This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching (...) and relied primarily on phenomenology in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Ludwig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology. All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct examples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psychoanalytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective. The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience. (shrink)

This paper is addressing Husserl’s critique of psychologism in order to gain a better understanding of an up to date phenomenological research. Staring with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology became more and more interested in how psychoanalytic theory can contribute to its findings. The latest phenomenological research reflects this growing interest in psychoanalysis. I will demonstrate in this paper that Husserl’s critique of psychologism enables this interest and that the psychoanalytic theory offers the same critique in (...) response. Thus, the ego problem leading to the deadlock of intersubjectivity, represent one of the common grounds phenomenology and psychoanalysis can meet. In this respect I will use the works of Marc Richir and Jacques Lacan. Emphasizing Marc Richir’s conception of language as phenomenon and the twist he gives to the concept of perceptive phantasia introduced by Husserl in 1918, I will consider the concept of unconscious as a way to solve the intersubjectivity dilemma. (shrink)

Phenomenological psychotherapy, while critiquing psychoanalytic theories, has always sought to draw on and be inspired by these (and other) approaches. To read psychoanalysis through the lens of existential-phenomenology opens, deepens and perhaps even rehabilitates this body of work. In this paper, the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is explored through a phenomenological reading of his early work. Aspects of his developmental theory, as well as certain of his theoretical innovations, are related to psychopathology and treatment (...) and are explored and understood in phenomenological terms. Emphasis is placed on psychotherapeutic experience and understandings. The paper argues that there is much of value in Lacan’s work and that it is more existentially rich than is often acknowledged. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

Philosophical engagements with psychoanalysis have taken several forms. Some have offered a philosophical re-vision of psychoanalytical understandings of human nature. Thus, we have Boss, Binswanger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty offering us existential-phenomenological; Ricoeur hermeneutic; Lacan structuralist; and Heaton, Elder, and Fingarette Wittgensteinian, readings of unconscious life and of therapeutic action. Such philosophical elaborations of the most apt reflective and the most fruitful revisionary understanding of dynamic unconsciousness also involve parallel critique of such aspects of psychoanalytical psychology's immanent self-understanding (...) as... (shrink)

Is the expression “unconscious phenomena” a contradiction in terms? Do psychoanalytic discoveries compel phenomenology to adapt its methods in treating inapparent phenomena? What role does the body play in the manifestation of such phenomena? In this paper, I approach these questions (1) from within the clinical context of a post-traumatic somatization and (2) by spelling out the implications of Heidegger’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in the Zollikon Seminars. Drawing new critical attention to Freud’s earliest theories and methods, developed (...) in the context of the investigation into hysteria, I argue that some of his fundamental insights may be read as following basic phenomenological intuitions. Following Heidegger’s reconfiguration of the field of phenomenology, the inapparent (“that which does not show itself as itself”) may be seen as taking center stage as the exhaustive model for phenomena as such. Placing particular emphasis on a set of Heidegger’s critical notions – “semblance” [Schein],” “understanding”, “motive” [Beweggrund] and “bodying-forth” [Leiben] — I argue that somatization could be conceptualized phenomenologically as a “bodying-forth” [Leiben] of an incapacity to understand or be understood, and that a similar mis-understanding may also befall practitioners who struggle to witness trauma, thus becoming the clinician’s own symptom. (shrink)

This book's critical approach addresses the anachronism, essentialism and ethnocentrism that underlie contemporary theoretical and methodological uses of the term «cosmopolitanism». It explores the concept of cosmopolitan reason from the viewpoints of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism and moral philosophy.

In the text Critique of the Foundations of Psychology (1928) Georges Politzer (1903-1942) sought to investigate the epistemological bases of some currents of psychology. His intention was to reorient psychological studies toward a concreteconception. By analyzing Gestalt theory, Behaviorism, and Psychoanalysis, Politzer outlined a project of concrete psychology with some principles that guide possible perspectives of studies on psychological phenomena. His principles consist instudying psychological facts through the prism of the first person and consider man in his drama. (...) Despite being Hungarian, the author walked his political and intellectual path in France in the 20th century, a time when Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focusedon psychological phenomena under the prism of phenomenology, proposing an Existential Psychoanalysis at the end of Being and Nothingness (1943). In this sense, we will verify to what extent the Sartrian theory can contemplate Politzer’s principlesof a concrete psychology. (shrink)

