed include those of Bion, Winnicott,
Loewald, Stern, Renik, Fonagy, Ledoux, Weiss and Westen. However, her frequent referral
to Freud on almost all the issues may lead one to interpret the present book as
a reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, in the line of her previous book
The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Yet, of course, the
book contains enough material to stand on its own.

The book contains philosophical
views, though very sketchy, on anxiety, memory and emotion. Further, the last
part of the book contains discussion on issues like freedom of the will (in
Chapter 8), value of emotions (in Chapter 9), self-transcendence (in Chapter 7)
and self-discovery (in Chapter 10) pertaining to moral philosophy and certain
other issues (in Appendix) like ‘justified true belief’, ‘certainty’, ‘consensus’
and ‘reality’ that come under epistemology and metaphysics. However, Cavell
aims her discussion of those other issues at psychoanalysts rather than
philosophers.

The first three chapters deal on
memory, anxiety and time. Cavell asserts that ‘without memory there could be no
mind at all’ (p.10) and endorses to some continental philosophers (like Sartre,
Heidegger and Kierkegaard) idea that anxiety is ‘the central problem of our
lives’ and it is ‘not to be eased or dispelled, but lived’ (p.27) in the
becoming of authentic selves. In the light of Freud’s "Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through" (the main paper Cavell discusses on in
Chapter 3) the role of psychoanalysts in ‘mending time’, in bringing a neurotic
in terms with reality by getting him/her live in the present, by replacing the
rigid ‘melancholic’ attitude by a flexible ‘mourning’ attitude. The theoretical
viability of ‘mending time’, of course, depends on the ‘multiple memory systems’,
different kinds of unconscious and memory systems (described in Chapter 1) crisscrossing
each other  and ‘the external world’ and ‘the interpersonal’ (discussed in
Chapter 2) crucial for the formation of anxiety.

Cavell grounds the social dimension
of becoming a subject on the social character of thoughts (in Chapter 4: "Triangulation:
The Social Character of Thought").  Advancing her concept of triangulation
through an explanation of Davidson’s concept of triangulation, Mead’s concept
of symbolic communication and Grice’s account of meaning, she explains the
social character of thought. Further, to underline her realistic account, to
include the reality of the external world along with that of the self and other
selves, she distinguishes her concept of triangulation from that of Britton and
Green. Although none of our constructed pictures of reality is identical with
another and each is subject to revision, for her, ‘what keeps pulling us back
to the drawing board is the world itself’ (p.72). 

The social dimension has been
emphasized further with respect to the intentional aspect of human thoughts (in
Chapter 5: "On Judgment"). Cavell argues that neither sensations nor
symbols stand as the building blocks of our judgments and considers ‘building-block’
theory of judgment ‘hopeless’ (p. 80). In her assessment, Bion’s idea that
thought precede thinking (judgment) and Freud’s idea that ‘fantasy and its
prototype, hallucination’ precede judgment are unsatisfactory insofar as they
subscribe to the said theory.

Cavell presents her conception of a
psychoanalytic self as to be a temporal continuum of ‘I’, developed through
beliefs, desires, emotions, perceptions and knowledge, in Chapter 6, and argues
for the social dimension of self and self-reflection. She refutes an understanding
of self and self-reflection (held by Descartes, Locke and Hume) that takes ‘first-person
thinking itself granted’ (p.84), ignoring the background conditions, the ‘long
and intricate pre-history’ of a first-person thinking (p.85). In her
assessment, even Frankfurt’s idea of a ‘caring’, ‘volitional’ and ‘autonomous’
self is erroneous because, though it underlines freedom of the will and a sense
of moral agency fundamental to subjectivity, it omits something ‘crucial to
selfhood: our relations to other persons’ (p. 93). Moreover, for Cavell, even the
reality of external world is inevitable for self-reflection. In her words, "The
line between what is my self and what is not, between the authentic and the
false self, cannot be drawn with the external world on the other side"
(p.94).  

In Chapter 7, "Irrationality
and Self-Transcendence", after explaining the inadequacy of Davidson’s
theory of irrationality, Cavell argues that self-transcendence is a process of
creating ‘a different first-person point of view’ (p. 108). At the root of
irrationality, there are deep-rooted beliefs and desires, unsuitable for the
subject’s present experiences but the subject acts in accordance to those
beliefs and desires. Establishment as well as the removal of those beliefs and
desires is not possible at one go, it requires a long process.

