Louise Braddock

Contemporary Anglophone philosophy often draws upon the resources of psychoanalysis. But is there a real connection between the two disciplines or are philosophers with an interest in psychoanalysis just trawling for ideas, critical openings, or catchy titles?

Psychoanalysis is often misunderstood, by the lay public and by philosophers as well, and it is true that it is hard to characterise succinctly. One thing that confuses people is the question of who is trained to do what. Surprisingly few educated people know the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, never mind the institutional differences between psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists, psychodynamic psychotherapists and so on. To the extent that these distinctions do reflect real differences between theoretical orientations within psychoanalysis, the lay person is liable to end up thoroughly confused about who thinks what.

Faced with these discriminations, from the substantive to the doctrinal, it is unsurprising that philosophers will turn to Freud (much as non-philosophers will turn to Bertrand Russell) as the authoritative voice on the subject. But Freud, like Russell, lived a long time, said a lot of things and changed his mind quite a bit. Psychoanalysis, like "analytic philosophy", is far from monolithic. There is a vast body of literature reflecting the evolution of the subject and also its unfortunate institutional tendency to deal with dissent and critique by schism. There are multiple "schools" of psychoanalysis, often grouped around a charismatic leader. Lacanian psychoanalysis in France is a prime example, while the doctrinal differences between Kleinian and Freudian analysts are (still) enshrined in institutional differences both in Britain and in the States. Although this situation may call to mind divisions in philosophy of a similarly tribal nature, a crucial difference lies in the in-principle amenability of philosophical dispute to rational arbitration.

Taken at its most general, psychoanalysis is a phenomenon of Western culture. It denotes a clinical practice – a treatment method for a significantly wide segment of the range of psychological disorder – which in its various forms is widespread. But "psychoanalysis" also refers to a vast and baggy corpus of theory, not just about the mind but about human nature and our development as biological and social creatures. And it has a history, of a little over a century, though with roots and antecedents far back in Western, Jewish and Classical thought.

There is certainly a long-standing connection with philosophy. Freud’s interest in philosophy pre-dated his medical career – as a student he planned to study for a doctorate with Brentano. His psychoanalytic theorising incorporates elements and ideas from Classical and German philosophy. His motivation for theorising about the mind matches that of philosophers such as Descartes and Locke, namely to secure a basis for scientific knowledge. But for these connections to be philosophically relevant there needs to be some further link of content or of method; a common preoccupation with the phenomena of human existence is not enough.

There are philosophical questions about the concept of mental disorder presupposed by psychoanalytic treatment methods, and about the extent to which psychoanalytic psychology supports the theory of treatment (rather than free-wheeling alongside it as a justificatory narrative or myth). We can ask about the cultural place of psychoanalysis: is it a mythology, a new religion, or a new narrative for mankind? Or does it just fold the "findings" of science back into an old story, re-describing man as inescapably animal in nature but nevertheless only re-describing, not explaining, him? There is much of interest in the genesis and genealogy of psychoanalytic concepts, such as the unconscious, repression, phantasy, identification, and the relation with an object. These concepts, whose origins lie in pre-psychoanalytic thought, have entered recursively into our everyday psychological thinking, modifying how we think of unconscious motivation and our relations with others.

More interesting for philosophers, institutionally speaking, is the question of what sort of academic discipline psychoanalysis might, roughly, come under – what department one might find it in. In this respect psychoanalysis is polymorphous, even promiscuous. It can present itself as one of the humanities, as a social science, as a social psychology, though perhaps most saliently as an individual psychology. There is then a debate about whether psychoanalysis should consider itself an empirical psychology, a debate whose early stages were brought into the philosophical arena by Grünbaum and others. The real importance of initiating a critique of psychoanalysis has tended to be obscured by a degree of animus on the part of critics, so that philosophical interest in the subject has been tinged with an unfortunately polemic ambience.

Later philosophical attention to the subject has generally been both better tempered and a good deal more informed; there has also been a defining shift in the perspective taken on psychoanalysis. Richard Wollheim, who died in November, is a key figure here, and he and other philosophers have argued for the view that psychoanalysis extends, rather than replaces, our ordinary psychology. Also due to Wollheim is the claim that psychoanalysis is, among other things, a "philosophical anthropology". This characterisation brings the discipline, at least in its theoretical aspects, into relation with the philosophical fold – a move that requires justification if it is not to invite ribald comparisons with "transcendental economics" or "analytic dentistry".