The Philadelphia Association is always linked with the name of R. D. Laing, one of its founders, but very little is known about its unorthodox contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. Founded in 1965, it took as its aim the relief of mental illnesss of all desciptions, in particular schizophrenia. At its inception it was a focus for people, with a diversity of backgrounds and interests, concerned with 'mental illness' and how society defines it. Its members - who included (...) psychoanalysis, psychiatrists and artists - developed a philosophical critique of psychoanalysis grounded in phenomenology, and an 'anti-psychiatry' critique of the institutional treatment of the mentally ill. They favoured the setting up of therapeutic community households of which the best known was Kingsley Hall. The PA was then very much part of the counter culture - it staged, for example, the famous Dialectics of Liberation Congress at London's Roundhouse in 1967. The psychotherapists who currently belong to the Philadelphia Association continue to work with community households and to offer a psychotherapy training. Here the authors share their innovative and distinctive approach on a number of interrelated themes: the herapeutic community and differend ways it can be understood; work with deeply regresed patients; the concept of identity in a social context; the debate between Lacan and Derrida on Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'; the phenomenology of knowledge and transference and authority. Together, they offer a cogent critique of many psychiatric and psychonalaytic assumptions. The contributors are Robin Cooper, Joseph friedman, Steven Gans, John Heaton, Chris Oakley, Haya Oakley and Paul Zeal. They are all psychotherapists and members of the Philadelphia Association. (shrink)

This edited collection discusses phenomenological critiques of formalism and their relevance to the problem of responsibility and the life-world. The authors deal with themes of formalisation of knowledge in connection to the life-world, the natural world, the history of science and our responsibility for both our epistemic claims and the world in which we live. Readers will discover critiques of formalisation, the life-world and responsibility, and a collation and comparison of Patočka's and Husserl's work on these themes. Considerable literature (...) on Husserl is presented here and the two themes of epistemic responsibility and the life-world are discussed together. This work specifically emphasises the interrelatedness of these existential aspects of his work - self-responsibility and the crisis - as not only epistemological, but also related to human life. This volume also introduces Jan Patočka to English-speaking readers as a phenomenologist in his own right. Patočka shows us, in particular, the significance of the modern abyss between our thinking and the world. Readers will discover that this abyss is of concern for our everyday experience because it leads to a rupture in our understanding of the world: between the world of our living and its scientific construct. We see that Patočka continually emphasised the relevance of Husserl's work to existential questions relating to human responsibility and the life-world, which he admits is left largely implicit in Husserl's work. This edited collection will spark discussion on the question of responsibility against the backdrop of formalised knowledge which is increasingly inaccessible to human understanding. Despite the complexity of some of the analysed ideas, the authors discuss these themes in a clear and readable way. This work is scholarly, exact in its discussion and authoritative in its reading, but at the same time accessible to anyone motivated to understand these debates. (shrink)

Roland Végső opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he traces the overlooked history of worldlessness in Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.

Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation is the fifth volume of Herbert Marcuse's collected papers. Containing some of Marcuse’s most important work, this book presents for the first time his unique syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical social theory, directed toward human emancipation and social transformation. Within philosophy, Marcuse engaged with disparate and often conflicting philosophical perspectives - ranging from Heidegger and phenomenology, to Hegel, Marx, and Freud - to create unique philosophical insights, (...) often overlooked in favor of his theoretical and political interventions with the New Left, the subject of previous volumes. This collection assembles significant, and in some cases unknown texts from the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, including: critiques of positivism and idealism, Dewey’s pragmatism, and the tradition of German philosophy philosophical essays from the 1930s and 1940s that attempt to reconstruct philosophy on a materialist base Marcuse’s unique attempts to bring together Freud and philosophy philosophical reflections on death, human aggression, war, and peace Marcuse’s later critical philosophical perspectives on science, technology, society, religion, and ecology. A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s work in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century politics and philosophy. An Afterword by Andrew Feenberg provides a personal memory of Marcuse as scholar, teacher and activist, and summarizes the lasting relevance of his radical thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCritical Theory and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives share many compatibilities in offering a constructive critique of society. Psychoanalysis teaches us that whatever values and ideals societies adopt, they are always mediated through unconscious psychic processes that condition the collective in both positive and negative ways, and in terms of relations of recognition and patterns of social justice. Contemporary critical theory may benefit from engaging post-classical and current trends in psychoanalytic thought that have direct bearing on the ways we conceive (...) of and observe how individuals operate within social collectives. In particular, Axel Honneth relies on psychoanalytic sources that are dated. Critical theory would profit from engaging post-object relations schools such as self psychology, analytical psychology, psychoanalytic intersubjectivity theory, relationality, and contemporary attachment theory that are more nuanced yet can supplement Winnicottian perspectives. Implications for contemporary theory need to reflect upon how the psychosocial matrix of self and society both facilitate and hinder optimal social arrangements and fabrics of justice as it takes up the question of normativity. It is within this context that I hope to introduce contemporary psychoanalytic paradigms that move beyond classical models yet complement redirecting shifts in emphasis both psychoanalysis and Critical Theory attempt to accomplish. I suggest that an applied psychoanalytic explication on social phenomenology can expand the interpretive depth and breadth of human relations and open up a permissible space for interdisciplinary discourse. Here new vistas emerge for a proposed synthesis between the two schools of thought. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the impact of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis. I contend that Henry and Rank clarify the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in psychoanalysis. To begin, I draw out the implications of Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In my view, Henry’s work reveals and untangles basic inconsistencies in Freud’s views on the unconscious, affective layer of the subject’s life, and establishes that the creativity (...) of life’s immanent movement is essential to the development of the subject’s personality and to the acquisition and alleviation of neuroses. At the same time, I maintain that, while Henry’s work acknowledges a potential role for mindfulness in the development of life’s creativity, his account is problematic. At the end of the day, Henry’s conception of life as an immanent, self-enclosed reality fails to adequately account for the relation between life (creativity) and intentionality (mindfulness). As a result, it fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness. To address these issues, I bring Henry’s insights into these matters into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference, which similarly regards affectivity and creativity as central to human life and to psychoanalysis. By doing so, what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can strengthen and weaken one another, and which always involve self-enclosure and openness towards others and the cosmos. Bearing this in mind, I maintain that mindfulness and creativity can play an important role in allowing psychoanalysis to realize its aim of improving the well-being of human beings. (shrink)

This paper begins by tracing the Hobbesian roots of `representationalism:' the thesis that reality is accessible to mind only through representations, images, signs or appearances that indicate a reality lying `behind' them (e.g. as unperceived causes of perceptions). This is linked to two kinds of absolute realism: the `naive' scientific realism of British empiricism, which provoked Berkeley's idealist reaction, and the noumenal realism of Kant. I argue that Husserl defined his position against both Berkeleyian idealism and these forms of absolute (...) realism by way of two arguments: a pragmatic argument against skepticism about the external world (as described by Karl Ameriks) and a distinctively phenomenological argument against the representationalism implied by absolute realism. (shrink)

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics. Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction - including differance, trace, supplement and logocentrism - and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, (...) and his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet. The author addresses directly the vexed questions of the extreme difficulty of Derrida's own writing and of the passionate hostility it arouses in philosophers as diverse as Searle and Habermas. She argues that deconstruction is a vital stimulus to vigilance in both the ethical and political spheres, contributing significantly to debate on issues such as democracy, the legacy of Marxism, responsibility, and the relationship between law and justice. Comprehensive, cogently argued and up to date, this book will be an invaluable text for students and scholars alike. (shrink)

This article distinguishes thought on phenomenology and psychoanalysis versus doing phenomenology and psychoanalysis and argues that while Fanon was primarily concerned with the latter, his thought also offers contributions to the former. They include methodological critique and an interrogation into the human sciences that includes a psychoanalytical decolonial critical reflection on science linked to open possibilities of human conditions.

There are religious thinkers of Kierkegaard's ilk who concede that their belief in an afterlife is the expression of a wish and an offense to the understanding. Freud could not agree more. The collision that this essay plots comes when a Freud and a Kierkegaard try to decide what the individual is to do with such inherently human, unrealistic desires. Freud urges us to forsake all wish?fulfilling thoughts of everlasting life; however, this requires nothing less than the acceptance of imminent, (...) everlasting death. This is a difficult thought to think I half argue, half insist. The question is raised as to whether or not psychoanalysis can help us come to terms with the reality it compels us to face. A negative conclusion is reached. (shrink)

This essay suggests what M. Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of primordial symbolism and embodied intersubjectivity imply for the problem of the existence and manifestation of dynamically unconscious experiences. First, the paper draws attention to two distinct approaches to the unconscious in the Phenomenology of Perception. One line of argumentation proceeds from the notion of bad faith, which plays a pivotal role in J.-P. Sartre’s critique of psychoanalysis; another line subsumes unconscious thoughts under the neurological notion of body schema. Later, in (...) Lectures on Passivity, Merleau-Ponty combines this expanded notion of body schema with his conception of “promiscuity,” which he illustrates with Freud’s case study of Dora. The paper explains how this new approach to intersubjectivity provides a basis for the manifestation of experiences against which the subject adopts defensive reactions. Finally, it is argued that this position does not equal a straightforward rejection of the notion of pre-reflective cogito and the problem of awareness of unconscious experiences thus remains open. (shrink)

Thomas Metzinger's self-model theory offers a framework for naturalizing subjective experiences, e.g. first-person perspective. These phenomena are explained by referring to representational contents which are said to be interrelated at diverse levels of consciousness and correlated with brain activities. The paper begins with a consideration on naturalism and anti-naturalism in order to roughly sketch the background of Metzinger's claim that his theory renders philosophical speculations on the mind unnecessary. In particular, Husserl's phenomenological conception of consciousness is refuted as uncritical (...) and inadequate. It is demonstrated that this critique is misguided. The main deficiencies of Metzinger's theory are elucidated by referring to the conception of phenomenal transparency which is compared to a phenomenological idea of transparency. The critical horizon is then enlarged by focusing on some implications of representationalism, including reification of consciousness, brain-Cartesianism and exclusion of the social dimension. Finally meta-theoretical reflections on the naturalism debate are taken up. (shrink)

This Ph.D. thesis is, in large part, a deepening of my M. A. dissertation, entitled: "Différance Beyond Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché)?" - an edited version of which was published in The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1989. The M. A. dissertation explores the development of the various phases of the movement of epoché in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and its relevance for Jacques Derrida's project of deconstruction. The analyses not only attend to the need for an effective propaedeutic (...) to an understanding of phenomenology as method, they also serve to demystify the logics of Derridean non-teleological strategy by explaining the sense of such a manoeuvre - as a kind of maieutic response to the Husserlian project - which operates within the horizon of a radical epoché. According to this orientation, Derrida's deconstruction of phenomenology is permitted to open itself up to a phenomenology of deconstruction. This doctoral thesis develops these analyses and utilizes a form of critique that points the way to the possibility of a phenomenological-deconstruction of the limits of Derrida's project of deconstruction through the themes of epoché, play, dialogue, spacing, and temporalization. In order to trace the resources from which he draws throughout the early development of deconstruction, this study confines itself to a discussion on the texts published between 1962 and 1968. This subjection of deconstruction to a historical de-sedimentation of its motivational, methodological, theoretical, and strategic moments, involves a certain kind of transformational return to the spacing between phenomenology and deconstruction that urgently puts into question the alleged supercession of phenomenology by deconstruction. The expression of such a 'beyond' is already deeply sedimented in contemporary deconstructive writing to the point at which it is now rarely even noticed, let alone thematized and brought into question. This conviction (regarding the transgression of phenomenology by deconstruction) traces itself out in the form of an attitude to reading which is, in fact and in principle, counter to D6rrida's own call for care. The meaning and limits of the very terms, transgression, beyond, supercession, etc., must be continually subjected to deconstruction. The notions of play, dissemination and supplementarity - with the concomitant sense of transformational repetition that defines them - do not function as a mere excuse for lack of scholarly rigour. Deconstruction is a movement of critical return, which must insert itself (with a sense of irony) within the margins and intersections of that which gives itself up to this practice of textual unbuilding. The strategy of play encourages the structural matrix of that with which it is engaged to turn in upon itself, exposing its limits and fissures in a kind of textual analogue to a psychoanalysis. To be sure, this does involve a certain kind of violence -a violation of the ( system's' own sense of propriety (what is proper [propre] and closest to itself) -but in no sense is this an anarchical celebration of pure destruction. We speak rather of irony, parody, satire, metaphor, double-reading and other tactical devices, which permit a reorganization of the deconstructed's (textual analysand's) self-relation and the possibility of playful speculation. Such play demands care and vigilance in regard to the appropriation of the logics of the system with which it is in a relation of negotiation. In order to play well, one must learn the game-rules. (shrink)

