Freud Sigmund - Passion in theory : conceptions of Freud and Lacan

The central problem of a psychology is the relation of the inside to the outside. But this relation is already assumed in the detail of any psychological theory. Psychology begins as a particular problem in philosophy: i.e., what is the nature of the mind, this extraordinary site of philosophy? It is an old and respectable problemindeed a founding problem for philosophy, and a self-defining one. It is Socrates directive to Know thyself.

But it currently also arises as a scientific task, since the question of the relation of the inside to the outside raises not just the necessity of self-reflection, but the question of knowledge. This question has for the several centuries of modern philosophy been taken up with empiricism. The basic commitment of empiricism is to knowledge found outside the self; more strictly, to knowledge as derived from that of the outside which impinges on the self, through the senses. The concern of psychology is shifted to the surface of the distinction between this inside and outside, which meets somehow on the verge of consciousness, in the sensory experience; on the body.

It is on this conceptual scene that psychoanalysis opens. But it is always a drama in the minds eye. The drawing of a distinction between an inside and an outside, between a mind and its body in the first instance, is always made in theory. In practice, consciousness is an inconclusive experience, joined in delirious flux with its seeming others. How can one, for example, conceive of a mind without the body? or of experience as separated from the senses, or from the phenomena which apparently provoke them? Empiricism is in the same position as idealism, phenomenology and other rivals, in being obliged to presuppose a configuration of terms, and in postulating an arrangement of them which its constituency finds plausible. This will necessarily be a philosophical exercise.

The great innovation of psychoanalysis is its rendition of the set of relations between consciousness and its others. The discovery of the unconscious is the new theoretical opportunity offered to consciousness for self-definition, in the wake of science which has separated, in theory, the subject from the object. The unconscious is then that with which consciousness struggles, all that which lies beyond itself, both mental and material. And as theory, psychoanalysis gives itself a place between rationality and its others. As a theoretical endeavour, it emerges itself as a kind of consciousness, its nature being to give itself a place, and to give these others their place.

This book examines that configuration as psychoanalysis has imagined it. First, in considering the theory of Freud, his metapsychology, and then in a consequence of it, Lacanian theory, which brings the argument explicitly to what is speculative in the psychological enterprise in general. The book outlines philosophical possibilities in psychoanalysis, and the shape of an evolving set of concepts which gain philosophical purchase and which provide the energy and compass of diverse contemporary moods.

Consciousness begins from that which is present to it. What is the character of the mental? For psychoanalysis, the theoretical task is to understand how ideas can both depict putative states of affairspropositional, with content, meaning and therefore the possibility of truthand how they can have materiality, as energies, motions, instances and events. Psychoanalytic theory begins from the mind-body problem, out of a scientific necessity to comprehend the material of the mental. For in science, it cannot be sufficient to accept a dualism of spirit and matter; the problem must be investigated in terms of how the mind, and not merely the brain as a physical deputy, could be said to be material. Materialism depends on this being possible.