Executive Editor

Dr. Kevin Boileau, PhD, JD, LLM

 

Managing Editor

Dr. Richard Curtis, PhD

 

Associate Editors

Dr. Steven Goldman, PhD

Dr. Michel Valentin, PhD

Dr. Loray Daws, PhD

Dr. Robert S. Corrington, PhD

 

Production Director

Ms. Nazarita Goldhammer

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Editorial Staff
2. Contributor Biographies
3. Letter from the Editor
4. Articles
   • “Autochthony versus the Dual World-View of Alterity (Otherness) – possible implications for mental health practice and the mental health client as reluctant philosopher”
     —Loray Daws, PhD
   • “Death and the Unconscious: A Reconsideration of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle'”
     —Vic Schermer PhD
   • “Postmodern capitalism and fundamental terrorism or the death drive in over-drive: a Lacanian Interpretation”
     —Michel Valentin, PhD
   • “The Phenomenology of Fetishism in ‘Objectum Sexualis‘”
     —Sunayana Baruah
   • “The Western Adaption of Eastern Spirituality: Fetishism, Global Capitalism, and the Problem of Free Will”
     — Brenna Gradus
   • “Criticism and Healing: A Study of Human Agency”
     —Steve Goldman, PhD
   • “The Importance of Metaphysics for Ordinal Psychoanalysis”
     —Robert Corrington, PhD
   • “Changes in Relationships and the Perception of Self Through Technology”
     —Gary Kolb, PhD
   • “Toward a Mutually Informing Relational Psychoanalysis and Epistemology: A Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity”
     —Andrew Nutt, PhD
5. Guidelines for Submission
6. Back Page

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”

 

— Martin Buber

Presencing EPIS

EPIS Journal

Guidelines for Submission

Publication Details: Published by The Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society. One issue per year.  Aims and Scope: Presencing EPIS is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to contemporary psychoanalysis. The journal covers theoretical and clinical issues emerging from existential psychoanalysis, phenomenology, traditional psychoanalysis, cultural studies, Critical Theory, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and fictional literature. The journal covers substantive and methodological issues in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including ethical, political, professional, sociological, and historical ideas, especially as they relate to similar professional practice. Articles address theory, method, clinical case studies, previous articles, and research. The journal also has a book review and forum section for critical commentary on the journal itself.

 

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A note on Aspasia of Miletus                                                                       

Steven Brutus, 2014

Steven Goldman, PhD

[Read as Digital Publication]

When we think of philosophy from Ancient Greece we recall names like Pythagoras, Parmenides and Zeno, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  History records the names of few women philosophers from ancient times.  Some of the few names that have come down to us include early Pythagoreans such as Themistoclea, Theano, Arignote and Damo.  Plutarch records that Themistoclea was a priestess at Delphi.  Aristoxenos asserts that Themistoclea introduced Pythagoras — sometimes considered the first philosopher — to ethics.  Theano, the daughter of Brontinus of Croton, became Pythagoras’ student, later his wife; Arignote and Damo were their daughters and later the expounders of their doctrines.  These figures all lie somewhere between legend and history — Pythagoras is a historical character, but in truth we know very little about him.  Some names of women philosophers with better historical documentation include the later Pythagoreans Aesura of Lucania, Phintys of Sparta, and Perictione.  Perictione is sometimes identified as Plato’s mother — i.e. the mother of Aristocles, son of Ariston, whose nickname was ‘Plato’ (‘broad shouldered’).  She left us two treatises: On the Harmony of Women and On Wisdom, though some have questioned whether the same author created both these works.  Plato himself introduces the incomparable Diotima of Mantinea in his dialogue Symposium.  Her profound ideas about love, reason, beauty and immortality have had a huge impact on Western culture.  Plato describes her as a priestess and wise woman in secret things, a teacher to the young Socrates “in the art of love.”  Yet the consensus of classical scholars through the ages is that Diotima is an entirely fictional character.  Axiothea and Lasthenia are mentioned as students of Plato during the first years of the academy, but are also thought to be members of his famous family, who traced their origins to the lawgiver Solon.  Hipparchia of Meroneia was a woman philosopher from a half-century later, also known as the partner and wife of the Cynic philosopher, Crates.

 

Thus the first group of women thinkers we can identify in Greek literature are either mythopoeic figures from the legendary past or the wives and daughters of famous men.  This is one reason why Aspasia is such a striking figure in the history of philosophy.

 

Aspasia of Miletus is often regarded as the most important woman of the classical era.  She achieves this status entirely on her own merit rather than through her connections: yet these are impressive too and include Zeno, Anaxagoras, Phidias, Sophocles, her student Socrates and of course her lover and partner, Pericles, Athens’ head of state.  Very little of her thinking is known to us — none of her writings survive — yet it is still possible to imagine some of her reasonings, pieced together from contemporary sources.  In this brief note I will explore a few Aspasian ideas and reflect on their import for philosophy — especially in the tradition that regards philosophy as therapeia, therapy and healing for the troubled soul — which is the line of thought and common concern of the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute and Society that will publish this note.  My hope is that people who like myself work for a philosophically inspired healing will find something of value in the musings of a woman who lived twenty-five centuries ago.

Fundamentally this is a work of philosophical imagination and attempt at reconstruction. I offer a brief biographical sketch, an account of Aspasia’s thinking, and an assessment.

1. Biography

Aspasia was born in Miletus sometime around 470 and died in Athens circa 400 BCE.  Several ancient sources name her father one Axiochus and speculate about his family.  She appears to have been sold into slavery — by one account as a prisoner of war, after her family’s native province, Caria, lost its freedom to Miletus — by another because her family could not afford a dowry.  While still a child, she was singled out for her beauty.  She was given a fine education and trained as a hetaera (courtesan, prostitute, geisha).  She appears to have learned several languages and much of the medical knowledge of her time.  Some accounts have her enslaved in Persia, then married and widowed, using her widow’s fortune to travel to Athens — the home city from which Ionian Miletus was colonized — and by several accounts she arrives in Athens at approximately age 20.

Within a decade after her migration to Athens she has set up a school for the daughters of well-to-do families, become friends with illustrious thinkers such as Anaxagoras and Zeno, become Socrates’ teacher in rhetoric and, scandalously, is living with Pericles, Athens’ head of state, after he has divorced his wife, who was also his cousin, Dejanira.

Ancient writers who discuss Aspasia — praising or abusing her, or in some cases both — include Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Atheneus, Antisthenes, Plutarch, Cicero, Lucian,  Eupolus, Cratinus, Duris, Aeschines and Dodorus Siculus.  Aeschines and Antisthenes both wrote dialogues entitled Aspasia, but both works are lost, save for a few fragments.

Aspasia was charged with impiety and corruption and again appears in good company in this connection, since Anaxagoras, Phidias, Socrates and Aristotle all faced these charges.  Hermippus the comic poet — another ancient source for our knowledge of her — brought and prosecuted the charges, but Aspasia was acquitted of all charges — yet she spoke up in her defense at her trial, which no woman before her had done, and this seems to have increased public knowledge about her and made her even more a target of gossip and condemnation.  Pericles also spoke at her trial and showed some emotion in doing so.  This is significant because Pericles has the reputation of being the mildest and most even tempered among all ancient leaders — the most ‘Olympian,’ meaning majestic, stately, superior to mundane affairs — this lofty and disdainful man, the first man in Athens, thundered with emotion at Aspasia’s trial and demanded that she be held blameless.  Lucian calls her “the Lady from Ionia” and “most admired by the most admirable” (A Portrait Study, 27) — the same person who Cratinus calls a dog and Eupolis a whore.

Plutarch, who is something of a hostile witness, and who seems especially to despise Pericles and credit stories that chip away at his stellar reputation, states that despite her infamous reputation, Athenian men would bring their wives to hear Aspasia speak, and were anxious for their daughters to enter her school and learn her teachings (Pericles 24).

Pericles and most of his family died in the first years of the Peloponnesian War when the plague struck Athens and wiped out most of its population (429).  Aspasia turned to Lysicles, a general and democratic leader, for protection and married him, and it is said that she made him the first man in Athens.  Little of her is known after this point, except that she died a few years before Socrates, who was executed by the democracy in 399.

2. Thought

Aspasia is recorded by most of the ancient sources cited above as a sophistes, a ‘sophist’ and teacher of speech and rhetoric.  Plato and several other writers pass on the story that Pericles’ Funeral Oration, recorded in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (II, 34-46), which is the most celebrated public speech from classical times, was not written by Pericles but by Aspasia instead (Plato, Menexenus 235).  It is noteworthy that this speech is among the first occasions in Greek history in which the word eros, which typically referred to bodily desires, is used instead to signify aspiration, the eros for ideas and great principles; Pericles encourages his hearers to become the city’s supporters, defenders and zealous guardians — to encourage their eros for a good and common cause — thus engaging eros in this positive sense and recommending a course of action in which we gradually get control of our baser desires yet also channel their amazing power.  Charles Kahn, the contemporary classical scholar, argues from these premises that Plato’s character Diotima of Mantinea, whose teaching about the ‘ladder of love’ is preserved in Plato’s dialogue Symposium, is really Aspasia in disguise (Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue: The Return to the Philosophy of Nature, 2014, pp. 26-7).

Aspasia is described as beautiful, but no physical description of her survives.  Instead there is the intriguing remark that her attraction lay in her animated expression and wonderful smile of reason, which no sculptor was able to convey.  She was said to listen intently in conversation and to hold her own with the greatest minds of the age — Socrates says in several places that he defers to her judgment about important issues, especially regarding love.  She is described as someone with astute political understanding, whose shrewd judgment was formed from experiences of suffering and degradation; she was said to possess a great penetration of mind and to quickly find a way to help her partners in conversation see the contradiction lying in their ideas, or to see the truth of her ideas.

Another recent commentator, Nicole Loraux, argues that Aspasia’s early training in the medical arts of her day — something that a hetaera was expected to learn — drew her to the analogy between applying drugs (pharmakon) and the use of discourses (logoi) to treat falsehood (Nicole Loraux, La Grèce au Féminin 2003, p. 29).  This very intuitive idea helps us see the truth of Cicero’s comment that Aspasia’s teachings had to do with how to acquire virtue through self-knowledge (Cicero, De Inventione, 1, 51-3).

Aspasia left no works of her own so that we must look for echoes of her musings in the works of other writers from her day.  I think regarding Loraux’s intuition, the place to look is Plato’s later dialogue Phaedrus, composed perhaps 30 years or so after her death.

Plato makes a number of thought-provoking claims in his discussions about persuasion, rhetoric, speechifying and related subjects that classical scholars associate with Aspasia.

Socrates proposes the problem in the Republic: “Suppose that we show someone that he does not know but merely has an opinion and he grows angry with us and protests that he knows and won’t listen to anyone — is there some way of soothing him and gently persuading him, without telling him too plainly that he is not in his right mind?” (467d).

Socrates investigates political speeches of his day to learn rhetoric and the arts of persuasion and he concludes that “the whole idea is to aim at making things seem likely, whether they are true or not” (Phaedrus 272).  He decides that this cannot really do the listener any good, since we may be persuading him to believe something false.  A great speaker can implant a belief in another person’s soul — you can talk people into something — just as a doctor can change a person’s body, e.g. by giving them drugs to calm or excite them, a speaker can calm or excite the soul.  But doctors learn more than just how to administer a drug, but when to administer it, in order to treat the illness.  They know what the disease is and how to cure it.  A true rhetoric or true art of persuasion is a kind of doctoring like this – Plato’s word for it is therapeia, ‘therapy.’ “In medicine and in speaking, we have to know the cause of the illness to treat it, and bring back health and strength, either by prescribing medicines, diet and physical exercise, or through discourses, ideas and intellectual training” (Phaedrus 270b).  Socrates asks “shouldn’t we try to persuade a person gently, since people do not make mistakes purposely, and so we should begin talking with him and asking questions?” (Republic 589c).  Plato appears to think that by asking questions and pursuing dialectic — following the course of free argument wherever it leads — a person’s native love of truth, or desire to see things squarely and discover what is real, will gradually emerge, and gather health and strength, so that the person will reject falsehood on his own.  This is what he calls psychagogia, literally ‘leading the soul,’ which he calls the “the true rhetoric,” the form of therapy (healing or cure) that he offers us.  Practicing the elenchus (process of critical cross-examination) is a great and powerful catharsis (release and purification) that reorients intelligence back to reality so that the person can instruct himself (Phaedrus 230d).

Plato argues that we don’t choose to be blind, so that when we are given a chance to see and are made to see we will want it and choose it.  But he doesn’t discount the possibility that someone might want illusion and falsehood instead — that people might want to believe many kinds of lies for many kinds of reasons — which in his terms is a test of character.  People who give in to base desires and lies are weak-willed (akrasia).  People who can tough things out and face reality squarely in spite of they want are self-controlled (enkrateia).  So ultimately when we start talking about persuasion and see people getting angry when their beliefs are challenged, we are looking at human nature, human psychology, and the ways people act in society, and we see the struggle going on in each of us to look at the world honestly, without evasion or grandiosity or self-pity;  we see that there are weak people who give in to lies and who have nothing to teach us; we also see strong people who resist lies and teach us how to live with our questions.