ABSTRACT“: We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks.” In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However, critique, in philosophy, is used in certain technical and precise senses. We will try to demonstrate that, technically, Anti-Oedipus is a delimitation of a Kantian sort, an evaluation of a (...) Nietzschean kind, and, finally, a divergence in terms of Deleuze himself. Thanks to this precision, we will find that the target of Anti-Oedipus is not psychoanalysis in general but what Deleuze and Guattari call, respectively, “the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious,” a conception of life presupposed by psychoanalysis, and a configuration of desire that explains both psychoanalysis and the system in which it functions. (shrink)

Developmental and clinical psychological findings on infancy over the past twenty years and more refute in striking ways both Piaget's and Lacan's negative characterizations of infants. Piaget's thesis is that the infant has an undifferentiated sense of self; Lacan's thesis is that the infant is no more than a fragmented piece of goods — a corps morcelé. Through an examination of recent and notable analyses of infancy by infant psychiatrist Daniel Stern, this paper highlights important features within the radically different (...) accounts. In particular, it examines Stern's account of self-agency —a facet of the core self. In doing so, the paper brings to light corporeal matters of fact and shows :how recent developmental-clinical data on infants accord with facets of bodily life described by Husserl. The paper contrasts these corporeal matters of fact and facets of bodily life with Piaget's and Lacan's notion of an infant as incompetent and deficient. On the basis of its empirical-phenomenological findings, the paper underscores the need to recognize the richness of nonverbal life and to give movement and the tactile-kinesthetic body their conceptual due. (shrink)

These seventeen lectures given in 1963 focus largely on Kant, 'a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence'. After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice, (...) ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality. (shrink)

An English translation of Politzer's 1928 critique of psychoanalysis. Contents Include: The Kalevala Metre and its Development; The Ingrian Epic Poem and its Models; The Wife-Killer Theme in Karelian and Russian Songs; Ale, Spirits, and Patterns of Mythical Fantasy; Song in Ritual Context: North Karelian Wedding Songs; Women's Songs and Reality.

Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, _Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation _is the fifth volume of Herbert Marcuse's collected papers. Containing some of Marcuse’s most important work, this book presents for the first time his unique syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical social theory, directed toward human emancipation and social transformation. Within philosophy, Marcuse engaged with disparate and often conflicting philosophical perspectives - ranging from Heidegger and phenomenology, to Hegel, Marx, and Freud - to create unique philosophical insights, (...) often overlooked in favor of his theoretical and political interventions with the New Left, the subject of previous volumes. This collection assembles significant, and in some cases unknown texts from the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, including: critiques of positivism and idealism, Dewey’s pragmatism, and the tradition of German philosophy philosophical essays from the 1930s and 1940s that attempt to reconstruct philosophy on a materialist base Marcuse’s unique attempts to bring together Freud and philosophy philosophical reflections on death, human aggression, war, and peace Marcuse’s later critical philosophical perspectives on science, technology, society, religion, and ecology. A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s work in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century politics and philosophy. An Afterword by Andrew Feenberg provides a personal memory of Marcuse as scholar, teacher and activist, and summarizes the lasting relevance of his radical thought. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the impact of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis. I contend that Henry and Rank clarify the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in psychoanalysis. To begin, I draw out the implications of Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In my view, Henry’s work reveals and untangles basic inconsistencies in Freud’s views on the unconscious, affective layer of the subject’s life, and establishes that the creativity (...) of life’s immanent movement is essential to the development of the subject’s personality and to the acquisition and alleviation of neuroses. At the same time, I maintain that, while Henry’s work acknowledges a potential role for mindfulness in the development of life’s creativity, his account is problematic. At the end of the day, Henry’s conception of life as an immanent, self-enclosed reality fails to adequately account for the relation between life (creativity) and intentionality (mindfulness). As a result, it fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness. To address these issues, I bring Henry’s insights into these matters into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference, which similarly regards affectivity and creativity as central to human life and to psychoanalysis. By doing so, what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can strengthen and weaken one another, and which always involve self-enclosure and openness towards others and the cosmos. Bearing this in mind, I maintain that mindfulness and creativity can play an important role in allowing psychoanalysis to realize its aim of improving the well-being of human beings. (shrink)