What I think Wollheim has in mind here is the capacity of psychoanalytic theory, built as it is on a distinctive empirical base, to deliver real insights into what we (still) can most conveniently term the "working of the mind". These insights, though often over-theorised and infelicitously expressed by the psychoanalytic idiom, are constantly in a process of re-adjustment to the experience, in the clinical setting, of the phenomena – a process that can in fact be brought under qualitative research methodology in the social sciences. These insights – into our understanding of the dynamic working of the mind, into the role of phantasy in organising and disorganising the processes of thought, into the limitations of rationality and the plasticity and adaptability of language – are derived from the "anthropological" observation of humans in their social and interpersonal setting, in particular the interpersonal setting of the analytic relationship. They are "philosophical" in that, once arrived at, these insights and their conceptualisation are susceptible of philosophical clarification and can be made apt for philosophical use. Philosophy can take over the anthropology, its concepts and its understanding, and use it for a foundation to extend the understanding of human beings. The philosophical treatment of emotions, of rationality, of value, of the concepts of a person and a human life – these and other central philosophical interests can be brought into a working relation with the essentials of psychoanalysis as a theory about human beings.

So one way that philosophy and psychoanalysis can be brought into a working relation is by a sort of measured "re-enchantment" of the austere and abstract view of rational reflection bequeathed by Russell. Another route to cooperation goes via continental philosophy, which has always been far more hospitable to psychoanalysis than Anglophone analytic philosophy. But as the latter loosens its girdle a bit and gets into relation with all those foreign philosophers (including those so assiduously ignored by Freud), all sorts of connections are, unsurprisingly, discovered. This by itself doesn’t further the overall project of respectabilising psychoanalysis in the eyes of a sceptical philosophical establishment; explicating Melanie Klein in terms of Heideggerian Dasein can seem like replacing the ineffable with the impenetrable. But if analytic philosophy is going to give continental philosophy a go, then psychoanalysis might as well get the benefit of any clarification going and there are real points of interest and contact. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, theorises the unconscious in terms of the background of our necessary embodiedness.

Having said all that, there are real reservations about the suitability and the extent to which psychoanalysis is in fact apt for this sort of working relation. Faced with the often opaque and non-explanatory formulations of psychoanalytic theory, the philosopher, rather than tackling the Sisyphean task of introducing some much needed intellectual clarification, is more likely to wash his hands of the whole thing, or not much more helpfully, to over-simplify, to misconstrue, and generally to fail to grasp the subtleties of the psychoanalytic picture. This then discredits both the philosophical project and the psychoanalytic contribution, and for this both sides must take responsibility. Psychoanalysis does not lend itself to a pick and mix approach – it is at best conceptually difficult, not just conceptually muddled (though too often it is also that). Some appreciation of its historical evolution and current theoretical disputes, as well as of the sorts of thinking that lie behind its theoretical formulations, is necessary if the philosophical uptake is not to be superficial. Equally, however, there is a serious question about the internal intellectual control that the psychoanalytic institution sees fit to impose on its theory-making activities.

David Tuckett, a former editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, wrote there that the discipline was "in crisis". Tuckett points to the failure of psychoanalysis to move away from the legitimation of knowledge by tradition and charisma, given internal institutional arrangements which militate against open debate and external validation. These arrangements tend to define psychoanalysis’s cultural status more as a mythology or religion, since failure to develop a methodology appropriate to an empirical discipline tends to set psychoanalysis outside of the academic sphere. But the case is not yet determined: this is just the sort of area in which philosophy can investigate psychoanalysis, in taking up both questions of epistemology and methodology, and of its nature as a cultural phenomenon.

So does any of this amount to a case for a legitimate philosophical interest in psychoanalysis? It depends on what you think philosophy is for. If it’s for saying more and more about less and less, hedgehog-like, or for pursuing the project of the pure mathematician never to be of any use to anyone or anything, then maybe not. But if you think philosophy is at least partly, as Bernard Williams put it, the pursuit of trying to understand things that puzzle us, then puzzling as we are to ourselves, psychoanalysis, in the ways I have described and doubtless other ways too, does give us something to work with.

Suggested reading

The Thread of Life, Richard Wollheim (Cambridge University Press)

Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Sebastian Gardner (Cambridge University Press)

The Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. Michael Levine (Routledge)

Louise Braddock teaches philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford