Psychoanalysis as Science pt. 1
The psychoanalytic model holds that we are primarily related to others; whether driven to be more competitive or more cooperative with them. Whether we love them romantically or as friends. The primacy of the rational self, is replaced by a primacy of the parental Other (the basis of the ideal).
The most important aspect of the psychoanalytic model of mind, in regards to establishing it as a science, is psychic determinism.
In the popular view people are held to be rational choosers who sometimes fall prey to depression, anxiety, strong self-criticism, passions like anger or jealousy, or what is generally labelled as irrational thinking that causes irrational feelings. They go see a therapist who helps them review their various thinking errors, or who helps them practice thought-stopping techniques or coping skills so that when they get angry or depressed, for example, they go for a walk, listen to music, or do something to distract themselves. Sometimes clients are just told to take medication and that their irrational thoughts or moods arise from chemical imbalances. Either way, for many contemporary approaches to mental health there is no interest in where these irrational thoughts or feelings come from, and the therapist or the medication is there to help you fight them or cover them up.
Leaving aside mental pathology like depression, paranoia, or anxiety for a moment, I’d like to focus on the personality trait of ambition. In the rational chooser model, the ambitious person is seen as someone who simply chooses to put a lot of time into working or studying and who chooses to sacrifice time with friends, or going out and having fun, so that she can accomplish her goal of getting good grades, accumulating wealth, or advancing in her career. In psychic determinism, you don’t view the ambitious person as rationally choosing to be rich and famous as her value— as if she weighed through all the possible lifestyles and decided that this one was the best. Instead,
psychoanalysis
explores this as one type of subjectivity and points to how ambitious people aren’t simply rational goal setters. When a therapist gets to hear their narratives in therapy, he will often get to hear how they experience jealousy or envy of others who get higher grades or promotions at work, and that they suffer from inferiority feelings or self-criticism when they aren’t living up to their ideal. Given these various feelings that appear around what is viewed as a simple choice, I think there is good reason to be sceptical of the rational chooser model.
There are many different types of happiness that a person can strive to achieve besides ambition. There is friendship and belonging, romantic love, being viewed as competent and knowledgeable at one’s job, being admired for one’s beauty or good taste, wanting to fit in and be seen as normal, and many more. These forms of happiness are taken to be part of the person’s individual psychology or drive structure that was formed during their childhood development. However, childhood development isn’t the end of the story. As a person grows older, things happen to reinforce certain drives and that see a person potentially suppress certain parts of their personality. For example, there are sometimes people who were unpopular in high school and who became invested in the idea that success was the best revenge, they can tell you about how the popular people they grew up with are idiots and how their (future) life is/will be much better than theirs. There are also people who were dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend and felt unloveable and reacted by being driven to prove their worth through success. And there are some people who got this focus much earlier, when they saw, how excited it made one of their parents, for example, when they expressed an interest in being wealthy or being a famous actor. Our individual psychology from childhood development encounters ego injuries, or injuries to our self-esteem, as we get older, and people can begin to live very small, predicable lives in which they act in the same rigid patterns.
Sticking with ambition, it is also apparent that there are different levels of ambition (Pederson 2015. 1018). On one level, a person can seek to have the reputation of being wealthy or important in their community. Such a person can run for city council, or join certain clubs or organizations, and seek to be seen as one of the important professionals or business owners around town. At a deeper level, a person can seek to be viewed as one of the important people in their field of work and to have a national reputation as a scholar, as a scientist, as an athlete, musician, or as an important politician, etc. or the person may simply desire to have celebrity and show up in news stories, or have millions of youtube hits, without much care for developing any of their talents. At a deeper level, someone can seek to become a world-historical individual. It’s not enough to be a famous writer in one’s own age, for example, instead one is concerned about whether one’s name will be immortal like Shakespeare’s or whether one’s role in science or politics will be featured in history books. Lastly, ambition can get to the level in which a person seeks to be God-like and their narratives concern material about the decoding of reality, uncovering the secrets of the universe, or creating something wholly unique and unlike anything that has come before.
These levels of ambition, are also registered in examples of psychopathology and this adds another layer to the position of psychic determinism. For example, there are people who suffer from narcissism or grandiosity, and who believe they are geniuses although they have never published any work, made an invention, or done anything that corroborates this. Instead of striving to achieve their ideal in society, they have become the ideal. This too is apparent at different levels, and thus at the deepest level, we have people who are megalomaniacs or who believe that they are God, the son of God, or that they have found the secret key or formula to the bible, or some secret to controlling reality with their mind, and other variations of this. From this level of megalomania, grandiosity can diminish in magnitude to someone believing that they are much more important, talked about, or famous to others than they are. Lastly, it can diminish in magnitude to someone who is simply a snob or suffers from vanity or arrogance.