In concept, an image has both verticality and horizontal dimensions. Saturated images within this space have a horizon and can exceed that horizon. Within that horizon where the image dwells something chances itself upon the observer and the observed. Into that public space between self and other, students bring an instrumental approach to how they plan to deploy their new fund of knowledge, only to discover that the setting itself has become an event where surprise and upheaval disrupt their illusion (...) of self-continuity and the façade of familiarity. Phenomenologically, upheaval shows itself when givenness both precedes and participates in the giving of phenomena such as medical students’ “before and after” images of psychoanalysis. They discover and reconfigure their erstwhile absolute positions and values into reconfigurations of self and prior commitments. The turning point from their instrumental use of knowledge to reconfigurations of how they situate themselves in the world decisively comes when teaching and learning become an event in se that disturbs their sense of order.Following Husserl, phenomenological psychological observation has required us to go from the events of history to a sense of history. Would, however, that we could stay at the level of events much longer to see images explode and exceed their horizons from the illusion of order, and patterned repetition disrupted by surprise, upheaval and indeterminacy in the spirit of Alain Badiou! (shrink)

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics. Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction - including differance, trace, supplement and logocentrism - and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, (...) and his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet. The author addresses directly the vexed questions of the extreme difficulty of Derrida's own writing and of the passionate hostility it arouses in philosophers as diverse as Searle and Habermas. She argues that deconstruction is a vital stimulus to vigilance in both the ethical and political spheres, contributing significantly to debate on issues such as democracy, the legacy of Marxism, responsibility, and the relationship between law and justice. Comprehensive, cogently argued and up to date, this book will be an invaluable text for students and scholars alike. (shrink)

Major psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Ricoeur to Lacan considered the Oedipus complex the key to explaining the human psyche and human sexuality, even culture itself. But, in fact, they were merely theorizing males. In this title, originally published in 1993, the author reassesses the benchmark concepts of Freudian thought, building on feminist criticisms of psychoanalysis and the new history of sexuality. The psychoanalytic questions become political questions: How do the norms of heterosexuality and masculinity themselves emerge within modern (...) society and culture? How do the institutions of compulsory heterosexuality and modern patriarchy shape identity and desire? What make heterosexuality compulsory in our society? Brenkman argues that the larger social world is part and parcel of the Oedipus complex. He challenges psychoanalysis to reinvent its cultural project, as a therapeutics and an ethics, by recovering the moral-political dimension in its approach to family, sexuality and gender. Straight Male Modern casts a new light on psychoanalysis’s contribution to modern life, revealing the richness of the Freudian tradition’s encounter with modern politics and culture, and the poverty of its response. (shrink)

Thomas Metzinger’s self-model theory offers a frame¬work for naturalizing subjective experiences, e.g. first-person perspective. These phenomena are explained by referring to representational contents which are said to be interrelated at diverse levels of consciousness and correlated with brain activities. The paper begins with a consideration on naturalism and anti-naturalism in order to roughly sketch the background of Metzinger’s claim that his theory renders philosophical speculations on the mind unnecessary . In particular, Husserl’s phenomenological conception of consciousness is refuted as (...) uncritical and inadequate. It will be demonstrated that this critique is misguided. . The main deficiencies of Metzinger’s theory will be elucidated by referring to the conception of phenomenal transparency which will be compared to a phenomenological idea of transparency . Then we shall enlarge our critical horizon by focusing on some implications of representationalism, including reification of consciousness, brain-Cartesianism, and exclusion of the social dimension . Finally, we shall take up our meta-theoretical reflections on the naturalism debate. (shrink)

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic (...) treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect. (shrink)