I think this is what Cicero has in mind when he says that Aspasia’s training in rhetoric had to do with how to acquire virtue (arete) through self-knowledge (gnothi seauton, ‘know thyself’).  Aspasia was also a midwife.  Plato sometimes refers to “the maieutic art,” i.e. “the art of midwifery” which enables him to be the instrument of many happy deliveries of “fair things” that pregnant minds discover within themselves — which Socrates calls the process of dialectic — which is also a way of sorting and sifting through an issue in order finally to distinguish the true from the false (Theaetetus 150, 184).

Aeschines of Sphettus — sometimes called Aeschines Socraticus — in his lost dialogue Aspasia, recounts her version of dialectic, or the maieutic art, or therapy, or the true rhetoric and doctoring of the soul, in the following brief passage (Aeschines frag. 31):

Aspasia asks a the wife of a man named Xenophon “if your neighbor had gold that was purer than yours, would you rather have her gold or yours?”  “Hers,” was the reply.  “And if she had richer jewels and finer clothes?”  “I would rather have hers.” “And if she had a better husband than yours?”  Here the woman could only answer with embarrassed silence.  Aspasia then begins to question the woman’s husband, asking him the same things, but substituting horses for gold, land for clothes, and asking him finally if he would prefer his neighbor’s wife if she were better than his own.  And again at the end the man can only answer with an embarrassed silence.  Aspasia concludes the dialogue with the comment “Each of you would like the best husband or wife: and since neither of the two of you has achieved perfection, each of you will always regret this ideal” (the fragment is also preserved in the later text, Cicero’s Invitation to Rhetoric 1, 31).

Socratic dialectic is said to engage the elenchus, disproof or destructive cross-questioning — the heart of the Socratic method — in order to reach the aporia, the impassable conflict or contradiction, which gives the person who experiences this check an opportunity to know herself or himself as a knower, or learner, as someone who gains self-knowledge in ignorance.  Aspasia’s earlier dialectic appears to aim not at contradiction and aporia and realization that one does not know, but at contradiction and blocked eros and realization that one has not reached one’s desire, one’s aspiration, one’s ideal or deep impulse.  It is less intellectual and more emotional — less about knowledge and more about love — not checking one’s pretensions about knowledge but one’s deeper ambitions for real love.

There is at least one more key element in Aspasia’s teachings — as best as we can tell or reconstruct them — and that is her much-documented and constant theme of attempting to raise the stature of her sex and establish again an equality between men and women that legendary Solon envisioned and tried to inaugurate more than a century before Aspasia was born.  She thought that her age was creating a new kind of freedom for people that was certain to fail (as fail it did) unless it was widely taught, grasped, loved, supported and fiercely defended.  This is the theme that comes out in Pericles’ ‘Funeral Oration’:

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern for others than imitators ourselves … our laws afford equal justice to all … we favor the many instead of the few, which is why we call it a democracy … neither social standing, nor class consideration, nor poverty should dictate advancement in public life, but merit …the freedom which we enjoy extends even to private life … we do not exercise a jealous surveillance over each other and we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes … we throw our city open to the world and look for every opportunity to learn and observe, even if the enemy may occasionally profit from our liberality … in matters of education, where our rivals try to teach obedience from the very cradle by a course of harsh discipline, here we are taught to be free and live and yet just as ready to encounter danger when it arrives … we cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without weakness … for us discussion is not a stumbling block on the way to action, but an indispensible preliminary to any wise action at all … we are the school of Hellas  … the admiration of succeeding ages will be ours … and where the rewards for simple merit are the greatest, we will also find the best citizens.”

Athenian eleutheria — liberty, openness and frankness — is a challenge not just to Spartan amathia — obedience, ‘manliness,’ literally ‘not-knowing’ — but to misogyny and ultimately to every base condition of subjection — which perhaps Aspasia learned both as a woman and a slave.  Like Socrates’ close friend Phaedo and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and many other thinkers who experienced slavery first-hand, Aspasia opposed the dominant ethic of her time.  Thus she was branded a whore, an upstart who speaks out of turn, and an atheist and corruptor of morals, and became something like the poster child for ancient misogyny and the most frequent butt for obscene jokes in antiquity.  The Funeral Speech argues that great ideals are insecure if only a tiny few uphold them.  It is crucial that our ideals be widely discussed, debated, criticized, upheld and improved; otherwise, when the barbarians arrive, there will be no one, or too few, to defend them.  And this is precisely what happened to her, and to Pericles, and to great Athens itself.

3. Assessment

My discussion uncovers three Aspasian principles of philosophy.  Arguably, these are core principles of critical theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology — I am arguing that the practices that draw us together are Aspasian — I will try to explain these connections.

The three Aspasian principles are the value principle, the ladder and the strength principle.

Values exist in the public space; they can only live and thrive by criticism, without which they decay into idols; or few people learn them, debate them, criticize them, defend or improve them, and they grow weak because they are no longer widely held and defended.

The experience of degradation can also be a prelude to freedom; base and noble desires lie close together; it is in our power to transform eros into arete via autognosia — we are trying to practice virtue or excellence, wrestling with eros, guided by self-knowledge.

Logoi can serve as pharmaka and the elenchus can be a psychagogia and thus a therapeia by which we practice enkrateia and wrestle with akrasia and bring more to noesis — that is, there is a talking cure that involves coming to terms with reality and becoming aware.

Critical theory seeks to liberate people from what enslaves them; psychoanalysis aims at health through awareness; phenomenology wrestles with how things feel right now — perceptions, feelings, thoughts right now — the way in which consciousness is constituted and the dimensionality of internal time-consciousness, which is, remembers and plans.  These themes all emerge as soon as one begins investigating the ideas of Aspasia Ionia.

+

I am not entirely sure how to assess the ‘Lady from Ionia’ or the contribution she makes to our society.   Most of what I’m saying about her here is speculation.   She may or may not be Socrates’ teacher; she may or may not be the author of the Funeral Oration; she may or may not be a Sophist, therapist, doctor of the soul, teacher of virtue, dialectician, politician, midwife, sex counselor, or true-life model for Socrates’ wondrous Diotima.  She is the most widely discussed woman from antiquity and we know nothing about her.

I think Madeleine Henry is right.  “To ask questions about Aspasia is to ask questions about half of humanity” (p. 9).  Aspasia is a name and a stand-in for every woman who has lived and died on this planet never given a chance for a real education or to add her voice to the human conversation or to add her genius to solving human problems.  Yet somehow Aspasia emerges out of the shadows and listens intently to what we are saying — discovering our contradictions — and smiling her enigmatic smile of reason.

 

 

Bibliography of modern sources

Eve Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981)

W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: University Press, 1971)

Madeleine Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Charles Kahn, Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue: The Return to the Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Nicole Loraux, La Grèce au Féminin (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2003)

Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1988)

Andras Schmidt, Das Perikleische Zeitalter, vol 1 (1877)

Stephen Tracy, Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)

Mary Ellen Waithe, A History of Women Philosophers (Boston: Kluwer Publishers, 1987)

 

The Ontology of Consciousness

Chris Haley

[Read as Digital Publication]

In the religious and philosophical tradition of Western thought there exists the foundational belief and cultural logic of the “self” as the essence and expression of our individual Being. In its religious guise, the self is the earthly manifestation of the eternal spirit of an individual’s soul. The explanatory power of the soul as the seat of the self gives easy support to free-will and personal identity. However, if God and soul no longer backstops the self—the “metaphysics of the subject” evaporated—the phenomenal remainder of “consciousness,” is laid bare and open to critique, inviting speculation over its ontology and capacities. We are left to consider the nature of conscious experience and whatever might be salvaged of a “self” in terms of subject-agency in fully immanent and materialist terms.^[1] In this paper, I argue that John Searle’s concept of the “unified conscious field,” Edmond Husserl’s concept of “internal time consciousness,” and Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of “non-positional consciousness” are three aspects or “manifolds in identity” of the same phenomenon. While these concepts point to slightly different functions within the structure of consciousness, when brought together, their unique explanatory powers complete and expand one another. Ultimately, by focusing on the ontological claims made by Searle, Husserl, and Sartre at the level of consciousness, we can begin to account how subject-agency is “vitalized” by the structure and capacities of consciousness, which provide a fount for subject-agent causal power in terms of reflexive and recursive praxis. If subject-agency is to be ontologized, this power will be accounted through the irreducible nature of consciousness, or in Searle’s words, a “first-person ontology of the subject.”

 

Searle: Who are we in the first-person?

 

The ontological status of consciousness historically has tended toward substance dualism, classically formulated in philosophy as “Cartesian dualism,” in which mind (soul) and body (material) exist as distinct types of things in the world. The dualist position is understandable on one level. Consciousness seems qualitatively different from the brute given of materiality and the “laws of nature” shaping its expression. The conscious experience of perceiving, conjecturing, remembering, anticipating, and imagining—an “aboutness” of and in the world, consisting of our thoughts and feelings—seem radically separated from other things, people, and even our own bodies. While plants and other animals seem to live as automata, according to a preset life plan, human beings experience an uncomfortable level of awareness and openness to what we can do, might do, and have to do. Mind-material dualism captures our intuition that human consciousness is cut out on its own.

In the historical development of the Western scientific paradigm of material monism, however, not only is the theology of the “soul” expunged from the record, but also the “mental” is rejected as having any separate reality, and hence, the move towards “eliminative materialism,” reducing the ethereality of consciousness to a set of propositions rendered solely in terms of its underlying bio-chemical strata. This type of reduction to a purported set of foundational causal operations is the hallmark of scientificity, such that “if consciousness can be reduced to brain processes then consciousness is

nothing but a brain process.”^[2] In this account, consciousness is epiphenomenal of underlying chemical interactions and electrical currents coursing through the neuronal system, which always logically proceed (in terms of causality) whatever we might “think” is going on. Cause and effect processes are objective, quantifiable, and subject to universal laws of determination. Consciousness as we know it, does not fit in the paradigm. How, might we ask, can the conscious intentionality of a mere “thought” move inanimate “matter?”

In answering this question, Searle gives several “conditions of adequacy.” The first is to reject any notion that reality consists of more than one “world”: dualism, trialism, etc., however conceived. Searle argues that we must adhere to a singular view of reality, such that quarks, electrons, consciousness, and baseball games are part of one world, connected by virtue of basic facts of the universe presupposing higher order, “non-basic facts.”^[3] Following from the first, the second condition of adequacy is that any account of consciousness must respect “basic facts…given by physics and chemistry, by evolutionary biology and the other natural sciences” and in particular with respect to consciousness, “the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.”^[4] A third condition for Searle, is that any account of consciousness cannot state facts violating our conscious, lived experience, viz., a theory cannot “say anything that is phenomenologically false.”^[5]

The problem however, as Searle notes, is that consciousness as the basis for intentional activity of saying, doing, and making is still largely a scientific mystery: “Right now nobody knows the answers to these questions: how is consciousness caused by brain processes and how is it realized in the brain.”^[6] Moreover, brain science has yet to account for the deeper mystery, which evokes the “dualist intuition” of those moments when it appears what we “think” logically proceeds (again, in terms of causality) the precise course of electrical and chemical processes in the brain (to give a wink rather than just blink, etc.). Searle argues thusly, “in order to have a scientific account of consciousness we will need more than an account of how the brain produces subjective states of sentience and awareness. We will need to know how the brain produces the peculiar organization of experiences that expresses the existence of

the self.”^[7] Consciousness is not just the sum of all intentionalities, the complex “aboutness” of the world given by sensory data and cognitive and conative powers. Some “thing” owns up to, peers at, and lurks among these intentionalities, and that thing is the “self.” Searle terms the self the “X” position of conscious awareness and activity that can react back upon the material body, such as the mundane activity of raising our arm, and with biofeedback, lowering our heart rate and mitigating affective states. If follows, therefore, that the structure of consciousness as the basis for conscious intentional activity must entail the existence of the self with an ability to react back upon and alter the very bio-chemical, “more basic facts” from which it emerges.^[8]

Searle’s proposed solution to the mind-body problem undermines both the dualist and eliminative materialist positions. On the one hand, Searle outright rejects substance dualism because it fails in terms of the general world view of science, being there is no non-material “mental substance” in the universe to which we can ascribe causal powers to “move matter.”^[9] Consciousness cannot be the expression of a little ball or field of mental or “spiritual energy” that stands apart from the material world, unaccounted for by the known laws of physics.^[10] On the other hand, Searle rejects all varieties of “reductive” and “eliminative” materialist positions (but not materialism outright) because eliminative materialists take the fact that if conscious states “can be reduced to brain processes, then consciousness is nothing but a brain process”^[11]

Searle argues however, consciousness is not an illusion to be explained by reductionist, third person analysis. Searle’s critique of “eliminative materialism,” (which he takes much more seriously as a philosophical position than dualism) rests on uncovering a confusion between the ontology of consciousness and the causality of consciousness. Searle notes that the debate between dualism and eliminative materialism rests on a mistaken assumption. Both positions presume the mental and the physical would have to be mutually “exclusive ontological categories.”^[12] Eliminative materialists however, cannot countenance “irreducible mental phenomena” that cannot be given an “objective” account.^[13] Eliminative materialists, seeking to avoid the unconscionable position of dualism, eliminate the mental in the name of preserving all explanation of the physical world in objective materialist terms. The materialist eliminates consciousness by rendering what is “mental” as mere epiphenomenon of its materialist base such that “the mental qua mental does not exist, that there is nothing there but the physical.”^[14] A second and related problem arises because eliminative materialists conceptualize causality in the classical Humean model whereby causality is a “relation of discreet events ordered in time.”^[15] Once the ‘mind-body problem’ is conceived in terms of Humean causal relations, either the conscious mind or the biological brain (or both at different times) will have temporal priority over the other. For dualists of course, this is not a dilemma: a mental ‘substance’ can effect a material substance. For eliminative materialists it is theoretically impossible: there are no mental substances therefore no conscious experience could ever be a “discreet event” occurring before a bio-chemical event in the brain. Discreet events in the brain must always precede discreet consciously experienced events.

Searle’s critique of dualism and eliminative materialism sets the stage for his theory of consciousness and solution to the mind-body problem, which he describes as “biological naturalism.” What is being fought over is the ontological status of consciousness, which, in Searle’s rather prosaic definition, “consists of those states of feelings, sentience, or awareness that typically begin when we wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until those feelings stop, until we go to sleep again, go into a coma, die, or otherwise become ‘unconscious’.”^[16] Searle’s theory retains the “dualist intuition” that consciousness is real and causally efficacious, while simultaneously correcting what he takes as the fundamental confusion over the relationship of ontology and causality that leads to eliminative materialism. Foremost, it is a mistake to assume that if consciousness is not a separate substance over and above its material brain base, consciousness is by default reducible in ontological terms to the brain, foreclosing its sui generis reality. Searle argues that conscious states are “features of the brain system, and thus exist at a level higher than that of neurons and synapses. Individual neurons are not conscious, but portions of the brain system composed of neurons are conscious.”^[17] The implication is that while conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes (no brain neurobiology, no consciousness), they are not ontologically reducible. Furthermore, the capacity of consciousness to react causally back upon or through the neuronal system gets lost by failing to recognize its causal power is ontologically emergent.

To begin to understand Searle’s argument for ontological irreducibility of consciousness to brain, he argues that an adequate philosophy of mind and theory of consciousness requires two fundamental distinctions. The first is between entities in the world that are ontologically objective and ontologically subjective. Ontologically objective things have existence independent of human intentions and creation such as electrons, coral reefs, tectonic plates, and our brains and bodies. Ontologically subjective things do depend on human minds and intentions, such as governments, money, aches and pains, and our ideas and theories about our brain and body. The second distinction is between human knowledge claims (and thus ontologically subjective) which are epistemologically objective or subjective. The epistemological distinction delineates knowledge claims which are epistemologically public and verifiable and hence “objective” (“the earth revolves around the sun”; water freezes at 32° Fahrenheit) and claims which are opinions and hence “subjective” (“English beer is better than German beer”; “Rainier is the world’s most beautiful mountain”).

 

In combination, these distinctions form a typology of human-centered knowledge claims. Entities such as the moon or a squirrel, are “ontologically objective” and “epistemologically objective.” The moon exists independently of human intentionality (objective) and we can all agree (objectively), for the most part, the moon exists. In contrast, an opinion that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla is “epistemologically subjective” statement about an “ontologically subjective” entity.

 

The crucial combination are those entities that are ontologically subjective (money, the feeling of pain, governments) and epistemologically objective. For instance, dollar bills are a social construction, dependent on human “collective” intentionality for existence (subjectively), which we all agree exists and holds the purchasing power of one dollar (objectively). The existence of most ontologically subjective entities such as governments, money, and ice cream are fairly easy to verify publicly and objectively. Insofar as it is possible to give an objective account for their existence, it is a trivial point that “ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity.”^[18] The singular contentious case is the ontological status of conscious states and experiences. The problem is that it is impossible to give a “third-person account”—the hallmark of the hard scientific paradigm— of conscious experiences. Third-person accounts are available for the locus and cause of a headache, when explained in terms of neuroscience, focusing on neuroanatomy and biochemistry. Phenomenological, first-person accounts of pain or other conscious experiences are not, and thus considered unscientific. Moreover, when conjoined by the eliminative materialist assumption of Humean causality as discreet events ordered in time, consciousness is rendered as epiphenomenal.

 

The point Searle draws from this typology bearing on the nature of consciousness, is that while consciousness in its manifest experience as such is not susceptible to third-person analysis, it does not follow it is ontologically irreal.^[19] Many objective experiences, like hunger and pain, have an unproblematic subjective ontology, as they are discreet events with identified causal processes occurring in the brain. Consciousness, while more complicated and so far not well understood, must follow the same logical structure, pertaining to its reality and susceptibility to causal explanation. What is yet to be determined, is how all our sensory and cognitive functions “unify” into an experience of consciousness that is greater than the sum total of its interlocking intentionalities. If consciousness is neither a substance nor ontologically reducible to the physical, the third option is to begin understanding consciousness in analogy to the properties of liquidity and solidity. For both properties, the relationship of the underlying molecular structure to the physical property is one of “simultaneous causality”^[20] The molecular structure causes the property of liquidity—not as a Humean “constant conjunction” of atomistic events—but as an intrinsic and occurring physical consequence of the underlying structure. Likewise, there is a relationship of simultaneous causality between the biological brain and consciousness. The unique quality of consciousness however, in disanalogy to liquidity and solidity, is that because consciousness is a subjective experience, it is impossible to derive a “third-person account” of its nature. The motivation behind the materialist reduction of this problem stems from the belief that the only legitimate, scientific account of reality is empirical, verifiable, testable, etc. What is “real,” viz., ontologically objective, can only be posited when ascertained in terms that are epistemologically objective.^[21] The latter requirement for both ontological and epistemological objectivity, Searle terms a “third-person ontology,” and as we have seen above, this contrasts with entities such as pain that are ontologically subjective, but verified as “real” when justified in epistemologically objective terms, and hence have a “first-person ontology.” Whatever our experiences of our own conscious states, it does not have a “third-person ontology” that can be known and analyzed like language, text, or a collection of butterflies. Consciousness is not a thing one can trip over or find under the couch cushions. Rather, like pain, consciousness has a “first-person ontology” that only manifests as its “qualitative feel” in and of living creatures .^[22] Searle writes:

 

“When it comes to identifying features of the mind, such as consciousness and intentionality, with features of the brain, such as computational states or neurobiological states, it looks like there have to be two features, because the mental phenomena have a first-person ontology, in the sense that they exist only insofar as they are experienced by some human or animal subject, some “I” that has the experience. And this makes them irreducible to any third-person ontology, any mode of existence that is independent of any experiencing agent.”^[23]

Hence, consciousness is the expression of the active awareness of the brain of the world, including, perhaps most saliently, a highly developed awareness of its own state of being in the world.

Searle’s formal account of consciousness demonstrates that it is real, irreducible, and capable of reacting causally back upon the neuronal system from which it emerges. The first-person ontology of consciousness as being neither reducible nor eliminable vouchsafes its reality. It follows therefore, consciousness can explored via a “realist” phenomenology striving to identify the basic structure of consciousness and its features as it manifests in and of the world.^[24] For Searle, there are three key features of consciousness: it is qualitative, subjective, and unified, all of which interlock and subsequently ground the consciousness of personal subjectivity. Searle notes first that conscious states are qualitative in that our cognitive experiences are differentiated by “what’s on our mind,” as, for instance, the qualitative difference between listening to Led Zeppelin or contemplating a panoramic mountain view or wallowing in self-despair. Qualitative experiences are formed out of the “intentionalities” of the mind, in that they are constituted by the “aboutness” of consciousness, whether they are features of the external world around us or features we find in self-reflection. They include perceptions, memories, feelings, and beliefs. Nonetheless, Searle argues that “consciousness” and the intentional states that typically fill our conscious awareness are not identical and should not be analytically conflated for important reasons we will see.^[25]

Second, consciousness is subjective, in that what is going on in our mind—our consciousness—cannot be experienced directly by any other person—(“Can’t you feel my pain?” “Sorry, not really…”). As a first-person ontology, conscious states of animals are unique in the world in that they have a “subjective mode of existence” unlike all other entities having an “objective mode of existence.”^[26] To repeat, just because consciousness is ontologically subjective, this fact does not preclude an epistemologically objective account of its nature and structure however difficult it may be in practice. Moreover, as we will see below, it is precisely the subjective experience, separate from other instances of consciousness around us, that ultimately is responsible for the psychic-physical experience of having a self.

The third feature of consciousness (and the most salient for my argument) is that conscious states (of music, the taste of food, etc.) manifest in a “unified conscious field.”^[27] Even though we may be focused on one aspect (the distracting bus rumbling past; the discomfort of sitting too long in front of a laptop), all our sensory experiences are parts of a singular and all inclusive totality, which generally coheres and provides a more or less seamless flow of conscious experience. Consciousness, however, is not just the sum-total of intentionalities, agglutinated in a totality. Conscious experiences like perception do not create consciousness as a one-to-one correlation between a perceived object and its corresponding conscious state (in neurobiological theory, the “Neuronal Correlate of Consciousness,” what Searle calls the “building block” approach or what we might think of as a “5-D” experience of a very high number of pixels). In this view, consciousness is nothing more than the sum total of sensory inputs with correlating neural reactions. Searle finds this approach wanting. He argues that conscious experiences modify a “preexisting conscious field.”^[28] In other words, the field is a capacity or power of receptivity, operating prior to all intentional states always and actively primed to encounter perceptions, sensory inputs, etc. that are the “subject” of consciousness. The profound philosophical implication of the unified conscious field is it necessitates an enduring “point of reference” and a requirement for “motivations” to process cognitively the torrent of intentionalities gathered within the field.

For one, Searle notes, the key feature of the unified field is the capacity so enabled to “change our attention at will” to different parts of the field. Toward our experience at any given time, even without moving our heads or eyes, we can focus our attention on different sensations, thoughts, and perceptions. We can consciously foreground and background sights, sounds, and feelings. We can multitask: cook dinner, listen to music, and talk with friends simultaneously, moving our attention rapidly and effectively to the priority task moment by moment. The first-person ontology of the unified conscious field thus grants human kind “a huge evolutionary advantage” to “coordinate a large amount of intentionality (“information”) simultaneously.”^[29] The question therefore, “crudely,” as Searle puts it, is: “when I say I can shift my attention at will, who does the shifting? Why should there be anything more to my conscious life than the existence of a conscious field?”^[30] Searle claims that “most philosophers” do not believe in a “self” that has any kind of ontological reality over and above the “sequence of our experiences, conscious and unconscious,” as they are situated in a “body in which these experiences occur.”^[31] Searle argues that the strong hold of this Humean conception of the “Self” as a fictional cover given to bodies merely undergoing the sequencing of experiences is inadequate. It is precisely the capability to shift our attention to various features of the conscious field that suggests something “more” is in operation. This conscious power of selection and contemplation is further strengthened and expanded by additional abilities to close our eyes, turn our head, or move to a new place, which thus open infinite possibilities of new, different, or reconfigured unified fields of intentionalities.^[32] The power to differentiate, separate, and focus within the unified field, as mode of efficient causation, is what is “more” for Searle, and what he takes to be the basic functional capacity as the “who” of the self, enduring in time and accumulating memories.

Two, a “self” who can range through and manipulate aspects of the unified field, moreover, must have motivations or reasons (however minimal), directing these changes in attention. For Searle, “the causes of… action in the form of the reasons [for the action]…, are not causally sufficient to determine the action. In normal non-pathological cases, the action is motivated but not determined, because there is a gap between the perceived causes and the action.”^[33] Reasons in and of themselves do not directly entail subsequent actions upon which they are derived, that is to say, they do not have powers of agency to “push out” through the sentient subject. I would also include antecedents of action (behaviors) by relatively autonomous or “objective” forces running through or conditioning human Being: biological requirements, subconscious contents, and social determinations.^[34] Thus, the logical structure of the unified conscious field, articulated in the primitive or foundational point of its operation (the basic logic of a reason motivating a subject to change their glance foregrounding a portion of the unified field while backgrounding the rest) holds true for the full range of potential “motivations” transposed as reasons.

Guiding this insight, is a basic argument that “the intentionality of language has to be explained in terms of the intentionality of the mind and not conversely.”^[35] In other words, in all human languages, human intentionality has imbued sets of sound patterns, logographs, written marks, etc. with significance that become formalized and institutionalized. Searle terms those instances of pre-existing intentionalities, “derived intentionalities,” which constitute the living legacy in which the subject-agent is socialized into. Maps, books, knowledge, stories, institutions, the built environment, and so on, all the symbolic and material coordinates of the life-world, exist by prior intentional activity, and are uptaked and come to condition the day-to-day “intrinsic intentionalities” of subject-agents in their doing, saying, and making.^[36] The point of intrinsic intentional states existing prior to language is clear for more “primitive” biological impulses: thirst, hunger, sex drive, and avoidance of suffering, but Searle argues the latter point holds true for our beliefs and desires.^[37] The first-person ontology of consciousness grounds all intentionalities, such that a belief, once taken as true, even if derived from some old 18th century German philosopher, is reactivated as an intentionality, and from which reasons for action and new articulations of its truth are born out of the gap.

Nonetheless, the mediating power operating in the “gap” between reasons and actions is a formal capacity X, “something capable of initiating and carrying out actions.”^[38] Our  and actions “do not just happen,” as if subjects are preprogrammed robots carrying out instructions in action. An ontological open space (which I think is best understood as a temporal gap between cause and effect moments) thus separates what behaviors ultimately manifest from a reason. Something—“the Self” through some effort, “the will”—ultimately acts, pushing these deliberations and decisions into being.^[39] Moreover, the gap is responsible for the phenomenological experience we have of a basic “freedom of will” to act on our reasons, to do otherwise, to not do anything, or “even [make] the choice not to make free choices,” as the strict “determinist” would have it, are all predicated on some minimal openness and a “self” choosing choices.^[40]

Searle’s theory of the self, is thus a necessary structural component of the “unified conscious field,” and is the “X” locus around which its “continuity in identity” in time is reflexively granted through acts of memory recall.^[41] The self nonetheless, never operates in isolation, detached from social context and unaware of its becoming in time. Searle notes that a significant “feature of the conscious field is that I do in fact have a sense of myself as a particular person situated at a particular time and place in history, with a certain set of particular experiences and memories.”^[42] In total, therefore, the self as an agent “has to be the entity that perceives, remembers, imagines, and reflects,” intentional capacities all of which enable subject-agents’ reasons for actions that a willing self instantiates in the world via her practices.^[43] This latter point is crucial because it is only out of our ongoing life experience bounded by memory and anticipations of the future that the subjectivity of the self—formed by sociocultural dispositions, the obscurity of subconscious content, and our concerns and interests—gels into meaningful reasons for our actions.^[44]

 

Husserl: Mind the Time

As I have described Searle’s concept of “unified conscious field” is largely a synchronic account of consciousness over and above the various intentionalities that predominate its field. These include our sensory impressions but also our awareness of our beliefs and desires when brought to attention. The structure of consciousness in Searle’s theory necessarily includes capacities of roaming among intentionalities, surmising their contents, and exercising volition within the gap between reasons and actions. Searle’s structural account of consciousness, nonetheless, is relatively flat, neither placing emphasis on the temporal dimension of consciousness as an unfolding awareness, nor tracing out how temporal awareness is possible. Husserl’s concept of “internal time consciousness” adds this temporal dimension and, when wedded to Searle’s unified field, adds a diachronic aspect, incorporating in much more detail how the structure of consciousness gives rise to the possibility for memories of the past and anticipations of the future . Crucially, this movement is inherently inviolable and indeterminate. Momentarily, it can be mesmerized by flashing lights, distracted by alluring images, and ordered to attention. A sudden loud sound or bright light can “cause” our attention to focus, perhaps akin to a “fight or flight” response. But the “causal” power of such shock and awe events is always transitory, whereby a moment later we normally regain our awareness and ability to focus our attention within the conscious field at will. On this account, there is no direct external power that can cause us to focus on a particularity within the conscious field.^[45]

In addition, though I am unaware if Husserl explicitly addresses the nature of the relationship between the brain’s neuronal system and its manifest consciousness, I think Searle’s argument against substance/ property dualisms and reductionist/ eliminative materialisms and for an emergent, first-person ontology of the unified conscious field are both logically and ontologically consistent with Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness. Moreover, in affinity with Searle, the enabling structure of the human experience of temporality is essential for a position of self-awareness. It is what constitutes the organizing frame by which the subject-agent can monitor the comings and goings of the thoughts and experiences occurring in subjective time. Like Searle, what emerges in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the structure of internal time consciousness is a formal “self” as a capacity for conscious manipulation of primary modalities of intentionality. In the act of disclosure of the world through the veritable “aboutness” of conscious experience, our memories and anticipations, our experiences and projects, are brought together in a process of “self” definition.

Husserl’s conception of the conscious experience of temporality has three dimensions. The first,  objective time, is substantiated by various technologies: calendars, clocks, Stonehenge(?), and/ or other cultural formats for organizing time.^[46] Objective time is typically demarcated in discreet units and time spans, such as hours, lunar cycles, millennia, and prominent cultural/ religious events. Its modality is “public and verifiable,” which thus enables and coordinates the intersubjective experience of temporality for a collectively shared understanding of time.^[47] The second dimension of time, subjective time is constituted by the conscious flow of our intentionalities and experiences as they arise sequentially and concurrently.^[48] Internal time is not public but private, and is not measured by objective time. Being “immanent” to subjectivity, it is confined to the qualitative experience of temporality as a basic sequential unfolding, and as a “pre-cultural” experience of time that is inherent to the structure of consciousness. Husserl argues that objective time is derivative of subjective time, in that “if we did not anticipate and remember, we could not organize the processes that occur in the world into temporal patterns.”^[49] It is only when temporality is institutionalized, such as “Coordinated Universal Time” or the “Solar Hijri” calendar used in Iran and Afghanistan, that it becomes objectified and a non-negotiable convention and profoundly doxic.

Nonetheless, presupposing both objective and subjective time, is a third dimension of temporality, what Husserl terms the “consciousness of internal time.” For Husserl, this dimension is one of the most salient capacities of human Being, arising as an intrinsic feature of the structure of consciousness. It is in a sense, a position of self-awareness, a full step back from subjective time, able to monitor the comings and goings of the thoughts and experiences occurring in subjective time (and objective time as well). Moreover, the salient feature of consciousness of internal time is that “this level…does not require the introduction of yet another level beyond itself.”^[50] Sokolowski describes it as the “ultimate context” that “achieves a kind of closure and completeness.”^[51] Husserl’s account of internal time consciousness is thus irreducible, and in my estimation, qualifies as an ontological claim for its emergence as a structural feature of consciousness. Internal time consciousness as a formal capacity, prefigures and enables the intelligibility of time and the existential consequences that flow from our being in time.^[52] Foremost, “it constitutes the temporality of the activities that occur in our conscious life, such as the perceptions, imaginations, rememberings, and sensible experiences that we have.”^[53]

Husserl argues that internal time consciousness in its “living present” is “composed of three moments: primal impression, retention, and protention,” which interlock to form the basic temporal structure of consciousness.^[54] This structure accounts for the seamless flow of the events within subjective time, rather than a series of discreet and disconnected “screen shots” of subjective experience. Husserl claims that “retention” is the legacy of ongoing primal impressions that have yet to form into full-fledged memories (or most often, forgotten in their banality), and despite being no longer primal (now “absent”), their contents are retained in the living present as a trace. The counterpart to retention is the experience of “protention,” a prescience of the future adjoining primal impressions, as a continual expectation of the next moment after which the primal impression will follow.^[55] The schema has a primal impression, book-ended by retention and protention, both of which stretch beyond the primal impression in opposite directions, either as part of an enduring legacy of past moments or a forecast of forthcoming moments.

Husserl’s more radical claim is that our capabilities both for memory (to recognize a memory as a past experience, as having occurred in a prior time) and for anticipation (to recognize and organize future possibilities, actions, and/or plans as occurring in a specified future we hope to experience or avoid) are enabled precisely by “the rudimentary past” of retention and “the rudimentary future” of protention.^[56] Husserl’s formal explication of the temporal structure of consciousness as a “living present,” (incorporating rudimentary experiences of past, present, and future), bestows the fundamental temporal meaning on intentional contents of consciousness, or, in other words, gives intentional contents their basic significance as having a past, present, or future temporal orientation.

Husserl’s account of internal time consciousness as the basis for the human capacity for remembering and anticipating is an essential condition of possibility for the recursive power of reflexive deliberation: to think back upon ourselves and adjust for the next moment of our being. Nonetheless, there is no implication of “epistemic authority” over subjective experiences of past, present, and future. Memories are inflected and skewed by present concerns (if not false or self-serving); interpretations born from primal perceptions of the world (what Husserl calls “categorical intentionality” in dialectical relation to “object intelligibility”) are often ideological and socioculturally dispositional; and our desires for the future are conditioned by subconscious contents via, for example, Lacanian mechanisms of enculturation such as the big Other and objet petit a. What remains, however, is the living present as “the origin of our own self-identity as conscious agents of both truth and action.”^[57] Its status is “pre-personal,” functioning autonomously, and resistant to conscious effort to alter its structure and temporal ordering: to slow down, accelerate, or halt its march. The constitutive effect of the living present gives the subject-agent a past of memories, a future of anticipations, and a primal impression providing the raw material for categorical intellection and understanding.

Moreover, it is precisely “when we identify and know worldly things, and when we experience our own sensations, perceptions, memories, and intellectual activities, we are always also unreflectively bringing ourselves to light as the identifiable source and receiver of such achievements.”^[58] What emerges in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis is a formal “self” as a capacity for conscious manipulation of primary modalities of intentionality (precisely, mutatis mutandis, as Searle finds, a postulation of a self). In the act of disclosure of the world through the veritable “aboutness” of conscious experience, our memories and anticipations, our experiences and projects, are brought together. We write our own narratives of these phenomena (or let others write them for us) and entitle it, “The Life of Our Self.” Despite all the deformations, misrepresentations, and obfuscations in the story, ultimately, as Sokolowski defines it, “phenomenology is reason’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects.”^[59] Be that as it may, it follows, most crucially, how we categorize and define this “Self” in our reflexive modality. Toward our own self, we ascribe qualities and impose culturally inscribed meanings and categories in an act of self-constitution with profound implications. In the following section on Sartre, this problematic is front and center in his crusade against mauvaise foi, engendered out of the subject’s confrontation with its temporality: the inevitable and relentless absence of being the protention of time portends (with anguish).

 

Sartre: Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose

 

In the two preceding sections, we have examined Searle and Husserl’s accounts of the formal structure of consciousness and capacities for conscious awareness. As I have argued, each account, however, gives a portion of the capacities intrinsic to the “self” in terms of the subject’s conscious awareness. This “self” so far, however, lacks any original meaning or purpose other than an empty set of “reasons” presupposing conscious alterations of attention in the subject’s spatial and temporal orientation. I propose to develop further this capacity in light of Sartre’s existential-phenomenological discernment of “non-positional consciousness,” which is the continuous self-awareness that we are subjectively experiencing intentional states and experiences born from Husserl’s concept of “internal time consciousness.”^[60] The implications Sartre draws from his concept of “non-positional consciousness” is a full-on existential and processual logic, rendering an inherent dialectic of desire and self-completion within the subject-agent. The limitation of Searle’s and Husserl’s concepts is an unconcern with or a failure to recognize that the capacity for a hyper-awareness (an awareness of the intentional aboutness of consciousness) is also the source for the genetic “impulse” of human Being in the world. Moreover, non-positional consciousness is the sine qua non of a first-person ontology and the necessary function required for reflexive monitoring of conscious experience. It is the condition of possibility for human agency, and presumably other sentient creatures, to have intelligible intentional states that cohere around some minimal sense of the Self, the “I” who owns to a set of memories, perceptions, anticipations, beliefs, desires, reasons, and projects in the world. The key feature of consciousness for Sartre, and where he advances beyond Searle and Husserl, is Sartre’s recognition that the existence of an always-present “gap” between positional and non-positional consciousness gives the subject an awareness of his own ontological conditions. On the one hand, the gap vouchsafes the self from “biological,” subconscious, and social determinations that would be ineluctably followed without the possibility of resisting or transcending. On the other, “inverse” hand, the subject is confronted with two existential problematics: nothingness and freedom. In the remainder of the essay I consider two ramifications of the gap as it constitutes nothingness and freedom: the emergence of “desire” as a fundamental to Sartre’s notion of “being-for-itself” and his theory-identification of “mauvaise foi” as it relates to the ontological openness of concrete existence.^[61]

The structure of consciousness for Sartre is formed by two dichotomous and interlocking modalities. The first, is the difference between “reflective consciousness” and “non-reflective consciousness.”^[62] In non-reflective consciousness, the noema or objects of intentionality are are given full attention with no thought to the “self” in relation to or among the objects. With a converse logic, reflective consciousness brings the “self” reflexively into conscious focus as an object of contemplation. Sartre gives the example of a man running to catch a bus. While running, his full attention is given to the action (avoiding other pedestrians, not tripping, cutting the best angle to the door, and so forth), and thus is being non-reflective. However, as soon as he realizes his attempt will fail, and his “self” is brought into consideration as an intentional object (“Drat, I’ve missed the bus! Should I get a taxi or walk now?”), he has switched to a reflective form of consciousness.

The second modality is the distinction between “positional consciousness” and “non-positional consciousness.” The concept of positional consciousness captures the basic phenomenological insight that all consciousness is intentional, that it is conscious of something. Consequently, all consciousness is always positional; it “posits” objects before us, whether perceptions, thoughts, or imaginations, etc. As we saw below with Searle, consciousness, however, is not just sequences of experiences like a 5D movie. The crucial aspect of consciousness for Sartre is the simultaneous capacity for “self-awareness” of our positional consciousness, viz., “non-positional consciousness.” Sartre writes: “Every conscious existence exists as consciousness of existing”—insofar as the subject always has a point of view towards all instances of positional consciousness.^[63] There is ever-present in conscious life an awareness of the “consciousing” occurring in real time. When we are watching a film our attention is transfixed by the visual field and sound track. No matter how engrossed in the film we become, however, we never enter into the film experience and “get lost” entirely. There is a concurrent awareness that there is an existent “me” emplaced in the context of a film-showing, who is watching, listening, and deriving meaning from the narrative. It is an extraordinary feature of human consciousness to have a parallel conscious process aware of its existence per se, running next to its positional consciousness of the world of reflective and non-reflective consciousness in terms of knowledge per se. While positional consciousness is ultimately a state of knowledge of intentionalized objects, the intrinsic gap between positional and non-positional consciousness has the effect of giving the subject the possibility of awareness of his own ontological conditions, and the being to whom these conditions confront.

 

The first consequence of the gap entails there are no prior determinations by “universal” modes of human Being, whether some form of “human nature,” “soul,” or “the sociocultural.” Because there is always a distinction or gap between consciousness and the objects of consciousness, consciousness never collapses fully into the object (the goal of mysticism, such as union with God, Nature, or Spirit animals), nor does the object collapse into consciousness (the outcome of theories of structural determination, whether by language, discourse, symbol, or social-structural dispositions, which inhabit and operate through the subject). Non-positional consciousness is the mechanism in the structure of consciousness that gives rise to the condition of possibility for human freedom. If existence is ontologically “open,” the concrete lived reality of human Being is created ex post facto, and therefore contingent on the singular experience and choices of the subject-agent.

For Sartre, human consciousness differentiates itself from all other entities by its position of “being-for-itself.” Most things in the world are complete in their being– rocks, chairs, plants, and animals–existing in and of themselves, manifesting what Sartre terms, “being-in-itself.” Human-kind, however, is unique. The structure of human consciousness in its ongoing temporal unfolding encounters a formal condition of “nothingness,” an absence that emerges from our relationship to the past and future. As such, each instance of “human Being in the world” of non-positional consciousness is precisely a “consciousness of being.” But such consciousness is not identical with Being in the world. The gap produced in the dislocation of non-positional consciousness of our positional consciousness of non-reflective and especially of reflective consciousness (an awareness of the fact the subject is aware of himself in the world), produces a gap (as a moment, distance, absence, and/ or nothingness) between the self and the world, simultaneously to all positional consciousness of the self and the world. Being becomes “for-itself”—the existential problematic par excellence.

The second consequence of the gap is the profound implication of indeterminacy stemming from the temporality of consciousness. Whatever beliefs or desires come to the fore, they do not manifest automatically without some minimal decision (by approval, acceptance, ignorance, apathy, etc.), and thus, neither prevents nor compels us to think or behave in a certain way.^[64] Because active “consciousing” is temporal, with simultaneous non-positional consciousness awareness, the effect of the absence has three bearings. Whatever has happened in the preceding moment cannot determine the next moment; whatever is about to happen cannot retroactively determine what is going to happen; and for general cognition, whatever crosses our mind cannot determine what we do “mind.” In this way, consciousness as a state of being-for-itself is permeated by nothingness. The gap is like a span of distance, over which no effects of determinations or ideals may cross, pushing the subject from behind to do this or pulling her forward to do that.

Sartre, with his usual (or perhaps French) disposition to be somewhat obtuse, reiterates the stance of consciousness —its being-for-itself—as that which “is not what it is and is what it is not.” And, as we are developing, this core dynamic of consciousness segues from Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism.^[65] Sartre argues that when we attempt to define ourselves (our Being) in the mode of the in-itself, we tend to posit our beliefs and desires as the ontology of the self—as what we “really” are. In virtue of mauvaise foi, we deceive ourselves as in Sartre’s example of a waiter in a cafe, playing the part to gaudy perfection, which belies his over-identification with an ideal “waiter.” The basic logic of self-deception stems from our non-positional conscious awareness, and the unassailable gap between our desire to be a being-in-itself (secure, solid, identical with ourselves, complete, at peace, full-filled) and our inherent experience of being-for-itself (as open and contingent). To reach a state of being-in-itself and identify who we really are, for all time and from the beginning, would thus bring a sense of closure and completeness to ourselves. Sartre describes this futile striving as the desire to be like God—the “God project”—to be self-causing yet fully “self-actualized.” The impossibility of being-for-and-in-itself, however, arises from a fundamental misrecognition of the nature of human reality as an undetermined process, always unfinished, and the unfolding outcome of our self-determined choices. The search for an essence-in-itself is a strategy to avoid countenancing the nothingness that is the true “nature” of sentient Being. We fail to recognize that our own manifestation of Being is not identical with our beliefs and desires (as social categories: “native Texan,” “war veteran” “jilted husband,” “Christian evangelist,” etc. and as characterological dispositions: “machismo stud,” “victim,” “coward,” etc.). These belief and desire complexes we “find” as our essence are in fact, at its ground point, an outcome of a prior choice in terms of the projects we have undertook. Our choices made in the past (even moments ago) do not determine the present no less than the future. At every moment, we are neither what we were nor what we will become (consciousness is not what it is). Out of nothingness, subject-agents remain forced to make choices, including the choice to not-be, whether a worldly quietus or an earthly suicide. The nothingness of conscious Being, however, is also coterminous with the condition of possibility of radical freedom for the subject (consciousness is what it is not). The facticity of the past is thus mediated by our present choice of being, either reifying it as in-itself or transcending it by authentic engagement with freedom.

Moreover, the temporality of consciousness, unfolding forward in time, places the burden of finding succor in being-in-itself as a project to be realized at some future point. The “self of the moment” is thus contrasted with an anticipated, idealized, “future self.”^[66] The difference between the present and future constitutes an absence (incompleteness), which can only be overcome through its elimination. This in turn prefigures one of the essential points in Sartre’s theory of consciousness: the structure of consciousness intrinsically generates Desire out of its absent center. Sartre formulates an ontological desire predicated on a lack of ontological completeness. However, the teleological thrust of the projects desire engenders remain eternally deferred, despite attempts at the mauvaise foi deception of self objectification. And yet, this desire can never be quenched (nor would we want it to) as the ideal, fully realized self always recedes from grasp. Desire always engenders new objects for its attainment.^[67]

The dynamic of the “nothingness” generating desire has another far-reaching consequence. There is a homology between the existential condition of the lack emerging from the structure of consciousness and those absences, failures, destructions, etc. we perceive and experience out in the world. Lack of clean water, housing, jobs, friendship—any perceived “hole,” silence, or negativity we might identify is the outcome of the condition of being-for-itself. As Sartre argues that all instances of being-in-itself are fully self-contained, positive, and complete in their present state (whether in a process of genetic composition of form like a growing tree or entropic decomposition like fallen leaves) it is impossible per definition, that their state in the world could contain an objective absence. Only consciousness constitutes negativities, or, as Sartre writes, “the being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness.”^[68] Consequently, it is desire for completeness, the striving for the always-deferred project of becoming a being-in-itself, as it reaches out into the world that imposes absences. Our desires thus prefigure a world shot full of holes. And while negativities are born from the structure of consciousness, they are discovered as objective facts about the world. Some desires we fill, other desires are stymied by others, repressed by law, found unreasonable, or otherwise unattainable.

To sum up, non-positional consciousness acts as a structuring principle within conscious experience of human kind. It creates our awareness of our facticity, our thrown-ness into a world not of our choosing and yet we are responsible for how we relate to our own facticity and for possibilities of its transcendence. Sartre writes: “It means that making sustains being; consciousness has to be its own being, it is never sustained by being; it sustains being in the heart of subjectivity, which means once again that it is inhabited by being but that it is not being: consciousness is not what it is.”^[69]

 

[1]          The compound concept of “subject-agent” I employ throughout this essay emphasizes the ontological difference between human subjectivity and the formal and innate capacity for human agency in terms of autonomous causal power. I take subjectivity to be the outlook and identity of actually existing people (in terms of their beliefs, desires, perspectives in the world, etc.), who are socialized in particular geo-historical locales.

[2]          Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 76.

[3]          Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press. p. 4.

[4]          Ibid., 4.

[5]          Searle, John. 2008. “The Phenomenological Illusion.” In, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 135. Searle has noted that perhaps no other fields of study displays greater divergence between the respected, consensus views within philosophy of mind and neuroscience and the brute, banal experience of our conscious waking life. The point here is that eliminative materialists cannot deny we experience consciousness (however “epiphenomenal” or a “mystified conceit”). And yet, to expunge from philosophical consideration this experience merely because it does not “fit the model” ought to raise questions over what assumptions drive such irrealism—assumptions we will see are undermined.

[6]          Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press. p. 26.

[7]          Searle, John. 2008. “The Self as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology.” In Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 150.

[8]          It is worth noting the work of Catherine Malabou on the philosophical implications of neuroplasticity and related research developments examining how repeated behavior alters the neuronal structure in terms of strengthened neural pathways.

[9]          Substance dualism should be contrasted with the position of “property dualism,” the latter being the tendency of contemporary dualists, who do not wish to violate laws of physics. Searle argues this less ambitious argument for consciousness as not a unique “substance” but as a “property” of the brain, ultimately faces the exact same problem substance dualists face, namely explaining how a mental substance or a mental property can interact causally with the brain. Nonetheless, despite these cloistered debates over the merits of dualism, widespread belief in the “soul” among the religious maintains “dualism” as powerful symbolic formation and cultural legacy. For Searle’s critique of dualism as a philosophical position, see pages 29-33 in Mind: A Brief Introduction.

[10]         Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 30.

[11]         Ibid., 76.

[12]         Ibid., 76.

[13]         Ibid., 88.

[14]         Ibid., 76. Spoiler alert: This is precisely Searle’s position, “that the mental qua mental is physical qua physical” to be explained below.

[15]         Ibid., 77.

[16]         Searle, John. 2008. “The Self as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology.” In Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 141.

[17]         Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 79.

[18]         Searle, John. 2008. “Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles.” In Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 29.

[19]         Recent and potentially revolutionary developments in the scientific study of consciousness appear to support the main thrust of Searle’s argument. See: J. Paul Hamilton, et al. “Modulation of Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex Activity With Real-Time Neurofeedback.” Human Brain Mapping 32:22–31 (2011). https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/5e7ed624986d. Accessed April 23, 2014.

[20]         Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 86.

[21]         This issue is what Roy Bhaskar calls the “epistemic fallacy,” prevalent in empiricism, positivism, and postmodernism, in which questions of being (ontology) is regulated and delimited by epistemological frameworks, in this case the requirement for “third-person accounts” of reality, thus preselecting what can and cannot be objects of knowledge, and hence “real.” See Bhaskar’s, A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Routledge 1988.

[22]         Searle, John. 2008. “The Self as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology.” In Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 142.  Let us ignore the debates over the exact extent snails and so forth have some form of consciousness.

[23]         Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 68

[24]         In Mind: A Brief Introduction, Searle lists eleven separate features of consciousness (pp. 93-101). For brevity’s sake, I am focusing on only a few because the remaining features like the “mood” that accompanies all conscious states and the fuzzy distinction between “active and passive consciousness,” while important, are not central to the larger points I am gleaning from Searle’s philosophy of mind.

[25]         Let me note here in anticipation of my analysis below of Sartre’s distinction between “positional consciousness” and “non-positional consciousness,” and the functional similarity between Searle’s distinction between “intentionalities” and the “unified conscious field.”

[26]         As subjective and seemingly disconnected from all other instances of consciousness, the enduring problem of skepticism over “other minds” is raised. Searle is not impressed with this problem (c.f., pp 12-14, Mind: A Brief Introduction), as he sees it as a “special case” of the more general problem of “skepticism about the external world.” The latter problem concerns the epistemic relationship between the mind and world: How do we justify that things in the external world exist and that we know them as they are? To answer the skeptic, Searle makes a “transcendental argument for direct realism” (or, what he also calls a position of “naive realism”) based on the supposition that “a public language presupposes a public world” with the implication that intersubjectivity via language enjoins “the privacy of sense data” to mutual recognitions and shared epistemic certainties (e.g., “Don’t eat the yellow snow”; “Zombies do not exist”; and, “It’s Miller time!”). Ibid., pp. 189-191.

[27]         Searle notes that his conception is more or less identical with Kant’s notion of  “the transcendental unity of apperception.” Ibid., 142. Searle however, does not evoke a Kantian transcendental ego imposing “our sense of the phenomenal” on noumena via a grid of temporal, spatial, and causal intelligibility.

[28]         Searle, John. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 108.

[29]         Ibid., 134.

[30]         Searle, John. 2008. “The Self as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology.” In, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. p. 143. Italics mine.

[31]         Ibid., 138.