In Chapter 8, "Freedom and
Understanding", Cavell hopes ‘to show that there are no good arguments of
a general nature to establish that freedom is an empty concept’ (p. 110).
Arguing for a kind of ‘explanatory dualism’, she maintains that an ‘understanding
of human behavior requires two mutually irreducible languages, a language of
body, or matter, and a language of mind’ (p. 115). From an irreducibility of
the language of mind to language of body, she infers that ‘freedom’ cannot be
ruled out. Even if there could be sufficient explanation for every human act
such that a rational subject turns out to be a non-reactive subject, to be
non-reactive means to be ‘self-annihilating’ (p.120). She says, "If to
understand is to forgive, then I suggest that the understanding in question is
this reactive objectivity" (p. 123).  She asserts that there is no absolute
freedom, but there are degrees of freedom. Similarly, there is no absolute
understanding, desiring, loving etc. (p. 121). She tries to argue that moral
freedom is indifferent to physical determinism, sensitive to the possibility of
understanding morally suitable acts. With our freedom, we cannot change the past
but the understanding of the past to enable ourselves to ‘change how we live
our lives now, precisely because we are the sort of ‘objects’ in the universe
that have minds, reflect, and make choices." (p. 124).

In Chapter 9, "Valuing
Emotions" Cavell aims ‘to show that emotions are quintessentially
subjective states that nevertheless have important objective and public aspects’
(p. 126). She holds the view that we are not human subjects without emotions;
there is no emotion without ‘caring’ and no ‘caring’ without ‘beliefs’, ‘attitudes’,
feeling’ and an appraisal of the reality. As beliefs are rationally assessable,
reality is publicly accessible, feelings are linguistically expressible, and
attitudes as well as suitable reactions to different realities are educable, so
also, emotions can be public, linguistically expressible and educable.  

Chapter 10, "Self-Knowledge
and Self-discovery" examines the difficulties involved in the ‘First
Person Authority’ view and in the ocular view of self-knowledge, Cavell
presents an alternative view that she claims of resolving ‘the seeming
contradictions between the subjectivity demanded by self-knowledge and
the publicity demanded by self-knowledge, in distinguishing what I
know from how I know it‘ (P. 144). For her, self-discovery
requires dialectic between the first-person and the third-person points of view
in relation to one’s self’. (p. 138)

Searle’s Rediscovery of Mind
and John Greenwood’s Realism, Identity and Emotion, are two important
works in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, respectively, which
argue for conclusions thematically close to those Cavell has attempted to
defend. However, Cavell has not referred to these two important works.

Greenwood advances a realist
account of social psychology; Cavell does a realist account of social
psychoanalysis. Although one account is in psychology and another in
psychoanalysis, both are attempts to show that the social dimension of self and
the reality of external world are necessary for the formation of a subjective
identity.

From the perspective of philosophy
of mind, although much of what Cavell says is anti-Cartesian, her dualism is
not free from what Lyons (in Modern
Philosophy of Mind) characterizes as the Cartesian vein responsible for survival
of philosophy of mind. This Cartesian vein is there too in Searle’s
understanding of mind that denies a reduction of consciousness to physical
things and ‘meat machines’ and, at the same time, denies it to be a ghost in
the machine. Searle and Cavell share the common objective of upholding the idea
that subjective consciousness is not reducible to the physical things of
external world, though one upholds it in philosophy of mind and another in
philosophy of psychoanalysis.

As the concept of triangulation is
crucial for the present work and a methodological account of mutual
supplementing between philosophy and psychoanalysis is involved, a link from
Quine to Davidson would have made things more clear than a switching on to
Grice from Davidson does (in Chapter 4).

Methodologically, Cavell pleads for
a ‘reciprocal containment’ between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Although
Quine does so with respect to natural science and philosophy to advance
naturalism, Cavell does not naturalize psychoanalysis, nor does she put
philosophy as a chapter of psychology or psychoanalysis. Moreover, although she
depends much on Davidson’s idea of triangulation, she is away from Davidson’s ‘anomalous
monism’ and goes with explanatory dualism.

This scholarly piece of work on
understanding human subjects from philosophical and psychoanalytic points of
view can be of immense academic help to philosophers, psychoanalysts,
neurologists and cognitive scientists; an invaluable piece for people working
on Freud.

 

© 2006 Laxminarayan Lenka

 

Laxminarayan Lenka, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis