Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis
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Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis

Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation

Robin S. Brown

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eBook - ePub

Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis

Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation

Robin S. Brown

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About This Book

This book explores how a deeper engagement with the theme of spirituality can challenge and stimulate contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.

Bringing relational psychoanalysis into conversation with Jungian and transpersonal debates, the text demonstrates the importance of questioning an implicit reliance on secular norms in the field. With reference to recognition theory and shifting conceptions of enactment, Brown shows that the continued evolution of relational thinking necessitates an embrace of the transpersonal and a move away from the secular viewpoint in analytic theory and practice.

With an outlook at the intersection of intrapsychic and intersubjective perspectives, Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis will be a valuable resource to analysts looking to incorporate a more pluralistic approach to clinical work.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2019
ISBN
9780429884252
Edition
1

Part I
Foundations

Chapter 1
The spiritual ground of psychoanalysis

Establishing a basic sense of theoretical orientation, this introductory chapter focuses on conceptualizations of the unconscious in relationship to the notion of a transpersonal psychoanalysis. I argue that a spiritually receptive approach to psychoanalysis entails that “the unconscious” be considered transpersonal and in some degree accessible to conscious experience. To address this theme invites a rapprochement between Jungian psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. Identifying the insufficiency of efforts to promote spirituality merely by endorsing the creative value of fantasy, I begin to articulate how the fear of paranoia has limited the field’s development.
Seeking to define what makes a therapeutic approach “psychoanalytic” has become a surprisingly complex task. Historically, efforts to circumscribe the field have often been undertaken for political reasons and in order to preserve professional advantage – a tendency that can be traced at least as far back as Freud’s Secret Committee.1 Wherever the task of defining the field has been undertaken by a self-identified “psychoanalyst,” the results of this inquiry are liable to be reflective of the standards to which the clinician has been made subject over the course of their own professional development. Disputes concerning training and technique have tended to be central, and it is along such lines that one’s entitlement to identify as a practicing psychoanalyst has often been claimed to rest. Emphasis has thus been placed on debating such variables as use of the couch; the frequency with which patients attend treatment; and the pedigree of a clinician’s training analyst, supervisors, and teachers.
With the changing nature of the clinical, intellectual, and economic landscape, however, psychoanalysis has shifted from a profession of prestige to one that has been significantly marginalized. The psychoanalytic community has thus been forced circumstantially to take a more relaxed attitude towards the question of professional membership. As the field has slowly become less preoccupied with defining a limiting stance on what psychoanalysis ought to be, it becomes apparent that the task of definition is aided in seeking to establish commonalties rather than defining a basis for exclusion. Antonino Ferro offers a minimally dogmatic definition of the field as follows:
In my view, in order for the term “psychoanalysis” to be used legitimately, three invariants are indispensable: first, the conviction that an unconscious exists (even if it may assume a variety of forms); second, respect for the unvarying elements of the setting; and, third and last, an asymmetry, with the analyst taking full responsibility for what happens in the consulting room.
(Ferro, 2009, p. 210)
Of the three points identified, the latter two are concerned with the technicalities of clinical practice. If we are to inquire, more simply, what makes a particular approach to the mind psychoanalytic, then the one pertinent feature Ferro identifies is the conviction that an unconscious exists. It is with this foundational idea of an unconscious mind that any psychoanalytic practice ultimately organizes its claims. Attending to the origins of this idea offers the possibility of a fundamental reconfiguration in our understanding of psychoanalysis, for while the technical prescriptions Ferro eludes to might cogently be traced to the specific nature of Freud’s intellectual contribution, the idea of the unconscious is by no means a Freudian invention. Freud himself states: “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied” (quoted in Trilling, 2008, p. 34). This statement makes clear that Freud’s own claim to importance hangs upon the development of a “scientific method” that furnishes us with the proof of an idea that was already widespread.2 The practice of psychoanalysis is itself grounded in a theoretical notion not of Freud’s making.