[32]         By “reconfigured,” I mean to suggest that we have the ability to reinterpret elements within the unified conscious field, most saliently by the inclusion of memories and anticipations. For instance, I can single out a large tree in a park for contemplation in the unified field, but I can also remember climbing the tree as a child, transforming the meaning of the tree. I can also anticipate a possible future of the tree (through imagination or future orientating the tree) with the additional conscious content of bringing my yet unborn child to the park to also climb. I will discuss Searle’s notion of  the “unified conscious field” in relation to a variety of “intentional modalities,” in light of Husserlian phenomenological insights into the temporality of consciousness below.

[33]         Ibid., 147. Italics are Searle’s.

[34]         I include these three “forces” as alternative antecedents of action (with the caveat that all, some, or none of these forces may be in effect at any given time, for any one individual) to widen the scope of Searle’s argument and to stress that whatever objective conditions impinge on the subject, before manifesting into actions, the subject will have some “reason” for the action, however delusional, mistaken, rationalized, or under “false consciousness.” Consequently, given the multitude of “motivations,” I think that the gap between reason and action remains in effect, always requiring a (fallible) “self” to choose to act. This insight, of course, only strengthens the ethical task of both psychotherapy and critical social theory to transform our knowledge of what we do and why.

[35]         Searle, John. 2008. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 113.

[36]         Ibid., p. 5. Incidentally, the relationship between Searle’s distinction and the relationship between “derived intentionalities” and “intrinsic intentionalities” maps onto the “agent-structure problem” in social ontology.

[37]         Let me mention as an aside: if reasons are the basis for the self changing its attention within the unified field, the self  does so because it is motivated by some value, desire, belief, intention, project, etc. Though I do not address this issue in my discussion of Sartre below, his concept of the “original project” as the foundational raison d’être of the subject, is a useful beginning to understanding our motivations, and one, as Sartre notes, could be the basis for existential psychoanalytical theory and therapy. Cf. Being and Nothingness, “Existential Psychoanalysis.”

[38]         Searle, John. 2008. “The Self as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology.” In, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. p. 148.

[39]         For many routine actions the self and will are bound tightly together in a seamless flow. In these cases, our reasons for behaviors are long established and well rehearsed, being perfunctory and mindless. “Getting up in the morning,” “making another cup of tea,” and “getting ready for bed at night,” all the small daily rituals of life require little deliberation beyond the usual aggravations: “I wish he would put the toilet seat down!” Thus, in routine, if we are “selfing,” we are “willing” without notice of the gap, for instance, when changing our focus within the unified conscious field. But at any moment during a routine action, if somebody asks, “why are you doing that?” an agent can give at least a semblance of rationality (however mistaken or ideological) for the action: “As required by my religious beliefs, I light a candle every morning to venerate my husband’s ancestor spirits….” What is more interesting are those moments when we do not act, when we desire to do or say something, but remain still or silent. Or conversely, we choose to act, despite a desire out of reasons not to do or say something, in accordance with peer pressure or social mores, for example. The ability to override a reason for an action by a countervailing reason for non-action or an other-action (because of cost-benefit, fear of censure, decorum, laziness, tactical advantage, and so forth) shows that we can deliberate over several competing reasons for different courses of action and choose among them.

[40]         Ibid., 147.

[41]         Ibid., 149.

[42]         Ibid., 147.

[43]         Ibid., 149.

[44]         As a caveat to this discussion, and one we have seen before, Searle notes that scientific accounts of consciousness have yet to understand fully “how the brain produces the peculiar organization of experiences that expresses the existence of the self.” Ibid., 150. However, our awareness of the unified conscious field of experience without an ability to maneuver consciously among its elements, operating prior to particular intentionalities is precisely what enables us to differentiate between a sight of fresh cut grass and its smell, for example. The ability  to focus our attention at command on minute details within the field is presupposed by a higher order awareness of a “self” to which all these “details” are presented, both from within and without the self.

[45]         In Anthony Burgess’, “A Clockwork Orange,” Alex undergoes the “Ludovico Technique,” whereby the arch hooligan’s eyes are pried open to watch graphically violent movies and injected with drugs, conditioning him to become nauseous when thoughts of violence or sexual impulses come to mind. Notably, the prison chaplain declares this form of State power immoral, as the technique undercuts Alex’s free will.

[46]         Objective time is also termed interchangeably with “world time” and “transcendental time.” I will use only the term “objective time,” to avoid confusion and to connote a relation to Searle’s notion of “epistemologically objective knowledge,” that while objective time is “ontologically subjective,” it is public and verifiable, and thus a collective intention and epistemologically objective.

[47]         Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press. p. 130. To note, my discussion of Husserl is taken primarily from Sokolowski’s realist account of Husserlean phenomenology.

[48]         Subjective time is also termed interchangeably with “internal time” or “immanent time.” Subjective time, similar to my reasoning in footnote 48 above, meshes well with Searle’s concept of “epistemologically subjective knowledge,” that while subjective time is “ontologically objective,” like feelings of pain or hunger, it is a private and solely intrasubjective experience, and thus epistemologically subjective.

[49]         Ibid., 132.

[50]         Ibid., 131.

[51]         Ibid., 131.

[52]         I have in mind here various existential facets of being: death, freedom, willing, responsibility, personal identity, our place in history and culture, and relationship with the Other.

[53]         Ibid., 133.

[54]         Ibid., 136. (Italics are Sokolowski’s).

[55]         The mode of awareness given by protention is manipulated in horror movies. In the usual clichéd scene of a young woman walking alone in the dark, we (the audience) expect something very bad to happen, but we do not know when. We anticipate some sort of attack, and can speculate about or imagine various scenarios of the evil deed. Nonetheless, it is the effect of protention that gives rise to the ability to anticipate the future, because we know something is always about to happen. In the humdrum of daily life, we expect more of the same is coming (sometimes with horror!). In the hysteria of a horror film, we expect a radical breakout of mayhem and violence is coming (always with glee!).

[56]         Ibid., 138.

[57]         Ibid., 142.

[58]         Ibid., 144.

[59]         Ibid., 4. Italics are Sokolowski’s.

[60]         My understanding of Sartre is highly indebted to Paul Vincent Spade, whose extensive outline and explication of Being and Nothingness clarified many points of Sartre’s thought, upon which I draw. A PDF of Spade’s text is available at  <http://pvspade.com/Sartre/pdf/sartre1.pdf>. Downloaded, October 10, 2013.

[61]         In the English translation of Being and Nothingness (1956), Hazel E. Barnes translates “mauvaise foi” as “bad faith.” In his collection of existentialism’s “greatest hits,” Walter Kaufman proposes an alternative translation, “self-deception,” as a closer description in English of what the term in French connotes. I will follow Kaufman’s example. See, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. 2004. New York: Plume. p. 280.

[62]         In the phenomenological literature, “non-reflective consciousness” is interchangeable with “pre-reflective consciousness.” I will employ the former term to retain a nice homology with the second set: positional- and non-positional modes of consciousness.

[63]         Sartre, John Paul. 1956. “Introduction: The Pursuit of Being.” In, Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library. p. liv.

[64]         This critical insight of Sartrean existentialism, which I think is accurate in principle, must be modified. While this essay is concerned with the ontology of consciousness, it is a first step toward an ontology of subjectivity attuned to the process by which subject-agents intersect with the social field for antecedent conditions of subjectivity in terms of enablements and constraints.

[65]         I see Sartre as a useful bridge between the more formal explication of the structure of consciousness per Searle and Husserl and the beginning of an explication of the structure of subjectivity. The structure of consciousness for Sartre profoundly anticipates the subject as embedded in a social field (as the subject confronts nothingness, freedom, self-deception, and desire) and consequently how he will “consciously” manifest as a socialized instance of “subjectivity.”

[66]         This is the case even if that “future self” is an attempt to recover a lost golden moment in the past, such as the cliché mid-life crisis, in which a man needs to reclaim his lost youth with a younger woman and splashy Porsche.

[67]         Consider for a moment the ideal upper middle class life style as a set of key goals to attain: advanced degree, career, marriage, children, home ownership, fine dining, travel, appreciation of high culture, and sophisticated home furnishings. The complete package, once attained however, does not satisfy. There is always an absence behind every curtain: higher salary, nicer cars, better clothes, ever more exclusive social registers to join.

[68]         Sartre, John Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library. p. 23

[69]         Ibid., 62

Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick’s final film on fundamental fantasy, jouissance and gaze

Wim Matthys

[Read as Digital Publication]

Abstract

This paper analyzes American director Stanley Kubrick’s cinematography and Eyes Wide Shut  in the light of Lacan’s theory on fundamental fantasy, jouissance and gaze. Firstly, we argue that the film’s events culminate into a staging of the scenario of fundamental fantasy “C observes: A overpowers B”, a scenario which in our thesis is staged on numerous occasions throughout Kubrick’s cinematographic work. Secondly, we substantiate that Eyes Wide Shut’s staging of this scenario of fundamental fantasy underpins the film’s staging of sadistic and masochistic modes of jouissance. Thirdly, it is argued that Kubrick ultimately aimed at confronting his spectators with the gaze, specifically by confronting the audience with his principal actor Tom Cruise’s insistent assuming the masochistic position in the scenario of fundamental fantasy at stake.

1. Introduction

Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s filmic adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s (2003 [1926]) Traumnovelle, opened in New York on July 16^th 1999. That is three months after its director died on March 7^th 1999, when he had just delivered the final cut of the film to is distributer Warner Bros. Following the film’s release, the hegemonic reaction both in the American public and press was one of disappointment (Preussner, 2001). The film’s critics typically explained that disappointment by referring to, what they called, the “misleading publicity campaign” that Kubrick and Warner Bros had set up for the film (Ransom, 2010). The focus of that campaign was on the film’s depiction of ‘(conjugal) sexuality’, specifically where it involved an appearance of the ‘married in real life’ Hollywood couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (Bart, 1999, September 27; Lobrutto, 1997). For example, Warner Bros.’ sister company Time announced the film on the cover of its July 1999 edition by means of the banner “Cruise and Kidman Like You’ve never seen Them.” The campaign’s message was also reflected in the vast amount of free publicity that Kubrick and Warner Bros. had managed draw to the film by casting Hollywood’s star couple. US Magazine for example questioned if Eyes Wide Shut would be the sexiest movie ever?

 

So, when the film was released, the critics’ main complaint was that, instead of the ‘hot’ erotic film to which they had anticipated, EWS was clearly ‘unsexy’ (Siegel, 1999; Kreider, 2000). Many critics focused on the film’s central orgy-sequence, dismissing it for being cold and impersonal, not to mention fearsome and, thus, far removed from anything that could be described as ‘titillating’ (scenes 17-22; Ransom, 2011; Denby, 1999, July 26).[1]  Also, by reference to the film’s depiction of conjugal (psycho) sexuality, The New York Times’ critic Michiko Kakutani (1999, July 18) complained of the lack of “erotic heat” between Cruise and Kidman’s characters. She also complained that at several points the film’s characters were presented in a lifeless, caricature-like, ‘mechanical’ way. The critics’ typical conclusion was that, where they had expected the film to deal with ‘hot’ eroticism, it on the contrary was “[..] passionless, sex-phobic, frozen, and dead” (Kreider, 2000, p. 41).

 

As indicated by academic film critic Robert Kolker (2000) EWS’s ‘coldness’ and staging of one-dimensional characters is representative of Kubrick’s films in general. In his view Kubrick presents a cinematographic universe reigned by cold, “dehumanized structures” in which human beings and their affects scarcely have a place (Kolker, 2000, p. 157). For example, in 2001, A Space Odyssey the functioning of human beings is almost identical to that of their machines and computer systems. The prominent place that rational structures occupy within Kubrick’s cinematographic universe is also reflected by the director’s use of a highly formalized style. With Falsetto (2001) we for example refer to Kubrick’s use of symmetry on the level of framing, mise-en-scène and narratives.

 

Kolker’s (2000) observation that Kubrick has created a cinematographic universe reigned by cold rational ‘structures’ is at the base of film theorist Todd McGowan’s (2007) thesis that the set-up of the director’s cinema reflects Lacan’s theory on the fundamental fantasy. McGowan (2007) indicates that, in contrast to the common tendency to associate the notion of fantasy with ‘hot’ affects, the fundamental fantasy rather is “a structure that operates with the same mechanical coldness that we see in Kubrick’s films” (2007, p. 43-44, our emphasis).  However, McGowan does not indicate what sort of structure the fundamental fantasy is about. As such he also fails to pinpoint what specific fundamental fantasy is at stake in Kubrick’s cinema. In this paper we discuss both issues, specifically with reference to EWS. We subsequently argue how this specific fundamental fantasy channels jouissance. Thirdly and conclusively, we point to a mode by which Kubrick’s films and specifically Eyes Wide Shut can confront its cinema viewers with the gaze.

