Requiem for the Ego

Freud and the Origins of Postmodernism

Alfred I. Tauber

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804788304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism.

1

The Psychoanalytic Ego

In the final analysis, in its transcendent constructions and its best phenomenological texts, Freudianism holds deep within it what our era most lacks. That is undoubtedly the reason—despite its theoretical uncertainties, contradictions, even absurdities—for its strange success. Psychoanalysis therefore does not belong to the body of the sciences of man to which it is now attached and from which it will here be carefully dissociated. It is rather, the antithesis of those sciences.

—MICHEL HENRY, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis

Freud conceived a conscious (rational) ego, beyond its outward engagement with the world at large, as an inward-peering agent examining a mysterious unconscious. Thus, the mental consists of an aggregate of conscious and unconscious faculties, of which the latter dominates, at least in regard to establishing intentionality. Consciousness, the medium by which the ego intuits the unconscious and “knows” itself, serves as a monitoring system of choice and action—both conscious and unconscious.¹ As such, the self-conscious I (that which is designated the seat of consciousness) observes (evaluates, assesses) the unconscious other, which in exercising its own behavior is judged (again, in the Freudian therapeutic context of neurosis) as failing rational rules as it follows an agenda unbounded by time or logic. Reason then becomes the ego’s faculty that would control the unconscious, but within this construct a fault line appears, and it grows as Freud further developed his theory: Because no neat division between an ego-consciousness and an unruly and hidden unconscious exists in Freud’s mature theory (Freud 1923a; Tauber 2013), identity becomes a question. To the extent that an other is sought, an ego must relate to some primordial thing—perhaps an intimate other, but nevertheless not the self-conscious me yet mine. This problematic “presence” poses the fundamental Freudian question: “Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of the assent to my identity, it is still he who agitates me?” (Lacan 2001, p. 130; 2006, p. 436). To address that question, Freud sought to decipher the doppelgänger accompanying the conscious self with a philosophy of mind, which fulfilled his commitment to a therapeutic science. That strategy imposed restrictions that he could not predict, or at least he chose to ignore. Unpacking Freud’s philosophy of mind illuminates the conceptual infrastructure of his theory and the tensions within it, of which the most prominent is the problem of representing the unconscious in language alien to its own Logos.

I

To create the odd mosaic of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Freud extrapolated from fundamental tenets of physical science to construct the cardinal precept of mental activity: An uninterrupted stream of cause and effect governs all mental functions.² While consciousness exhibits apparent gaps in its sequence of events, Freud speculated that unconscious causation accounted for these gaps, which was revealed once repression yielded to analytic interpretation.³ However, since the unconscious mind as he interpreted its manifestations did not correspond to the laws of logic and natural order found in physical phenomena, how might those mental events be understood in terms of the normative structure seemingly beheld in the world at large?⁴ In other words, Freud’s theory required that the logic he discerned in rational thought (so applicable to observed natural phenomena) also be applied to study unconscious thought. In many ways this was a naïve assumption.⁵

The philosophical genesis of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory originates with Kant’s representational conception of mind.⁶ As argued elsewhere (Tauber 2009a, 2010), Freud was in several important respects a Kantian, albeit a particular kind of neo-Kantian. In some sense this allegiance is unexpected, given Freud’s naturalism and his positivist aspirations, but consistency is not at issue; an accurate philosophical description is. To place Freud within this Kantian universe reveals important insights into both the particulars of Freudianism and, directly pertinent to our theme, the later philosophical criticism directed against Kant’s epistemology that swept Freudianism along its torrential path.

According to Kant, the human mental structure organizes knowledge of the world, and for that matter our own thought, by its innate cognitive character. He posited the necessary a priori requirements for human cognition, which included space, time, causality, number, and so forth, as transcendental characteristics (necessary conditions) of the mind, which configure reality through such mental categories. Thus, the noumenon, the thing-in-itself, could not be known as such, that is, unmediated by mental processing. And because Kant’s antirealist epistemology asserts that the thing-in-itself cannot be known in a first-order way, reality is constructed (Tauber 2009c) with certain architectonics established by a point of view with embedded a priori forms of reason. The entire enterprise rests on a fundamental separation of self from the world, and thus a representation or picture of the world is required to depict reality—what is known requires a re-presentation to a subject. Thus, the rational faculty, both autonomous and self-critical, serves as the linchpin of Kant’s epistemology.

Because all mental activity is mediated as representations, there is no immediate knowledge of the world. That construction is determined not only by the innate cognitive structure of the mind as a perceptive organ but also by social (learned) forms of knowledge that are framed by linguistic constraints, cultural-historical parameters, political ideologies, and so on. Once integrated, these various modes of knowing present a particularized picture of the world and oneself in it. Freud inherited this philosophical understanding and built upon its basic postulates.

