Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid

Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology

Dany Nobus, Malcolm Quinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135446192
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is stupidity sublime?

What is the value of a 'dialectics of ignorance' for analysts and academics?

Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid draws on recent research to provide a thorough and illuminating evaluation of the status of knowledge and truth in psychoanalysis. Adopting a Lacanian framework, Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn question the basic assumption that knowledge is universally good and describe how psychoanalysis is in a position to place forms of knowledge in a dialectical relationship with non-knowledge, blindness, ignorance and stupidity. The book draws out the implications of a psychoanalytic theory of knowledge for the practices of knowledge construction, acquisition and transmission across the humanities and social sciences.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section addresses the foundations of a psychoanalytic approach to knowledge as it emerges from clinical practice, whilst the second section considers the problems and issues of applied psychoanalysis, and the ambiguous position of the analyst in the public sphere. Subjects covered include:

The Logic of Psychoanalytic Discovery

Creative Knowledge Production and Institutionalised Doctrine

The Desire to Know versus the Fall of Knowledge

Epistemological Regression and the Problem of Applied Psychoanalysis

This provocative discussion of the dialectics of knowing and not knowing will be welcomed by practicing psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalytic studies, but also by everyone working in the fields of social science, philosophy and cultural studies.

Part I

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The subject of
psychoanalysis:
knowledge, truth
and meaning

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Chapter 1

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Midwives of the whys and
wherefores: on the logic of
psychoanalytic discovery

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It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

John K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 131

Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

Richard P. Feynman, attributed

Psychoanalytic knowledge

How did Freud arrive at the complex body of ideas that is known to us as psychoanalysis? If it seems ludicrous to proclaim that it suddenly emerged from his head, like Athena from Zeus, or that he quite simply discovered it through focused research and a smidgeon of serendipity, like a fully formed diamond waiting to be found by one fortunate soul, can we honestly say that he invented it, if not entirely ex nihilo, perhaps from the soft clay of his own creative thought processes? More than one hundred years after the birth of Freud's ‘talking cure’ and in the aftermath of a plethora of scholarly studies on the epistemology of psychoanalysis, these questions may appear as totally superfluous, because their hackneyed, if often antithetical answers do not bear a renewed challenging. Freud came to psychoanalysis, it is being peddled, after engaging in the heroic enterprise of his ‘self-analysis’, after failing to find a neurophysiological explanation for the experiences reported by his hysterical and obsessional patients, after relentlessly pursuing his ardent ambition to give birth to a new revolutionary science, quite independently from established scientific traditions yet resolutely geared to resolving the mysteries of the human condition on the basis of reason, and reason alone.

In this chapter it is not our intention to reopen the debate concerning the value of the various ‘origin myths’ that have been formulated, sometimes quite persuasively, over the past fifty years or so in order to account for the birth of psychoanalysis. Nor do we wish to study, in typical structuralist fashion, the symbolic rules of transformation governing the intellectual replacement of Jones's popular portrait of Freud the hero (Jones 1953–57) with Sulloway's controversial picture of Freud the cryptobiologist (Sulloway 1992). Instead we wish to examine how Freud described and explained the knowledge underpinning the theoretical models and therapeutic techniques within the general doctrine of psychoanalysis. What type of knowledge does psychoanalysis contain? Where does this knowledge come from? How does the psychoanalyst operate with it in his clinical work and beyond the walls of the consultation room? Does this knowledge meet the rigorous requirements of scientific episteme or is it doomed to remain stuck in the doxa of beliefs and opinions?