2. The fundamental fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut

The question we have to answer is: what sort of structure is the fundamental fantasy? As Verhaeghe (1997, p. 259) points out, the concept refers to a “generating structure,” operative on the level of the unconscious and at the base of the subject’s symptoms and fantasy-life, as expressed in daydreams. He defines it as an unconscious, “cognitive-affective script through which we approach the world” (Ibid., p. 142). In his tenth seminar Lacan (2004 [1962-63], p. 89) emphasized the fundamental fantasy’s link with the order of the Imaginary, comparing it with “a picture that comes to take place in the frame of a window.” In his fourth seminar Lacan (1994 [1956-57], p. 119-120) had also compared the fundamental fantasy with a movie still, or “a cinematographic movement that [..] suddenly stops at one point, freezing all the characters.” Marking the Symbolic dimension involved, Lacan (1986 [1964], p. 185) stated in his eleventh seminar that that the frozen image of the fundamental fantasy in essence is underpinned by a specific “scenario” or basic script. In his fourteenth seminar Lacan concretized that this scenario in essence is no more than a “sentence with a grammatical structure”. Relevant for our study of Kubrick’s work, Quackelbeen (1987, 1994) indicates that one key to unraveling an artist’s fundamental fantasy, is to question whether his or her creations are marked by the repetitive staging of such a minimal script, which thereby tends to function as a magnetic pole for the (visual) action involved?

 

In order to retrieve the scenario of fundamental fantasy which is at the base of Kubrick’s cinema, we point to the director’s insistent depiction of human interactions in terms of antagonism and violence. We see this most prominently in the director’s ninth feature film A Clockwork Orange. The film in which every layer of society deploys methods of overpowering, not only marked the apex of the 1960s and 1970s “Golden Age of American film Violence”, but also became the center of a fierce public controversy (Slocum, 2001; Strange, 2010). We add that the visual depiction of aggressive behavior however insists throughout the totality of director’s oeuvre. To illustrate this thesis, we firstly point to the director’s staging of the leitmotiv of the ‘fist-fight.’ For example, Kubrick’s first documentary short film Day of the Fight (1953) focused on the career of middle weight boxer Walter Cartier (Phillips & Hill, 2002). The thirteen feature films the director made, from 1953 to 1999, further illustrate his preference for staging sequences of hand-to-hand combat, as they all include at least one sequence which involves a punch-up or a form of wrestling. Secondly, the director’s work is permeated by the theme of war. Four of his thirteen films are war movies, while two other films also explicitly include large-scaled battle scenes. Thirdly, on a smaller scale qua number of involved combatants, four of his films, among which The Shining (1980) stage the violent disruption of the family unit. Where Eyes Wide Shut’s critics focused on the film’s approach of sexuality, they rarely have pointed to the film’s staging of domestic violence. We however essentially take into account the film’s staging of aggressive behavior to mark the involvement of Kubrick’s fundamental fantasy.

This leads to our observation that Kubrick’s repetitive staging of sequences of violence, explicitly reminds of the fantasy-scene of ‘a child that is being beaten’, which Freud (1975 [1919e]) considered to be central in several of his patients’ fantasy-life. Freud’s text on the beating fantasy also was used by Lacan (1966-67, Lesson of January 11 1967) as a paradigmatic example for his theory on the fundamental fantasy. Although Freud indicated that the exact content of the beating fantasy varied both with the sex of his patients and over the fantasy’s chronologically phased development, in our interpretation the different versions of the fantasy are underpinned by a minimal abstract scenario or sentence: “A overpowers B”. In our argument this scenario also functions as a magnetic pole for the action staged in Kubrick’s work. In A Clockwork Orange the staging of that scenario explicitly is marked by the involvement of passive-active reversal. The first part of the film consequently stages the film’s anti-hero, Alex, in the position of perpetrator (A). However, in the second part of the film, the character shifts from that position of perpetrator (A) to the position of  victim (B), while his opponents do the opposite. We also point to Kubrick’s staging of passive-active reversal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). For example, at the beginning of the film the overpowering of one tribe of anthropoids by another is countered by the former’s murderous revenge. Interestingly, also Eyes Wide Shut stages the scenario “A overpowers B”, that is, as the culmination point of its central male character ‘Bill Harford’s’ social encounters. The film’s staging of that scenario specifically is organized around that character indulging in active-to-passive reversal over his interactions with his wife, ‘Alice’.

 

During its opening scenes, the film suggests that in their marriage, Bill self-confidently assumes an active, dominant position towards Alice (scenes 1-5). While he is presented as a successful physician, we learn that Alice is unemployed and on a manifest level resigns herself to a supportive role by taking care of their child’s upbringing and by publicly appearing as her husband’s trophy wife. This balance in the marriage however is upset when, during a bedroom discussion, Alice provokes her husband to reveal that he is unable to acknowledge that she is a subject of desire which may exceed his interest. During the discussion, Bill’s self-satisfied utterances reach their culmination point when he states that he knows for “sure” that Alice, ‘being his wife and the mother of his child’, would or could never be unfaithful to him. In response, Alice radically confronts Bill with her desire. Although she has not factually betrayed her husband, she manages to upset him merely by disclosing that she fantasizes about doing so. In a mechanism of hysteria, Alice dethrones Bill in his assuming the position of ‘master of knowledge’, confronting him with the lack at the base of subjectivity. The radicalness of the scene however is that, Alice not only confronts Bill with his inability to acknowledge her subjective desire, but explicitly humiliates him while doing so: her immediate response to her husband’s self-assured utterances is that she bluntly starts to laugh in his face (Image 1, scene 7). Remarkably Bill at this point, does not challenge his wife’s aggressive outburst, but passively subordinates to it. While Bill thus shifts from the active position of dominance to passive subordination, his wife does the opposite. It is in that sense, that the bedroom-sequence culminates into an instance of the scenario “A overpowers B.” While it is Alice who ultimately assumes the position of aggressor (A), while Bill ultimately is in the role of victim (B). From this point in the film onwards, Bill will insistently assume the passive subordinate position towards his wife. We for example point to a later sequence of the film in which Alice again humiliates her husband. In this case she does so by telling Bill the content of a dream, in which she not only indulges in sex with other men, but specifically does so to make fun of her husband.

 

   Image 1:  Alice ‘castrates’ Bill, by laughing in his face (scene 7)

 

Now, in order to complete the scenario of fundamental fantasy that structures Kubrick’s cinematography, we have to take into account that on numerous instances throughout his films, the director also explicitly stages the third party of an observer (C) towards the scenes of overpowering involved. The full scenario of fundamental fantasy that underpins these films thus is: “C observes: A overpowers B.” As an illustration we indicate that Kubrick’s first short film Day of the Fight (1951) opens by immediately pointing to the fact that the boxing matches it comments upon in the first place function as a spectacle for their public of spectators. Secondly, Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) also repeatedly emphasizes that the function of its gladiators’ involvement in mortal combat primarily is to provide visual entertainment to Roman patricians. A Clockwork Orange (1971) most prominently stages the scenario “C observes: A overpowers B” when its central character Alex is submitted to an experimental technique for treating his aggressive behaviour. During the treatment Alex’s eyes are fixed to the screen in a cinema auditorium, so that he literally is forced to observe filmic depictions of “A overpowers B.” Eyes Wide Shut also on one instance literally stages the scenario “C observes: A overpowers B.” We point to the central sequence from the film in which Bill is ritually punished for having intruded a masked orgy. In this sequence, a master of ceremony occupies the position of aggressor (A). The figure not only commands Bill to drop his mask but also humiliatingly suggests that the film’s protagonist should ‘undress.’ In this sequence the position of the observer (C) is assumed by a series of masked spectators whom all encircle Bill and as such witness him assuming the position of victim (B) (Image 2, scene 22). We add that the specific set-up of the sequence recalls that also in five other films Kubrick stages instances of overpowering that involve a hedge of spectators (C) constituting the border of the combat zone.

 

           

Image 2: masked spectators (C) encircle Bill in a ritual of humiliation (scene 22)

3. A scenario of jouissance

At this point we take into account that from a Lacanian point of view, the subject ultimately tends to cling on to the script of his fundamental fantasy because it sets out the coordinates by which means he channels bodily jouissance (Declercq, 2004). We remind that a literal translation of Lacan’s concept of jouissance into ‘enjoyment’ is inadequate. Where enjoyment is entailed with a connotation of mere pleasure, jouissance explicitly refers to a transgression of the pleasure principle (Vanheule, 2011). As Fink (1995) points out, it is “a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination” (p. xii) For Lacan (1992 [1959-1960]) jouissance’s dimension of excess also is pointed to by its association with the subject’s transgression of the boundaries set up by the Symbolic or Oedipal laws.

In Kubrick’s films, jouissance most prominently appears in its sadistic variant, that is in association with the position of the perpetrator (A). As McGowan (2007) indicates, this mode of jouissance typically appears where Kubrick’s representatives of authority insistently tend to exceed the boundaries of their function. One mode by which Kubrick highlights these figures’ jouissance is by deriving over-the-top-performances from the actors that impersonate the according roles. As a paradigmatic example McGowan refers to Michael Bates’ appearance as A Clockwork Orange’s (1971) chief prison guard. For McGowan (2007), jouissance appears through Bates’ use of his voice, as the prison guard exaggeratedly screams at his inmate Alex when the latter arrives in jail. Similar mechanisms of over the-top-performances can be retrieved in, for example, George C. Scott’s impression of Dr. Strangelove’s (1964) general Buck Turgidson and Lee Ermey’s performance as Full Metal Jacket’s (1987) drill instructor. In Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick most prominently points to an authority’s figure’s jouissance in a sequence where Bill is carpeted by a ‘substitute father figure’, Ziegler. In this scene the ‘excess’ which marks Ziegler’s jouissance is subtly indicated by the inappropriate ‘paternalizing touch’ which he applies to Bill’s shoulders. The involved dimension of humiliation is marked by the contrast between the smile which appears on the Ziegler’s face and Bill’s facial expression of discomfort. As another nuance to McGowan’s approach of Kubrick’s films, we indicate that in Eyes Wide Shut, sadistic jouissance is not solely associated with the appearance of authority figures. Indeed, the perpetrator’s jouissance also explicitly is pointed to in the scene where Alice as aggressor (A) humiliates her husband during the bedroom discussion. Similar to the sequence in which Ziegler overpowers Bill, the involvement of sadistic jouissance is marked by the contrast between Alice’s overt smile and her husband’s facial expression of discomfort. The sequence also evokes jouissance’s dimension of ‘excess,’ as it involves actrice Nicole Kidman’s shift from natural acting to an over-the-top performance: her outburst of laughter not only takes remarkably long but also is accompanied by burlesque bodily gestures, she swaggers around and even falls to the floor (scenes 6-7).

 

Secondly, Kubrick’s films on several instances refer to the link between jouissance and the position of the victim (B). The according mode of masochistic jouissance reminds of Freud’s (1975 [1924c], p. 161) notion of “erotogenic masochism”, or the pleasure a subject can derive from his own pain. To illustrate Kubrick’s depiction of masochistic jouissance, we refer to A Clockwork Orange’s (1971) staging of a quick-cut montage of close-up images that depict four identical ceramic Christ figures placed on a cupboard in its protagonist room. The specific set-up of the scene marks masochistic jouissance’s paradoxical association between pleasure and pain. On one hand the sequence contains elements that accord with a classic representation of Christ’s crucifixion, referring to the experience of pain: the figures have their head bowed, wear a crown of thorns and have nail-wounds in their wrists. On the other hand, they are lined up in a dancing pose while the sequence, moreover, is edited to an inflaming passage of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. The addition of these burlesque elements not only marks the scene with a reference to excess, but also implies that the figures are portrayed as if they paradoxically derive pleasure from their suffering. In our hypothesis the set-up of Eyes Wide Shut subtly suggests that its character Bill also derives masochistic jouissance from assuming position of victim (B). We recall that, from the point Bill is humiliated by Alice during the bedroom sequence, he keeps running into situations that confirm his passive subordination to aggression. At several points the film suggests that the male protagonist somehow ‘actively chooses’ to persist in the passive position. For example, Alice only discloses her humiliating dream to Bill once he has prompted her to do so, ignoring all her signs that he will ultimately be hurt by it (scene 24). It also is remarkable that, although Bill has plenty of opportunity to interrupt or counter his wife’s outbursts of aggression, he insistently fails to do so. In this sense, we can hypothesize that quasi-paradoxically, assuming the position of victim (B) somehow is a source of pleasure for Bill. Although the character’s ‘lust’ in his own pain does not manifest visually (e.g., at no point is it illustrated in his facial expression), the involvement of masochistic jouissance thus is subtly suggested by his insistent indulgence in ‘self-sacrifice.’

Thirdly, we indicate that Kubrick’s films also mark the association between the position of the observer (C) on one hand and the experience of jouissance on the other. As an example we refer to a sequence of A Clockwork Orange in which the film’s character Alex is humiliated on a theatre stage for a public of observers (scene 23). The sequence implies that Alex’s former aggressor, the film’s chief prison guard, is staged as a member of the observing audience. Here, however, a close-up of that character reveals that he responds to the observed depictions of humiliation both with enthusiastic applause and by displaying a large smile on his face. The scene’s excess is thus not only marked by the transgression depicted on the theatre stage, but also by the prison guard’s exaggeratedly enthusiastic reaction to the transgression he observes. As such, the sequence not only highlights a complicity between the positions of perpetrator (A) and observer (C), but also that this complicity is essentially substantiated by a sadistic mode of jouissance.