According to this Kantian formulation, even knowledge of the self is a representation (e.g., Damasio 1994; Metzinger 2003, 2009). As the subject of experience (as opposed to a Cartesian entity), the self upon its own scrutiny becomes a natural object, and, as such, it is perceived as a phenomenon through sensory faculties organized by the a priori categories of knowing (e.g., time, number, causality): “I represent myself to myself neither as I am nor as I appear to myself, but rather I think myself only as I do every object in general from whose kind of intuition I abstract” (Kant 1998 [B 429], p. 456). And thus the self-reflexive ego is subject to the same epistemological structure of all knowing: Because the world is not a given, the Kantian ego essentially becomes a representational function or logical power, one that also becomes a representational relation to itself (a being that possesses only a “self-relation” to itself).⁷ Note that “the transition from a subject of representing to the nominalized I [the ego] is . . . made by the notion of self-reflexivity . . . [and] Kant always identifies I-ness with self-reflexivity” (Frank 1997, p. 11). So the locution “I think”—from Leibniz to Kant—holds two meanings: (1) self-reflection of consciousness, that is, self-consciousness; and (2) the representing function of something, that is, perceptual object(s).⁸ And here, the nature of Freud’s philosophical construction clearly appears as a representational model of mind.

Freud characterized consciousness as a “sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities” (1900, p. 615).⁹ So the presentation of the unconscious to the conscious sensory faculty (albeit through complex pathways) comprised a metaphorical extension of the brain’s general perceptive qualities (Natsoulas 1984, 1985, 2001), namely, all conscious items are ultimately sensations or associated with sensations, and thoughts enter consciousness by “parasitizing sensation” (D. Smith 1999b, p. 417). Simply, the unconscious would be perceived as the ego perceives the external world. However, given that the unconscious is not governed by conscious time or causality, how then would this ontologically separated domain register in the realm of representations? Freud responded to this challenge by closely following Kantian epistemological principles.

Psychoanalytic theory rests on accepting that the unconscious cannot be directly known, inasmuch as it follows its own “laws” of cause and temporality and thus, at least from Freud’s perspective, fulfills the criteria of a noumenon. Freud treated it as such and referred to the noumenal character of the unconscious from at least 1910,¹⁰ through the metapsychology period (1915b, p. 171; Eriksson 2012), until his last writings:

In our science as in the others the problem is the same: behind the attributes (qualities) of the object under examination [the unconscious] which are presented directly to our perception, we have to discover something else which is more independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves. But herein lies the very nature and limitation of our science. . . . Reality will always remain “unknowable.” (Freud 1940, p.196; emphasis added)

Thus for Freud, the unconscious would be perceived, like nature, indirectly, as a representation—a phenomena recognized by the mind’s organizing faculties.¹¹ This capacity assembles perceptions and synthesizes them through an interpretive function residing in reason. Accordingly, Freud invented a “language of our perceptions”¹² (i.e., a system of representations) to capture phenomena just as a physicist portrays natural forces.¹³

Freud, following Kant, conceived reality as a product of mind and nature, for given the constitutive role of the mind in creating any knowledge of nature, a cognitive construction of reality, employing representations, must occur.¹⁴ Truth then is the correspondence between those representations and nature. In other words, the normative structure of the mind allows an accurate map to be drawn of reality, which for Freud includes the reality of inner mental states as well. So what Kant devised as a philosophy to study nature, Freud applied to the psyche;¹⁵ however, whereas Kant devised a philosophy to ground science and objective truth, Freud revised notions of human reality, radically. Indeed, psychoanalysis makes a unique contribution to the notion of reality by posing it as obstacle to fantasy and wish, the object of desire (Henry 1993, p. 392; Cousins 2005). And here the psychic calculus becomes operative, one in which a Janus-like ego peering simultaneously inward and outward to satisfy its mandate, mediates reality in two senses: (1) the traditional facilitation of fulfilling psychic desire; and (2) mediation by defining that reality, which in the psychoanalytic universe is the world of possibilities—objects of desire, targets of fantasy, opportunities for gratification. Thus, the real is determined by the meeting of mind with its intentional object, or in the terms of psychoanalysis, fantasy. “Success,” at least from this point of view, is the (maximal) fulfillment of desire in the encounter, and “failure” becomes its frustration. In either case, the real consists of the mental and its other, locked together.

