Psychoanalysis and Social Involvement

Interpretation and Action

U. Hadar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137301079
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301093
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Psychology

This book considers psychoanalysis as an ethical enterprise, both on the level of the individual in analytic psychotherapy, and on the level of society in the global struggle for human and civil rights. Hadar examines the struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lives from a Lacanian psychoanalytical perspective.

1

The Subject

Being-a-subject

There are different ways to be happy, healthy or fulfilled. One can makemoney, one can be active in the community, be invested in a valuable relationship, in parenthood or family life; one can be an achiever in some activity, say in sports, art or public life. But psychotherapy sets its aims elsewhere. Psychotherapy, in a sense, could be said to deal with another dimension of happiness or health altogether. This is to say, psychotherapy is concerned with the way in which the individual experiences himself while going about the various activities of his daily life. I would like to refer to this reflective dimension of life, in which the individual constitutes her or himself both vis-à-vis and within the sum of her or his actions and activities, as ‘being-a-subject’.

This being-a-subject, for me, is the fundamental perspective of psychoanalysis– not merely of the therapeutic approach, which is at the focus of the present book, but of psychoanalytic personality theory as well. While it is marginal in the present context, personality theory cannot be wholly left aside when we come to explain and describe the perspective of being-a-subject. What is required, first and foremost, is a discussion, even if brief, of what it means to be a subject– a question that philosophers have been looking at throughout modern history.

It is obvious, already from my opening remarks, that while, in my perception, being-a-subject involves reflectiveness– i.e., the individual’s consideration of her or himself– it cannot be reduced to this reflectiveness as such. Being-a-subject, as I consider it here, at the outset of my discussion of the concept, is reminiscent of how it is conceived of by phenomenologists like Heidegger (1927/1962) and existentialists like Sartre (1943/1958)– namely, a general mode of being in the world, a certain way of going about things, including mental things (like thinking thoughts or having fantasies). Being-a-subject bears a resemblance to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein– something which is borne out by the central role of reflectiveness in it, since Dasein is defined as a being that is capable of understanding– or of attributing meaning to– its own being (ibid.). Similarly, but with a significant difference, nevertheless, I consider it critical for being-a-subject that we should be able to perceive the things we do, or the situations in which we find ourselves, as things and situations that are ours, as things and situations that carry our personal imprint or name. What distinguishes between this and Heidegger’s approach– and what links it, by contrast, with Sartre– is that here being-a-subject turns to the world. For Heidegger, the subject is more immanent, directs itself more inward (see also Chapter 1 and 11). In the ideal being-a-subject, the individual experiences her actions as the outcome of her choice, something she or he has chosen to do. However, I formulate my notion of subjecthood more tentatively than being-able-to-make-choices, in such a way as to make being-a-subject possible also when a person does not carry out or experience a choice. One could substitute ‘making a choice’ by the softer notion of ‘taking responsibility’, which is to say seeing oneself as responsible for the acts one has committed or for the situations in which one is or has been. This predication of the subject is better than predication through acts of choice because it enables us to conceptualize being-a-subject also for those instances where we did not choose to do something or to be in the situation in which we find ourselves. In this conception, a person can take responsibility for things he did not choose to do (or indeed, decline responsibility for things he did elect to do). Still, the notion of responsibility does not embrace important meanings of being-a-subject. So it can occur, for instance, that while I do not feel responsible for my condition, I do nevertheless feel that it is part of me and I perceive it as an inherent part of my life and my identity, even if I would much rather not be in this situation or be the person who did this thing, which I may not hold in high regard and due to which I may even suffer. At the same time, I recognize that this deed or this situation is part of who and what I am.