It is common knowledge that Freud always considered himself a child of the Enlightenment, putting all his trust in the power of scientific reason, yet it is equally accepted that his allegiance to the ideology of ‘illumination through knowledge’ did not suffice as a guarantee for the scientificity of his work. Interestingly, the scientific status of psychoanalytic knowledge has been disputed not only by its most ardent detractors, but also by some of its most loyal adherents, amongst which it would surely be wrong not to include Professor Freud himself. In an oft-quoted passage from his case history of Elisabeth von R, Freud deplored the fact that he had not been able to maintain his own intellectual standards: ‘[I]t still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own’ (Freud and Breuer 1895d: 160). In terms of Lyotard's distinction between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge (Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 25–27), Freud clearly admits to operate in the realm of the latter, although very much despite himself and owing to ‘the nature of the subject’. Many case studies later, at the very end of his career, it did not stop him from saying that psychoanalysis should be regarded as a ‘natural science like any other’ (Freud 1940a [1938]: 158). Some critics will no doubt argue here that the alternatives of science and belief are spurious in themselves, since psychoanalytic knowledge is just a load of codswallop ingeniously disguised as profound wisdom. Yet if the critics are right, this still leaves the question as to where the hogwash comes from and why so many people, including patients and practitioners, produce and consume it.

One probably does not need to ascertain the feats of Freud the hero in order to accept that, unlike many founding figures in the history of ideas, or most mainstream scientists for that matter, Freud never really wrote up the results of a finished empirical and/or intellectual research process. Although it cannot be denied that he preferred knowledge over ignorance, rational clarity over irrational obscurantism, and that he was deeply driven by a strong sense of Wahrhaftigkeit (truthfulness) (Freud 1915a [1914]: 164) and Wahr-heitsliebe (love of truth) (Freud 1937c: 248), Freud rarely presented a set of definitive truths with a view to eradicating manifest falsities. Although any postgraduate student would be berated for presenting her work not as a retrospective account of a completed research project but as a reflection, in real time, of the actual research process, Freud seems to have done exactly that, expressing his views on things he was still very much in the process of investigating. He announced, postponed and eventually aborted the idea of completing a ‘general methodology of psychoanalysis’ (Freud 1910d: 142), settling instead for a series of technical papers which contain little or no practical advice, numerous thorny questions and few solid answers. Purportedly expository volumes such as the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud 1916–17a [1915–17]) and the posthumously published Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Freud 1940a [1938]) invariably offer new perspectives on relatively well-known psychoanalytic issues which challenge the outsider and defamiliarize the insider. Reading Freud gives one the idea that at the end of his life he still had not succeeded in finishing the project he initially set out to research.

From these initial observations it can already be concluded that Freud did much more than introducing the ear into the reigning clinical establishment of his time. For he also stubbornly pursued a research practice based on the vicissitudes of speech and language, speaking and listening, reading and writing, which contravened his scientific aspirations, affected the status of psychoanalytic knowledge, and informed an unusual epistemological economy. The position adopted by Freud, which cannot be disjointed from the body of knowledge he produced, was unlike any other recognizable scientific, philosophical or professional position, although, as we shall see later on in this chapter, we have to acknowledge certain similarities between the Freudian analyst, Socrates' ‘atopic’ position, the detective, the archaeologist and the Zen master. In releasing the whys and wherefores sustaining the symptomatic straitjackets in his patients' minds, and accounting theoretically for the dynamic relationships between the agencies of the ‘psychical personality’, Freud wanted to be a scientist, yet at the same time his epistemology was miles removed from the hypothetico-deductive method pervading scientific practice. Apart from exploring the way in which Freud developed the knowledge which supports the psychoanalytic edifice, this chapter will demonstrate why psychoanalysis cannot constitute a Weltanschauung, how it differs from closed systems of knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, why Freud was right in proving himself to be continuously wrong.