Integration of unconscious states sets the ego’s vision of the world, and as libidinal forces find their intentional objects, fantasy and its object meet. But that other holds no final subjective-free status, because the other is conceived and then refracted through the psychic lens directed (intended) by wish, and then the object transmutes into various derivative representations. The cathexis may be attached either to an inner ego object (narcissistic investment) or to an external object of desire: The subjective object, of course, remains resolutely nonobjectified; and the external object itself is also conceived with heavy emotive components. Consequently, a distinct line between fantasy and the real cannot be drawn, for the mind’s intention, according to Freudian theory, constructs its reality through its own emotional structures and affective requirements. If fantasy dominates, the primary narcissism of the subject then must struggle in its rejection of the stimuli of the outside world, or, alternatively, desire seeks its object and reality becomes the site for its gratification. Thus, reality emerges as a negotiation between fantasy and its obstacle to become an achievement of sorts. The unconscious—whether lodged in the ego or the id (Freud 1923a)—alienates the subject from full acceptance of external reality so that ultimately the subject is the battleground over which reality and fantasy lay their respective claims.¹⁶ In short, the world—the psychic world—is a reality organized by the mind’s intentional desire, mediated by a complex normative rationality coupled to psychic drives (“emo-reason”) and largely perceived subconsciously. The conscious picture of reality is thus only a superficial gloss of a deeper dynamic.

II

As discussed, Freud’s basic philosophical move treats unconscious ideas as objects of scrutiny, albeit mental objects, which could be represented by the conscious mind. In other words, he assumed mental states have the same basic epistemological standing of entities and processes found in nature, and so to establish his science of the mind, he would apply the same principles established for the scientific study of nature to the unconscious mental life of humans. That crucial extrapolation rests on an implicit commitment to a representational epistemology, whereby the world is truly known because of the correspondence of our mental picture or representations of that world with the world itself. In other words, our minds mirror reality through the representations we employ (Rorty 1979). When Freud modeled the mind, albeit with novel interpretive methods, he confidently proceeded as if the correspondence of that representational strategy employed to study exterior nature would also hold for his studies of the psyche.¹⁷

Freud went to great lengths to show how the dynamics of the unconscious differs from those governing the conscious ego (i.e., the lack of intelligible notions of time and space; the seeming arationality and amorality of dreams; the inscrutable disjunctions of sequences that pass for loss of causality); nevertheless, in the key metapsychological paper “The Unconscious,” he declares that despite all distortions relative to reasoned thought, unconscious dynamics would be treated in the same terms one characterizes conscious thought: “All the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to them [unconscious latent states]” (1915b, p. 168). In other words, he made the unconscious discernible in the same terms used to describe consciousness and thereby claimed an objective status for mental states.¹⁸ So despite the hermeneutical connotations of “interpretation,” Freud relentlessly presented his project as a science, namely, an analysis that objectified unconscious motivations and uncovered hidden meanings. And with this commitment to positivism, Freud devised a representational language, the métier of science, to “capture” the phenomena: “Thus we shall not hesitate to treat them [unconscious latent states] as objects of psychological research, and to deal with them in the most intimate connection with conscious mental acts” (ibid.; emphasis added). Let us unpack these assertions.¹⁹

Conceiving unconsciousness in the semantic tradition firmly places the representations of unconscious drives as ways of thinking about them. Indeed, Freud (1915a) recognized that the drives themselves are never represented as such but appear in the psyche as ideas to which the drives attach themselves. In “The Unconscious,” Freud explicitly addresses the relationship of language (representations) with the unconscious object, where he asserted that the “thing-presentation” cannot become conscious until associated with words, and this step occurs in the preconscious (not the unconscious, which knows no language as such). At the interface of conscious and unconscious mental life, this associative locale, where unconscious objects or drives become associated with language, provides the key link between the sectors of the psyche to offer the coherence required for normal mentation.²⁰

This “associative” formulation dates to Freud’s 1891 prepsychoanalytic writings on aphasia (Freud 1953). Framed by the neurological discourse of the time, he joined attempts to model the relationship of brain localization studies to speech, namely, how to balance the contributions made by areas with localized language competence (e.g., Broca’s area) and the complex processing that must occur as sensory data ascend to higher cortical regions. Very much in the same spirit of his later hypothesis presented in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he postulated that different types of neurons fulfill different neurological functions, Freud assumed that a nerve on its way to the cerebral cortex changed its functional significance (or meaning) (1895, p. 52).²¹ Making the case for a more global integration, Freud relied on some modality by which “a word sound image” associates with an “impression of word innervation” (ibid., p. 73), and he suggested that the word concept appears as a “closed” complex of images of visual and auditory perceptions...