Being-a-subject is inherently tied up with negativity, which may be expressed in the experience of negative feelings such as threat, anxiety, or distress. Though these feelings may be different from each other in some crucial ways, they always concern the possible loss of subjecthood- its erasure or annihilation. This is especially striking in Sartre’s work (ibid.), in which being-a-subject always emerges in the face of death, or of nothingness. The radical human freedom which Sartre propounds is only possible from this position– of being versus nothingness– because any constitution in the face of positivity is always already marked or shaped by this very positivity. When facing nothingness, by contrast, the individual is free to choose without the constraints of what he is already. It is by rejecting Sartre’s notion of absolute freedom that my approach is not existentialist– though I do call it ex-sistentialist (see Chapter 11), a term I borrow from Lacan (1973/1998) to refer to the manner in which some aspects of our being escape mentalization in a total way, even beyond the escape that is implied by the Freudian notion of the unconscious. This elusive aspect of being, which Lacan calls ‘the Real’ (ibid.), is what for me constitutes the subject as negativity. Being-a-subject forms itself against a background of a Real of which she has no positive knowledge. This introduces into being-a-subject an inexorable element of absence of freedom, by contrast to Sartre’s notion of the subject. Negativity plays a formative role in being-a-subject not only in my ex-sistentialist approach, but also in psychoanalysis as a whole, where negativity appears in the various forms of suffering, especially anxiety, but not only. In psychoanalytic writings, this is sometimes mistakenly thought of in terms of disease but, as I show throughout the book, the notion of disease neglects to appreciate the ethical nature of being-a-subject.

Much like in Sartre, for psychoanalysis being-a-subject is logically impossible in the absence of a threat to its very existence. In psychoanalysis, the two most general threats are those of corporeality on the one hand, and the dependence on the recognition of another subject, on the other hand. First, the subject is irremovably attached to a body, despite the fact that this body is never directly constitutive of being-a-subject; the body always remains alien to it (see Chapter 2). In some cases, the body limits, constrains or even obstructs the being of a subject, but even when it does not, it remains a threat to it. Second, being-a-subject is reliant on the recognition of another subject– a recognition which is never simply secure. The other, as Sartre said, is always a bit of a hell for the subject. Chapter 3 deals extensively with this aspect of subjecthood. From these two threats, it follows that the whole ensemble of concrete conditions for being-a-subject is marked by experiential negativity, by suffering. This is one reason why the analytic therapeutic context offersus a privileged field of investigation where it comes to being-a-subject. The patient arrives in therapy with the visiting card of the threat, of experiential negativity. Analytic psychotherapy operates by directing itself towards this negativity.

Let me give a brief illustration. A woman friend in her sixties lost her husband after a long illness. The first two years following his death were very hard. She was in constant pain due to her partner’s absence and suffered from an unbearable sense of futility and grief. Gradually she found her way back to a life that resembled her previous life, which was active in all respects (work, family, learning), but without the desire she had felt before. She was low spirited, most of the time, especially when alone at home, and even though she was as active and dedicated as ever with her grandchildren, she experienced them like a burden no less than a pleasure. In one of our conversations, at some point in the third year after her husband’s death, I asked her whether she would not like trying to take anti-depressant medication. ‘ ... in a low dose’, I said, ‘you can take it for long stretches of time, there are no side effects’. She laughed in response and said, ‘Oh Uri, it wouldn’t enter my mind. It’s hard. I am no longer enjoying things the way you used to know me, but that’s my life. That’s the sense I make of it, the pain and the pessimism included. When I take a look at my life, it seems to suit the picture as a whole. I would have liked to be in a different place, experience more joy, but I wouldn’t dream of doing it by force, by medicating myself’. Given her situation, this woman’s response, for me, exemplifies being-a-subject. It contains the discomfort of facing an absolute negativity, the death of her life-long partner, his absence, the continuing experience of him missing, of missing him. From within this absence, she now constitutes her position in the world, she cannot imagine herself without it, she does not want to. She does not try to cover up or to deny the absence; she makes no attempt to pretend and is instead determined to stake out suffering as her proper mode of being for the time being. At other times she was different. There is no inner self here that is more truthful than her earlier life-loving self, but nor is it less truthful. The central place of suffering in this dialogue of ours indicates how a therapeutic perspective may be relevant to the life circumstances of this woman, even if she rejected the manner in which I suggested therapy to her– in the form of anti-depressants. This rejection underscores the psychic nature of the type of therapy that directs itself at being-a-subject, as well as the way in which insistence on the psychic nature of any possible therapy actually constitutes the woman as a subject in the circumstances that make up her life. She lives her particular life. It is this life that is hers.