The philosophical unconscious

In considering how “the unconscious” [das Unbewusste] came to emerge as an idea, we might first turn to RenĂ© Descartes (1596–1650). It is in the work of Descartes that we recognize a shift in Western consciousness that would later be expressed in the emergence of “psychology” as a distinct discipline. Descartes is known for theorizing that the mind is an entity that should be conceptualized in distinction from the physical body. His famous statement cogito ergo sum – “I think therefore I am” – identifies selfhood with the conscious mind. Any question of an unconscious would thus appear to destabilize the basis upon which Descartes’s philosophical enterprise rests. Nevertheless, a forerunner to the idea of the unconscious is still discernible in Descartes’s thinking. In order to preserve the self-transparency of the mind, this conception is associated with the domain of matter. As Eshelman (2007) states:
Descartes’s account of unconscious psychic life centers upon the claim that mental transparency does not hold for material causes of our emotional lives. Since the subject has no awareness of these causes, there will be cases where it cannot tell that its thoughts are by secret impressions implanted in the brain (due to a traumatizing experience), but not from current sensory perceptions (someone who resembles the offender).
(p. 299)
For Descartes, the unconscious is conceptualized in terms of an environmental event resulting in a physical trauma registered upon the brain. However, despite Descartes’s willingness to recognize the possibility of the past impacting our perceptions of the present, the main thrust of his philosophy hinges upon establishing the self-transparency of consciousness. This is why it is necessary for Descartes’s outlook that he consign unconscious processes to the material domain of the body. Yet in separating the mind from the body and emphasizing the role of thought in his definition of selfhood, Descartes’s philosophy inadvertently casts doubt upon the soul’s constant activity. This is most evident with respect to the phenomenon of sleep. If the soul is to go on existing, Descartes’s approach requires that we always be thinking. How, then, are we to explain the state of dreamless sleep? Descartes is required to offer a rather convoluted justification:
You say you want to stop and ask whether I think the soul always thinks. But why should it not always think, since it is a thinking substance? It is no surprise that we do not remember the thoughts that the soul had when in the womb or in a deep sleep, since there are many other thoughts that we equally do not remember, although we know we had them when grown up, healthy and wide-awake. So long as the mind is joined to the body, then in order for it to remember thoughts which it had in the past, it is necessary for some traces of them to be imprinted on the brain; it is by turning to these, or applying itself to them, that the mind remembers. So is it really surprising if the brain of an infant, or a man in a deep sleep, is unsuited to receive these traces?
(Descartes, 1984, pp. 246–247)
The questionable nature of this justification led Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) to argue that a neurological understanding of the unconscious is insufficient. Owing to the hardline separation Descartes establishes between mind and matter, the unconscious is associated with the material world while the conscious mind is associated only with thinking. Like Descartes, Leibniz wishes to preserve a notion of the soul’s constant activity, but unlike Descartes, he suggests that supporting this notion requires a more nuanced conception of consciousness – one that acknowledges different degrees of intensity, thus establishing a spectrum of mental experience ranging from relatively conscious states to relatively unconscious states. Thus, for Leibniz, not all thought is conscious, and the notion of the unconscious is framed as something mental. The self-transparency of the Cartesian mind can thus be contrasted with the Leibnizian mind’s multifaceted complexity.
It was Descartes’s philosophy that was to exert a more powerful influence on the development of the Western intellectual tradition. While Descartes’s adoption of a skeptical method in order to combat skepticism fell short, his dualist separation of mind from body emphasized a mechanistic conception of the material world that helped clear a path for the development of Western science. Although Descartes’s project was explicitly concerned with establishing the thinking subject as the ground upon which to refute skepticism, the more lasting impact of his philosophy came to be reflected in the implication that if there is to be a basis for certainty then it is to be found in a material world that could now be thought of as though existing in distinction from the thinking subject; a thinking subject that Descartes wished to establish as primary, but which seemed only less certain as a consequence of his emphasis on the cogito. It might be argued that Descartes’s rationalism only fostered the subsequent rise of empiricism.
