Every so often I come across an article about the psychology of some prominent figure. Sometimes it is a politician, sometimes a celebrity, sometimes a person representing an influential populace. These articles focus on what these people are thinking, what internal drives motivate them, and how their daily experiences encourage them to act in certain ways, among other topics. Reading one recently led me to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and how one of philosophy’s long-term goals, seeking the rational basis of existence, had to be reevaluated in light of the insight that we are often motivated by drives that influence our concept of rationality. While very few, if any, philosophers claim that rationality is dead, understanding the psychic factors which produce it has sparked many projects.
The relationship between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and truth seems as salient today as ever, since so much of what passes for contemporary discussion consists of staking out one’s stance as rational while dismissing one’s interlocutors as fundamentally biased. Public appreciation of truth has atrophied, while the insights of psychologists who study unconscious drives have been used not to inform, but to justify never having to listen to others. Considering this, the following articles which discuss the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy seem well worth a read.
- Juan Pablo Jiménez, “Psychoanalysis in Postmodern Times: Some Questions and Challenges,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, August/September 2015.
- Martin Bergmann, “Philosophy And Psychoanalysis,” Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2010.
- Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, “The Philosophic-Psychoanalytic Interface: Truth Axes and Psychic Development,” Truth Matters: Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis, 2016.
- Jan Goldstein, “Neutralizing Freud: The Lycée Philosophy Class and the Problem of the Reception of Psychoanalysis in France,” Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2013.
- Luigi Longhin, “Fourteen: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, 2011.
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Add the insights of behavioral economics in evaluating human actions and behavior.
What is getting archived! That is not a question. It is once again an exclamation, with a somewhat suspended exclamation point because it is always difficult to know if it is getting archived, what is getting archived, how it is getting archived — the trace that arrives only to efface itself / only by effacing itself, beyond the alternative of presence and absence. It is not merely difficult to know this; it is strictly impossible, no doubt not because there is always more to be known but because it is not of the order of knowledge, This is never a sufficient reason not to seek to know, as an Aufklarer — to know that it is getting archived, and within what limits, and how, according to what detoured, surprising, or overdetermined paths. (Derrida)
I can now restate what I am trying to convey. I want to draw
attention away from the sequence psychoanalysis, psychotherapy,
play material, playing, and to set this up again the other way
round. In other words, it is play that is the universal, and that belongs
to health: playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing
leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication
in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has
been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the
service of communication with oneself and others. (D.W. Winnicott)
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. (Heidegger)
Language is the expression, produced by men, of their feelings and the world view that guides them… In it’s essence, language is neither expression nor an activity of man. Language speaks. Accordingly, what we seek lies in the poetry of the spoken word. (Heidegger)
Language is the house of Being, in its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. (Heidegger)
An analysis which is not merely a theoretical analysis, but at the same time another writing of the question of Being or meaning: deconstruction is also a manner or writing and putting forward another text. (Derrida)
It is not a “tabula rasa”, which is why deconstruction is also distinct from doubt or from critique. Critique always operates in view of the decision after or by means of a judgment. The authority of judgment or of the critical evaluation is not the final authority for deconstruction. Deconstruction is also a deconstruction of critique. Which does not mean that all critique or all criticism is devalued, but that one is trying to think what the critical instances signifies in the history of authority. (Derrida)
Death, the ‘proper result’ and therefore the end of life, the end without end, the strategy without finality of the living — all of this is not solely a statement of Schopenheur’s. It also coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions that we had attempted to interpret: on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead (Joyful Wisdom), a ‘particular case’ and ‘means in view of something else’ (Will to Power), this something necessarily participating in death; and finally on the absence, in the last analysis, of anything like an instinct of conservation. The unconscious port of registry, at the distance of this generality, also will have been Nietzschean. (Derrida)
Sublime receptivity to anything, can disentangle the whole
Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous
Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from,
To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,
Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy
The long sweetness of the simultaneity, yours and mine, ours and mine,
The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem
Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.
(John Ashbery)