Being-a-subject forms a focal point for therapy in all psychoanalytic approaches, though the terminology used may differ (awareness, responsibility, maturity, etc.). The nature of the process by which it is attained, however, has been variously described. On the one hand, there are the objectivistic approaches of which ego psychology is an excellent representative. According to this approach, general balances in the mental economy allow the individual’s optimal functioning, whether emotional or social. Ego psychology has a fairly specific image of the psychic normativity which allows the individual to occupy her place as a subject within her mental makeup, as well as in society and, as it happens, these two coincide. This image involves a notion of a person who works, has a family, and views reality soberly and with a degree of detachment, as something that does not depend on her interests, actions or aspirations. A person’s ability to promote such functionality is called ‘ego strength’ and it is the task of psychotherapy to promote this strength. A strong ego is apt to help a person control her feelings, be a good citizen, maintain her health and the health of her loved ones, be pleasant in social intercourse and to her surroundings, look after her property, make a good living and so on. The basic motto of psychotherapy that is based on ego-psychology, therefore, is ‘Where Id was, there will Ego be’ (Freud, 1933, p. 80), which effectively states the objective of the analytic process. The Id in this formula represents everything instinct-driven inside us, whatever pushes for instant gratification and eludes the demands of culture or of due consideration of the other. For Freud, being psychologically healthy and taking one’s place as a subject is crucially bound up with controlling one’s impulses and adjusting them to the social and cultural reality. This reality, of course, is not easily represented and does not unfold its demands in anything like an univocal manner. On the contrary, in fact, in certain cases. According to Freud (1930), however, social reality is constituted on the basis of three fundamental prohibitions, the prohibition of taking another person’s life; the prohibition of eating human flesh; and the prohibition of sexual relations with members of one’s closest family (i.e., the prohibition of incest). For ego psychology, a person can be psychically healthy or, to put it more precisely, take her place as a subject, to the extent that she observes these three basic prohibitions– even if she entertains impulses and fantasies whose sole aim is to break these rules. Because there is a wealth of extensions of these prohibitions which generate a large collection of social norms, being-a-subject, for ego psychology, manifests in social conformity.

Freud’s message, however, is not just one of conformism, normativity and social conservatism (Frosh, 2010, pp. 6–13). It also recognizes human drives and the passions, which also inform his being-a-subject or, even in a stronger formulation, his mental health. Psychoanalysis has left its profound impact on Western culture as the catalyst par excellence of sexual liberation– initially as a result of the recognition of the universality, the naturalness and the omni-present nature of sexuality, and subsequently because it recognized that sexual oppression comes at a high cost in functional terms, to the point of mental illness. This led to the insight that being in touch with our desires, including the sexual ones, striving to satisfy them, as long as this does not obscure or obliterate the desires of others, actually contributes to mental health and social functioning, as well as to cultural pluralism. Ironically, given the conservative nature of psychoanalysis, it was often accused of promoting sexual permissiveness, mainly on account of theories like that of Wilhelm Reich (1936/1951) who, in his later writings, celebrated sexuality as the prime dimension of being human. Such theories, however, did help to put into proportion the functional objectivism of ego psychology. From the point of view of this book, it is significant that Reich started out, theoretically speaking, from opposition to fascism and the attempt to conceptualize this opposition in psychoanalytic terms.

In recognition of the liberating potential of psychoanalysis and being faithful to the original formulation in German of the aim of psychoanalytic therapy, Lacan (1955/2006, p. 347) re-translated Freud’s words.¹ Instead of ‘Where Id was, there shall Ego be’, Lacan put it, ‘Where it was, there shall I come into being’. He argued that while Strachey (Freud’s first, official English translator who coined the terms ‘Ego’ and ‘Id’) used ‘Ego’ and ‘Id’, in Freud’s original wording the regular personal pronouns ‘Ich’ and ‘Es’ (‘I’ and ‘It’) had featured (see also Hadar, 2010a). What is impressive about the difference between these translations is that with the minimal theoretical tools of translation Lacan creates a crucial shift in meaning, from the objective to the subjective. The thematic shift is from the vision of a person who fits in with a certain normative ideal to a vision of a person who strives towards being-a-subject. Therapy aims to allow a person to be whatever she chooses or wishes to be (as long as it is within the limitations of the possible and the lawful). The ideal suggested by Lacan’s translation is, of course, similar to my definition of being-a-subject, that is to say, the ideal of a person who stands behind her actions and thoughts, who perceives and experiences them more as an ‘I’ and less as an ‘it’. This implies a clear conception of what constitutes, in the eyes of psychoanalysis, a good choice in a person’s daily life. It is this choice that optimizes the being of a subject, the one that allows the person to put herself behind the choice as best as she can. The measure I propose here for being-a-subject is a matter of experience in the first place, although it implies a fit between the chosen course and the pre-existing tendencies of the subject, her desires, which is not an easy issue and may be circular in its reasoning at times.