David Hume (1711–1776) would come to criticize the cogito from an empirical standpoint, arguing that the mind is nothing but a bundle of sense perceptions. The empirical refusal of rationalism had a powerful basis in the politics of the time, for empiricism was considered a revolutionary movement standing for independence of thought and a resistance to religious dogma. The work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) can be understood as an attempt to establish a balance between the extremes of rationalist dogmatism and empirical skepticism. His concern is to protect the autonomy of reason – he wishes to deny that reason is merely contingent on habits of belief. Kant’s critical philosophy seeks to argue for an a priori knowledge upon which our experience of the world can be shown to unavoidably rest. In approaching this undertaking, Kant establishes a different form of dualism from the one endorsed by Descartes. While Descartes’s philosophy hinges upon the separation of mind from matter, Kant establishes a distinction between the phenomenal world (our experience of things) and the noumenal world (the things in themselves).
Although Kant’s philosophy sought to protect the autonomy of reason, it did so without adequately addressing the relationship between self and world. In Kant’s view, the law of cause and effect only applies as a function of subjective experience. If this is so, however, it becomes impossible to say how objects in the world (noumena) could give rise to our experiences (phenomena). The German philosophical tradition coming after Kant sought to offer a more comprehensive (and for this reason speculative) philosophy of consciousness. It was out of this endeavor that the philosophical idea of the unconscious proper arose. The term was coined in its German original by Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) who, under the influence of Jakob Böhme’s (1575–1624) Christian theosophy, built on Leibniz’s petits perceptions (perceptions that are not apperceived) and Kant’s dunkele Vorstellungen (obscure presentations) to formulate an evolving philosophy of the unconscious. For Schelling, reflecting the idea that reason can never gain mastery of its own conditions, an unconscious ground is asserted such as to express the original unity out of which self and other emerge. Spiritualized nature – the world soul – is conceptualized as the unconscious other in relationship to which self-consciousness comes into existence.
The notion of the unconscious articulated by Schelling was subsequently expanded upon by Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), and reframed in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) as the Will. In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) published his compendious Philosophy of the Unconscious – a work of more than 1,000 pages surveying the various permutations of “the unconscious” to have arisen in the recent history of Germanic philosophy. Such was the popularity of this idea in the mid-nineteenth-century German-speaking world that by the time Freud and Breuer’s ‘Preliminary Communication’ was published some 24 years later, von Hartmann’s book had already made its way through nine editions (Dufresne, 2000).
Broadly speaking, the notion of the philosophical unconscious can be understood as a unificatory principle that reflects a response to the dualisms of both Descartes and Kant. It offers itself as a speculative basis upon which to conceptualize the unity of self-consciousness, the unity of self and world,3 and the unity of mind and body. Reflective of its speculative and inherently murky status, it should be noted that the unificatory function of the philosophical unconscious is enlisted not to annul difference but to preserve it. This is worth underscoring, for it suggests the extent to which the idea upon which psychoanalytic practice is founded might serve to support diversity – this has perhaps been clouded by the extent to which our conceptions of what it means to invoke “the unconscious” have been shaped by Freudian dogmatism, and a consequent concern that orienting practice to this idea is liable to result in abuses of clinical authority. As Kugler (2005) writes:
The realization that our clinical grounds are not as absolute as we once thought does not lead to a radical relativism, nor to a nihilism. It leads, instead, to a psychological realism based upon the awareness that all systems of clinical interpretation gain their authority through a grounding in a god-term, a transcendental “ultimate.” But this “ultimate” is no longer so absolute, so ultimate. In therapeutic analysis we must still, on one level, believe in our god-term, and use it as if it were the ultimate explanatory principle. But on a deeper level, we also know it is not. And it is precisely this deeper level of awareness that prevents our psychological th...

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