These levels are also indirectly visible in paranoia. For example, instead of being all powerful in megalomania, one can face God’s wrath in paranoid fears of the end of the world. Instead of being an immortal name in history, some people have paranoid fears about the illumaniti or some secret group that has controlled things throughout history hunting them down. Some fear that some gangster or corporation that they came into acquaintance with will want to kill them for seeing or knowing something that they shouldn’t. Then there are people who are paranoid about some secret or lie being uttered about them in their community and fear the attack on their reputation.
Freud (1917a) compares the need to understand the pathological states of the mind as necessitating a Copernican Revolution. The Copernican revolution, introduced by Copernicus is the move from a Geocentric to Heliocentric model which allowed for planetary motions to be understood. Religious teaching originally put the earth as the center of the universe but through regarding the sun as the center, the orbits of the planets could be calculated. In a similar way, Freud (1917b) writes:
if we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind…They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. (p. 58)
If we similarly leave the rational chooser model we can take the different levels of power and authority that are visible in the brokenness of grandiosity and paranoia and make them intelligible by referencing ambition as a drive that is also directed through these different levels of the ideal. This mental representation of power and authority is formed during childhood development, but this is not to say that the infant or child perceives and comprehends complex power relations in society. Rather the idea is that he or she forms a placeholder for authority and power relations that becomes linked to the culture of a given historical time and place.
Just as Copernicus, and more so Galileo, who followed him decades later, encountered resistance from the church’s ideology, Freud recognized that his model would also encounter a lot of resistance. A model of psychic determinism continues to be taken as an attack on the idea of free will and the doctrine of sin that comes from religion. It is also taken as an attack on secular individuals who want to feel that they are the makers of their own choices, and that their choice to be ambitious or work hard, justifies them in enjoying extreme levels of wealth inequality. The Freudian model also erases the solid line between being a rational chooser and being irrational, or mentally sick. If reason and logic aren’t regarded as a separate sphere in the mind, but are only expressed in the aims of the drives, then we are all adults who have experienced ego injuries and suppressed parts of ourselves and are therefore all neurotic. It is just a matter of what degree.
Today in universities, the rational chooser model will often be contrasted with DNA or genetic deterministic models favoured by biologists and neurologists. The latter essentially sees us as robots programmed by our DNA and holds that our conscious thoughts are epiphenomenal, or just an illusion. A famous philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett, in 2013 writes:
When I squint just right, it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot… But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination.
The view that we are robots of our DNA or that we are rational choosers both have an atomistic view of the individual, which sees him or her as primarily separate from others. Either my individual DNA is running a program in me that is calculating relationships with others in terms of survival, reproduction, and the satisfaction of other instincts, or I am a rational chooser who is calculating whether people fit into my goals or my value systems. The psychoanalytic model holds that we are primarily related to others, whether we are driven to be more competitive or more cooperative with them. Whether we are driven to love them romantically or as friends. Instead of the primacy of the rational self who makes choices, there is a primacy of the parental Other, who is the basis of the ideal. It is through this ideal that the drives select our levels of passionate or inhibited relations with the external world. And, instead of the primacy of genetically programmed instincts, we saw that the ideal that the ambitious person strives for is an object that he or she can become in grandiosity, and this shows that relations to objects of the mind are necessary and not just an illusion. It isn’t simply a matter of our DNA programming being combined with an evolutionary model of environmental stresses. Empathy for the motivational and ideal states of others, which shows up in our common language assessments of them, is important, raw empirical data of psychology. However, the science of the mind begins with the metapsychology of ordering the ideals, and understanding the psychodynamic relations between drive and ideal, the different motivational systems, and psychopathology.
References
Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. WW Norton & Company.
Freud, S. (1917a). A difficulty in the path of psycho-analysis. S. E., 17: 135–144. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1917b). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. S. E., 16: 241–463. London: Hogarth.
Pederson, T. C. (2015). The Economics of Libido: Psychic Bisexuality, the Superego, and the Centrality of the Oedipus Complex . Karnac Books.
Pederson, T. C. (2018). Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom. Routledge.
Trevor C. Pederson is a licensed professional counselor and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Laramie, Wyoming. His book The Economics of Libido: Psychic Bisexuality, the Superego, and the Centrality of the Oedipus Complex (Routledge, 2015) won the 2016 Gradiva Award for Best Book. His current book is Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom (Routledge, 2018) in which he introduces a new psychoanalytic methodology for literary criticism and innovations in clinical techniques that synthesize psychoanalysis and EMDR.
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