Nevertheless, this formulation allows me to state that the interest of therapy is to identify domains in the life of the patient in which she feels robbed of selfhood, a stranger to her actions or milieu, and then make possible and initiate, where possible, a psychological process that will let the patient recognize herself in those places too. She may then connect with them, be more active in them and not just bear them, suffer them or, worse, be a victim to them. Such a process may involve a change in the subject’s experience of the area of life that is under discussion (work, family, etc.), to the effect of making one feel better at home with it, less alienated or, if this is too much to ask, less tormented by her sense of alienness. In the latter case, the unease can come to feel and be thought of as fitting with the subject’s sensibilities, as in the previous example. Much of this book is dedicated to a detailed examination of this work, but before I continue, let me remark on a certain fundamental ‘ill-at-easeness’ associated with being-a-subject, an ill-at-easeness that is irremovable, I believe. This is what one has to learn to live with.

Subject to a body

Being-a-subject, it would seem, emerges in a paradoxical field. It is perceived and conceived of as a non-physical sphere of life, a challenge to the physicality of existence, a protest against it, or even an indication that existence grows human where physicality is constrained, where the physical is no longer merely physical. Yet, the subject, on the other hand, is firmly welded to a specific body, an entity which is physically defined, positioned in space and time and marking a mobile territory. While my approach acknowledges forms of subjectivity that are not attached to a body (see Chapter 3), it nevertheless cannot make sense of purely disembodied subjectivities. In fact, the present approach is non-religious in precisely the sense that body-less subjectivity is perceived as derivative to embodied subjectivity, or is perhaps even parasitic upon it. Body-less subjectivities act in the world through bodies that are not directly attached to them. This idea considerably complicates our notion of being-a-subject.

The individual relies totally on the experience of his body in order to forge the platform on which his feelings of ownership, of belonging, and so on, rest. Such feelings originate in the ability to determine that a certain part of space belongs or does not belong to the subject’s body. For instance, healthy people decide very expertly whether the body they just touched is theirs or someone else’s, or whether a body part they see belongs to them or not. In ordinary states of experience, this is done with such skill that people are not aware that this is not trivial. Brain injury or sophisticated experimental manipulations can easily cause the individual to lose these capacities and, along with them, the entire experience of self integrity (Salomon, 2011). Similarly, in all experimental approaches, the very core of self experience inheres in the individual’s ability to tell when a motion of one of her limbs is caused by an outside force or by her own will– something which is the basic foundation of the possibility of agency. Things are not self-evident here either even if most of us experience them as such. Again, these experiences are easily unsettled as the result of brain injury or planned experimental manipulations (ibid.). These two basic abilities– to identify body parts as our own and experience bodily movement as self-initiated– make up what experimental psychology calls ‘the minimal self’. Its extension to other domains of experience and cognition is considered the hard core of self functioning. To the extent that being-a-subject is related to the experience of self, it is also related to these body-based experiences.

In addition to functions that are related to the minimal self, the body also serves as the metaphorical field in which subjecthood is expressed and articulated. For example, the notion of the face, especially in the wake of Levinas (1985, 2000), powerfully illustrates the subject’s rootedness in the body. Similarly, in the Jewish priestly blessing, birkat hakohanim, the divinity casts its being-a-subject onto the recipient of the blessing by positioning his face in relation to the recipient, ‘May God turn His face towards you’ and ‘May God light His face to you’. As I show in Chapter2, the specular or imaginary distinction between the subject and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Structure and Overview of the Books Main Themes
• 1  The Subject
• 2  Interpretation and Action
• 3  The Other
• 4  Thirdness
• 5  The Injury
• 6  From the Analytic to the Post-Colonial
• 7  Occupation and Analytic Psychotherapy
• 8  Activism
• 9  Psychological Activism in the Israeli-Palestinian Arena
• 10  Therapy and Politics
• 11  Epilogue: The Ethical and the True
• References
• Index