Many prisoners in solitary confinement experience adverse psychological and physical effects such as anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, headaches, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units [SHU] of supermax prisons. While psychiatric accounts of the effects of supermax confinement are important, especially in a legal context, they are insufficient to account for the phenomenological and even ontological harm of solitary confinement. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of (...) space in supermax confinement by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeal depth. I argue that the prolonged deprivation of concrete experiences of spatial depth in a shared world is a form of violence against the relational structure of embodied (inter)subjectivity, and that it threatens to undermine the prisoner’s capacity for a meaningful relation to the world, to others, and even to herself. Nevertheless, some prisoners have developed strategies for resisting this psychopathology of space. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is phenomenology. How should we think of phenomenology – the discipline or activity of investigating experience itself – if phenomenology is to be a genuine source of knowledge? This is related to the question whether phenomenology can make a contribution to the empirical study of human or animal experience. My own view is that it can. But only if we make a fresh start in understanding what phenomenology is and can be.

This paper uses Heidegger’s discussion of artifacts in Being and Time to motivate a phenomenological critique of Digital Rights Management regimes such as the one that allows DVDs to require one to watch commercials and copyright notices. In the first section, I briefly sketch traditional ethical approaches to intellectual property and indicate the gap that a phenomenological approach can fill. In section 2, following Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time, I analyze DRM technologies as exemplary of the (...) breakdown of things as ready-to-hand; in particular, DRM is an example of what Heidegger calls "obstinacy." In section 3, I argue that this sort of concern generalizes beyond digital rights management due to its imbrication in ordinary, everyday experience. Finally, in section 4, I propose a framework for analyzing DRM in terms of our individuation from "the They," emphasizing how DRM undermines the functioning of "responsibility.". (shrink)

This chapter focuses on a critical analysis of particular theoretical frameworks in psychiatry in their interplay with issues of race and gender. Analysis shows that theoretical perspective is one of the most important factors in play in working toward the goal of eliminating racism and sexism from psychiatry. To this end, four types of theoretical frameworks are considered: naturalism, social constructionism, relativism and antirelativism, and phenomenology. Also considered are efforts to show the compatibility of two different frameworks. Each framework is (...) explored and critiqued regarding its potential to expose and correct racist and sexist attitudes that are incorporated into research and treatment in psychiatry. Included are discussions of the relevance of realism and antirealism in evaluating theoretical frameworks, as well as evaluation of theoretical claims regarding the roles of biology, genetics, the medical model, and culture in either sustaining or counteracting racism and sexism in psychiatry, including psychoanalysis. Finally, Husserlian phenomenology is suggested as a philosophical framework for psychiatry that can transcend the limitations of the other frameworks discussed. Phenomenology enables psychiatry, including psychology and psychoanalysis, to constitute itself as a science that transcends both constructionist relativism and naturalistic reductionism. (shrink)

The text of Martin Heidegger’s 1927–28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course, Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismatling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Within this context the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is shown to be rooted in the genesis of the (...) modern mathematical sciences. Heidegger demonstrates that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant’s Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality, which is the basic constitution of humans as beings. (shrink)

In his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty maintains that our own existence cannot be understood by the methods of natural science; furthermore, because fundamental aspects of the world such as space and time are dependent on our existence, these too cannot be accounted for within natural science. So there cannot be a fully scientific account of the world at all. The key thesis Merleau-Ponty advances in support of this position is that perception is not, as he puts it, . He argues (...) that it has a fundamental intentionality which configures the perceived world as spatio-temporal in ways which are presupposed by natural science and which cannot therefore be explained by natural science. (shrink)