In search of psychoanalytic research

Let us consider the possibility that psychoanalysis is included as an acknowledged discipline within an academic curriculum leading to a degree in social sciences. It is extremely likely that the lecturer responsible for the psychoanalysis module(s) will at some point be asked to consider or even to teach the research principles governing psychoanalytic practice, so that students gain insight into the nature of psychoanalytic research questions, are able to pursue a psychoanalytic research project in a psychoanalytically correct fashion, and are capable of interpreting research results in accordance with the psychoanalytic orientation of a project and psychoanalytic principles in general. The lecturer will probably be led to examine how psychoanalysis may be situated within or vis-à-vis the traditional distinction between quantitative and qualitative research methods in the social sciences, and he will probably decide that his discipline ranks amongst the qualitative approaches, sharing some of its central assumptions with content analysis, discourse analysis and grounded theory, although nonetheless sufficiently different from these methods to deserve further investigation. In addition he might recall Dilthey's classic dualism between Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the mind), whereby the former favour Erklärung (explanation) and the latter emphasize Verstehen (understanding), and he might even remember Windelband's equally classic opposition between nomothetic (universalizing) sciences and ideographic (individualizing) sciences. And he will presumably conclude that psychoanalysis is an ideographic science of the mind which operates in the realm of understanding. Adding a touch of Weber, he might then proceed to the assertion that the type of understanding which comes closest to the research methodology employed within psychoanalysis is a rational, explanatory understanding, whereby someone's actions are understood through inferring the motives and intentions behind them, as opposed to a direct observational understanding, which merely relies on empathy or an awareness of situational rules.

Relying on a set of contemporary and classical epistemological distinctions, the lecturer builds his case, and slowly the module on psychoanalytic research methods is starting to take shape. However, no matter how convincing the result may be, there are at least two problems with this approach. Firstly, and most importantly, the lecturer seeks to find answers to the question as to what constitutes psychoanalytic research (and, by extension, which epistemological status psychoanalysis has), by trying to situate Freud's invention within a series of known methodologies and accepted forms of knowledge. As such, he has recourse to a list of purportedly established concepts, trying to capture the specificity of psychoanalysis through one or more of these notions, yet unwittingly reducing the very specificity that he is supposed to account for. It may make sense to say that psychoanalysis is qualitative rather than quantitative, and few people will indeed doubt that Freud was not particularly concerned with trying to measure the size of the unconscious, yet this apparent convergence between psychoanalysis and qualitative methodologies in the social sciences does not preclude the fact that psychoanalysts would be very hard-pressed to admit that they practise a kind of (clinical) discourse analysis, if only because discourse theorists tend to attribute most meaning to central, recurrent themes, whereas psychoanalysts are much more attuned to marginal, isolated inconsistencies. This strategy of trying to situate psychoanalysis within accepted methodological and epistemological categories has also generated the (hitherto unresolved) debate on whether psychoanalysis is an art, a science or a religion, which, as we shall see, did not escape Freud either and which has prompted numerous researchers to evaluate the origin and function of psychoanalytic knowledge. Again, this debate obfuscates the specificity of psychoanalytic knowledge and generally occludes the particular ways in which psychoanalysis aligns knowledge and truth. Secondly, our conscientious lecturer assumes that it is possible (necessary, even) to restrict psychoanalytic research to one or the other of the opposing poles within the various dimensions of scientific practice, thus excluding, for instance, its realm of action from the natural, explanatory, nomothetic sciences and the praxis of direct observational understanding. Yet if anything can be learnt from the way in which Freud practised and developed psychoanalysis, it is that his highly individualized clinical technique did not stop him from formulating universal laws, that his ‘science of unconscious mental processes’ (Freud 1925d [1924]: 70)—a science of the mind if there ever was one—did not prevent him from betting on the (past and future) achievements of the natural sciences, especially biology, and that his rational, explanatory understanding of a patient's symptoms did not preclude his having recourse to the method of empathy. One could of course use Freud's epistemological wobbliness, here, as yet another indication of his total lack of scientific rigour, yet it may be more accurate, and more in accordance with the epistemological specificity of psychoanalysis, to say that Freud refused to commit himself to one particular alternative. Transcending the split between C.P. Snow's famous ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1993 [1964]), Freud testified both to the artificiality of traditional epistemological distinctions when human intentionality is allowed to enter the research equation, and to the extraordinary status of knowledge in psychoanalysis.