The question of the world in itself — the world beyond its correlation with experience in the broadest sense — is one of the sore points of phenomenology and becomes especially acute in the light of modern discussions around correlationism. These discussions, in one way or another, make phenomenology come around to the classical distinction between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, with the help of which Kant outlines the field of ethics as a special world lying on the other side (...) of the correlation of knowledge and object constitutive for nature. Philosophy deals with the thing-in-itself in the proper, positive sense of the word, not as phenomenology (transcendental philosophy, which reveals the correlation of knowledge and reality in the world of phenomena and the futility of attempts by theoretical reason to know anything beyond phenomena), but as a critique of practical reason. The article attempts to consider the opposition of the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon in the context of the criticism that Kant’s practical philosophy is subjected to in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and to explicate the arguments that this criticism makes available to phenomenology for rethinking the problem of Ding an sich and the ethical dimension of the epoche. The first part of the article examines the Hegelian analysis of the main contradiction contained in the Kantian opposition of duty as something that is in itself, and nature as a phenomenon (this opposition forms what Hegel calls the moral worldview): duty does not depend on nature and therefore does not need natural (phenomenal) realization in actions, but at the same time, duty is nothing but the necessity of actions and, consequently, the necessity of a phenomenon. This contradiction, as Hegel shows, leads to the disintegration of the moral worldview and, thus, turns into the sublation of the absolute separation of duty (thing in itself) and nature (phenomenon). The restitution of the difference between the moral an sich and the phenomenon within conscience — a phenomenon that arises as a result of the destruction of the moral worldview — turns into a new paradox, which demonstrates that the thing-in-itself (ethical good), since it is freed from the phenomenon, is not only unreal, but also turns into its own opposite. The paradox consists in the fact that the consciousness of duty, taken in its independence from the phenomenal realization in actions, becomes evil itself, turning to hypocrisy in the moral judgment about other people’s actions. In the second part of the article, the significance of the Hegelian critique of Kant’s practical philosophy for the phenomenological destruction of the difference between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon and the problematization of the ethical dimension of the phenomenological method is explicated. Tracing the naive origins of this difference in the natural attitude and their transformation in Kantian philosophy, the author tries to consider the sublation of the opposition of the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon in the field of ethics as one of the possible paths to phenomenology. It is shown how the necessary relation of the supra-worldly an sich with the situational nature of its phenomenal realization in actions calls into question the possibility of a phenomenological epoche. The author also seeks to demonstrate that the problematization of the difference between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon does not turn phenomenology into a system in the Hegelian sense. (shrink)

The article intends to explore the young Heidegger’s attempt to reconfigure Husserl’s methodological conception of phenomenology by analyzing his position towards description. Thus, we wish to show that, while first following Paul Natorp’s overt critique of phenomenology in its pretension of offering accurate descriptions of our lived experiences, Heidegger gradually came to give a new meaning to phenomenological description by reinterpreting both phenomenology’s understanding of intuition as well as that of its conceptual expression.

In a working note to The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes an enigmatic call for “a psychoanalysis of Nature.” This paper argues that there are two interrelated ways in which this call might be taken up. First, it might be taken as the demand to give voice to the deep sense of a nature, conceived in terms of unconscious desire rather than scientific rationality, that precedes and exceeds human life. Second, we might do a psychoanalysis of (...) our relationship to nature, of the ways in which modern thought tends to deny and repress the unconscious, organic desire at its heart. This paper addresses the psychoanalysis of nature in both these senses. The first part of this paper takes up Merleau-Ponty’s well-known discussion of the phantom limb in Phenomenology of Perception in order to give a critique the mind-body dualism implicit in traditional attempts to account for this and related phenomena, and in order to present Merleau-Ponty’s own account of the phantom limb in terms of being in the world. Second, I argue that being in the world requires that we repress not only aspects of our personal pasts, but also our organic nature itself. Third, I argue that much of modern scientific thinking tends to deny the bodily and unconscious dimensions of conscious life—it is this denial that calls for a psychoanalysis in the second sense of studying our troubled and repressive relationship to nature. This denial of our own naturalness is accompanied by a denial of the unconscious and irrational nature of nature itself; finally, I will speak to the ways in which psychoanalysis might go further back than we might expect—beyond our childhoods and to the organic heartbeat of life itself. (shrink)

In the perceptual model of mystical experience, the mystics are said to “perceive” God much like ordinary people perceive physical objects. The model has been used to defend the epistemic value of mysticism, and it has been championed most vigorously by William Alston in his work Perceiving God. This paper is a critique of the model from a phenomenological perspective. Utilizing insights from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I show that models like Alston’s are based on an inadequate notion of (...) perception, which fails to distinguish perception from other modes of intentionality; the result is that even if we assume the mystics have directly experienced God, it is not clear why we should say they have “perceived” God. Then, using a better and richer concept of perception, I show that the mystical experiences under discussion cannot be truly perceptual, because they lack some salient features of perception. The conclusion is that talks of “perceiving God” can only be analogical or metaphorical, but not literal. (shrink)