Although throughout his life Freud remained very concerned about psychoanalysis being a respected and respectable discipline, and often complained about the resistance against it (Freud 1925e [1924]), despite its significance for a wide range of psychological and non-psychological sciences (Freud 1913j), he never bothered to try to identify it along one or more of the aforementioned epistemological lines. Dilthey, Windelband and Weber do not have the honour of figuring amongst Freud's intellectual sources; their distinctions do not appear as such in any of Freud's major contributions to psychoanalysis. The term ‘research’ does not feature in the subject index of the Standard Edition, and given James Strachey's tight control over the translation project and his pervasive desire to ensure the scientific respectability of psychoanalysis, it is difficult to blame this absence on the compiler's forgetfulness. Freud's only extensive comment on the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge, the type of research activity that contributes to it and the relation between psychoanalysis and other praxes is embedded in ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’, Lecture 35 of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud 1933a [1932]: 158–182]). Yet even here, late in life and drawing on the benefits of professional hindsight, he seems better at exposing—in strict allegiance to Comte's famous law of the three stages—the epistemological dynamics of magic, religion, philosophy, art and science, than at clarifying the exact status of psychoanalysis.

Freud expresses his position on the matter in no uncertain words right at the beginning of the lecture and again at the very end, devoting the lion's share of his discussion to a psychoanalytic interpretation of various ‘proper’ Weltanschauungen. ‘As a specialist science,’ Freud says of psychoanalysis, ‘it is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one. But the Weltanschauung of science already departs noticeably from our definition [“a Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place”]’ (ibid.: 158). We cannot fail to be struck by the strange, seemingly inconsistent argument that Freud is formulating here: 1. psychoanalysis is incapable of forming its own Weltanschauung (and this speaks in its favour, since Weltanschauungen are essentially idealistic and illusory); 2. psychoanalysis must conform to the scientific Weltanschauung, and thus give up its epistemological lack for a newly found, non-psychoanalytic completeness; 3. the scientific Weltanschauung is not a Weltanschauung in the first place, and this is why it fits psychoanalysis. After having said that psychoanalysis is unable to construct its own, Freud claims that it still needs one, yet the one it can embrace does not actually qualify!

Witness his explanation of how science ‘departs noticeably’ from the traditional Weltanschauung: ‘It is true that it [science] too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfilment of which is relegated to the future. Apart from this it is marked by negative characteristics, by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable and by its sharp rejection of certain elements that are alien to it. It asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations—in other words, what we call research—and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination’ (ibid.: 158–159). It remains to be seen whether Freud's description of science here would meet with much approval from contemporary hard-nosed scientists, partly because they might doubt that their explanations should follow a uniform pattern but mainly because they might feel quite uncomfortable acknowledging the ‘negative characteristics’ of their paradigm, and perhaps outright weary at the idea that there are serious limitations to knowledge.

Freud's unflinching support for the scientific enterprise, here, has of course been used by noted Freud critics, such as Adolf Grünbaum (1984, 1993, 2004), and equally noted Freudian revisionists, such as Mark Solms (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 2002; Solms and Turnbull 2002), to underscore the unequivocal tenor of his intellectual aspirations and to define psychoanalysis respectively as a fundamentally flawed undertaking or a radically unfinished project. What most critics miss, however, is the fact that Freud is happy to align psychoanalysis with science precisely because science is not a Weltanschauung, because it does not claim to solve all the problems, because there exists a constitutive lack of knowledge at the heart of its intellectual body, because its knowledge is not all-encompassing but strictly limited in space and time. It is because the truth of science rests in its negative characteristic of an incomplete knowledge that Freud is confident that psychoanalysis' fundamental and characteristic inability to constitute a Weltanschauung will not be annihilated when it embraces the ‘ideology’ of science. Only by virtue of its central gap in knowledge can science provide psycho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The subject of psychoanalysis: knowledge, truth and meaning
• PART II Less than knowledge: psychoanalysis and the economies of thought
• Notes
• References
• Index