 

Although Eyes Wide Shut on the level of its content does not manifestly stage the observer’s (C) jouissance, we now argue that on an extra-diegetical level Stanley Kubrick himself derived jouissance both from staging and observing the sequences of overpowering that appear in the film. To pinpoint the mechanism at stake, we evoke the film’s co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael’s (1999) statement that it is at least remarkable that Kubrick’s deliberate choice to cast a married couple –Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman- for a film which explicitly dealt with the theme of marital crisis. In terms of the fundamental fantasy, whenever Alice was overpowering Bill in the film, Kubrick was involved as director of sequences in which, structurally, Nicole Kidman also assumed the position of aggressor (A) towards Tom Cruise. In our argument, Kubrick’s sadistic jouissance specifically was marked by his casting of Tom Cruise. The film not only stages Tom Cruise in situations where he is overpowered and humiliated by his own wife, Kubrick’s film also involves specific elements that reflect the mediatized gossip and rumours about the disparities in Cruise’s marriage to Kidman. We firstly point to the remark by Andrew Sarris (1999) of The New York Observer that it was striking how Kubrick throughout the film was dwelling “sadistically on the size disparity in [Cruise’s] marriage to Ms. Kidman.” Secondly, Kubrick also included sequences that can be interpret as subtle allusions to the rumours that the Cruise’s marriage to Kidman was a sham to hide Cruise’s purported homosexuality (see Siegel, 1999, Pocock, 2000; Webster, 2011). As an example, critics like Amy Taubin (1999) often referred to a scene in which Bill / Tom Cruise encounters the flirtations of a gay desk clerk. More radically Kubrick also includes a short sequence in which Bill/Tom Cruise is overpowered by a group of young men on the street. In a literal depiction of the scenario “A overpowers B,” these young men not only aggressively push Bill/Tom Cruise against a car, but also verbally humiliate him by calling him a member of the pink team (Image 3, scene 10). Also this scene thus involves an allusion to Cruise’s purported homosexuality. Based on these observations, we consider it plausible that Stanley Kubrick himself derived sadistic jouissance from actively staging and observing Tom Cruise assuming the position of victim (B) of these various humiliations.

 

                

     Image 3: Bill is pushed against a car and humiliated by a group of young men (scene 10)
4. Conclusion: Kubrick’s staging of the gaze
In this paper we firstly have argued how Eyes Wide Shut, like other Kubrick films, stages the scenario of fundamental fantasy “C observes: A overpowers B.” Secondly, we have argued that Kubrick’s staging of that scenario channels sadistic and masochistic dimensions of jouissance. Moreover we pointed to a mode by which Eyes Wide Shut’s director Stanley Kubrick himself derived sadistic jouissance from staging and observing the film’s sequences of overpowering.

Conclusively we indicate how the staging of fundamental fantasy and jouissance in Eyes Wide Shut can involve the film’s viewers. To locate the mechanism at stake, we indicate that whenever Kubrick’s films stage the scenario “A overpowers B,” also his film’s cinema viewers are structurally involved as observers (C) of the violence staged on screen. Kubrick’s reference to his spectators’ involvement specifically is underlined in the sequences from his films that depict sequences of overpowering being observed on television or on a cinema screen. For example, in Killer’s Kiss (1955) two characters explicitly watch a television broadcast of the film’s anti-hero being knocked-out in a boxing contest. Also, three of Lolita‘s (1962) characters at a given point are at a drive-in cinema, observing a sequence of overpowering from Fisher’s film The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

Ultimately Kubrick’s films evoke their viewers to confront, what Lacan calls ‘the gaze’. Tis gaze for Lacan essentially unseen. An encounter with it can be marked by the spectator’s experience of shifting from the position of actively looking to being looked at from some undefinied point behind a pictorial surface. A confrontation with the ‘the gaze’ essentially implies that the spectator loses his distance towards what is depicted in the visual field. The mechanism most literally is pointed to in A Clockwork Orange, at the point where its main figure Alex is portrayed at the bottom of a cinema auditorium while he is forced to observe cinema violence. We point to a specific shot from the sequence which, as a central element stages an intense concentration of light, which indicates the presence of the film projector on top of the auditorium. We also remark that through the specific set up of the camera, the position of the film’s spectator here coincides with that of the cinema screen that Alex is forced to look at. These observations call to mind Lacan’s statement that the presence of the gaze is typically marked by “[..] the instrument through which light is embodied” and by which the spectator of a visual spectacle experiences himself as “photographed,” or is turned into a picture himself (Lacan, 1986 [1964], p. 106). The film’s shot, in our interpretation, confronts with the gaze in case the viewer undergoes the imaginary experience of shifting from the active position of distant observer towards the position of the passive object that is looked at.

To locate a mechanism by which Eyes Wide Shut can confront its viewers with the gaze, we turn to the sequence in which ‘Bill’ is unmasked and ritually humiliated for having intruded the film’s secret orgy (Image 4, scene 22). With Pizzato (2004), we firstly indicate that a logical effect of the sequence is that the first impression of the film’s viewers is that the unmasking in the sequence not so much concerns the fictional character of Bill, but rather reveals the ‘famous face of [the actor] Tom Cruise.’ Secondly, this sequence also stages Bill/Tom Cruise in a position where he is passively looked at from all sides by the figures that encircle him. In several of the scene’s shots Kubrick’s set-up of the camera is as such that these masked figures look at the film’s spectators. Thereby the evokes Lacan’s (1986 [1964], p. 107) thesis that the ‘gaze’ typically manifests itself as an enigmatic presence located beyond the surface of a “mask,” a presence by which the viewer imagines himself being looked at. In our interpretation a radical effect of the sequence is reached in case the film’s viewers suddenly experience themselves passively looked at, or confronted with Kubrick’s attempt to make them complicit on the level of the jouissance that he himself derived from staging scenes of overpowering, specifically where they involve the humiliation of his principal actor.

 

Wim Matthys

Missoula, 2014 August 1th

 

Image 4: Masked observers (C) witness how Bill/Tom Cruise is unmasked (scene 22)

References

Bart, P. (1999, September 27). Marketing pix with eyes wide open. Variety. Retrieved from http://variety.com.

Declercq, F. (2004). Lacan’s concept of the Real of jouissance: Clinical illustrations and implications. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 9, 237-251.

Denby, D. (1999, July 26). Last waltz. Kubrick’s dark orgy and ‘The Blair Witch Project’. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com.

Falsetto, M. (2001). Stanley Kubrick: A narrative and stylistic analysis. Westport: Praeger Publishers.

Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject. Between language and jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Freud, S. (1975 [1919e]). A child is being beaten: a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, pp. 179-204). London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1975 [1924c]). The economic problem of masochism. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 157-170). London: Hogarth Press.

Kakutani, M. (1999, July 18). A connoisseur of cool tries to raise the temperature. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com.

Kolker, R. (2000). Tectonics of the mechanical man: Stanley Kubrick. In R. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (pp. 97-174). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kreider, T. (2000). Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. Film Quarterly, 53(3), 41-48.

Lacan, J. (1994 [1956-57]). Le séminaire, livre IV. La relation d’objet. Paris: Du Seuil.

Lacan, J. (1992 [1959-60]). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton.

Lacan, J. (2004 [1962-63]). Le séminaire, livre X. L’angoisse. Paris: Du Seuil.

Lacan, J. (1986 [1964]). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XI, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. New York: Penguin Books.

Lacan, J. (1966-67). Seminar XIV: The logic of fantasy. Unpublished Seminar.

Lobrutto, V. (1997). Stanley Kubrick: A biography. New York: Donald I. Fine Books.

McGowan, T. (2007). The real gaze. Film theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Phillips G.D., & Hill R. (2002). The encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Checkmark Books.

Pizzato, M. (2004). Beauty’s eye : Erotic masques of the death drive in Eyes Wide Shut. In T. McGowan and S. Kunkle (Eds.). Lacan and Contemporary Film (pp. 83-110). New York: Other Press.

Pocock, J. (2000). Collaborative dreaming: Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the ‘paradox of the ordinary. Arachne: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Literature, 7 (1-2), 76-93.

Preussner, A. (2001). Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ as Shakespearean tragicomedy. Literature/Film Quarterly, 29(4), 290-296.

Quackelbeen, J. (1987). Schrijvers van het symptoom versus schrijvers van het fantasme. Unpublished paper presentation.

Quackelbeen, J. (1994). Een psychoanalytische benadering van kunst. Duras, Heyboer en Genet.  In S. Haakma (Ed.), Art brut: Teksten over kunst en waanzin (pp. 49-59). Utrecht: Perdu.

Ransom, A.J. (2010). Opening Eyes Wide Shut: Genre, reception, and Kubrick’s last film. Journal of Film and Video, 62 (4), 31-46.

Raphael, F. (1999). Eyes Wide Open: A memoir of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Ballantine Books.

Sarris, A. (1999, July 26). Eyes don’t have it: Kubrick’s turgid finale. The New York Observer. Retrieved from http://observer.com.

Schnitzler, A. (2003 [1926]). Dream Story (Trans. O.P. Shinnerer). Los Angeles: Green Integer.

Siegel, L. (1999). Eyes Wide Shut: What the critics failed to see in Kubrick’s last film. Harper’s Magazine, 299, 76-82. Retrieved from www.indelibleinc.com.

Slocum, J.D. (2001). Introduction: violence and American cinema: Notes for an investigation. In J.D. Slocum (Ed.). Violence and American cinema (pp. 1-34). Routledge: New York.

Strange, C. (2010). Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as art against torture. Crime Media Culture. 6, 267-284.

Taubin, A. (1999). Imperfect love: Amy Taubin on Stanley Kubrick’s last film. Film Comment. 35 (5), 25-26 & 30-33.

Vanheule, S. (2011). The object a and jouissance in Psychosis. The subject of psychosis: A Lacanian perspective (pp. 125-148). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Verhaeghe, P. (1997). Does The woman exist? From Freud’s hysteric to Lacan’s feminine. London: Rebus Press.

Webster, P. (2011). Love and death in Kubrick: A critical study of the films from Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.

 

[1] All references to scenes from EWS are based on the division of the film into 38 chapters on the DVD which Warner Bros released in 2001 as part of The Stanley Kubrick Collection, a box containing six Kubrick films.

The body in obsessional neurosis:
Psychoanalytic reflections illustrated in a single case study[1]

Shana Cornelis

[Read as Digital Publication]

Abstract

From a Freudian-Lacanian point of view, neurotic symptoms are always to be conceived as embedded in the interpersonal relation of the subject towards significant others. With respect to this interconnectedness, the symptom specificity hypothesis (Blatt, 1974, 2004) – which can be considered an empirical operationalization of Freud’s theory on the psychoneuroses (Desmet, 2007) – states that a univocal association exists between type of neurotic symptom and mode of interpersonal functioning. More in particular, reminiscent of Freud and Breuer’s (1978 [1895d]) ‘Studies on Hysteria’, bodily symptoms are claimed to occur solely in hysterical neurosis; whereas obsessional neurosis, as Freud (1978 [1909d]) indicated in his famous Rat Case, is specifically characterized by the return of the repressed in the mind. Our contribution focuses on possible contra-indications for the presumed absence of bodily symptoms within obsessional neurotic pathology. In a first step we therefore investigated both research-oriented and theoretical writings as well as clinical case studies. We found that, although bodily symptomatology in obsessional neurosis has not often been commented upon, several authors (e.g. Fink, 1997; Skolidis, 2008; Soler, 1984; Strubbe, 2004) have explicitly denoted the crucial impact of/on the body in some cases of obsession. Secondly, we concretise this impact by means of a specific case study of a Lacanian psychoanalytic therapy with an obsessional patient. We indicate that in this patient, bodily symptoms do appear, but in a different, more obfuscated way than is classically the case in hysteria. Framed within an overview of the therapeutic process, we will elaborate on the function and evolution of the subject’s symptoms within his relation towards the Other, as expressed in his singular way of positioning himself towards the desire of significant others. Finally, these findings are discussed in the light of the psychoanalytic approach of the (bodily) symptom.

 

Introduction

In this presentation, I will focus on the appearance of the body within obsessional neurosis. More specifically I will focus on the function of bodily or somatic symptoms in obsessional neurotic patients. I will start with a short notion on the current descriptive psychiatric approach of symptoms, as opposed to the psychoanalytic view of neurotic symptoms, as always being embedded in – or interwoven within – important interpersonal relationships of the patient. Next, I will briefly elaborate on the theoretical elaborations of some authors who exclusively or predominantly link certain types of symptoms with certain modes of interpersonal functioning. It so happens that, within these elaborations, the presentation of bodily symptoms is often exclusively linked to the hysterical personality structure, whereas obsessional patients are viewed to only display mental or cognitive symptoms. This contribution will concentrate on possible contra-indications for the presumed absence of somatic symptoms within obsessional psychopathology. In a first step, I will highlight the theoretical contributions of a selection of authors on this matter; in a second step, I will illustrate these remarks by means of a specific case study of a Lacanian psychoanalytic therapy with an obsessional patient who presented with severe tinnitus and back pain complaints.

 

Descriptive ‘versus’ structural diagnoses and the function of the symptom

Within the enormous field of psychopathological phenomena patients display, clinical psychiatry and psychology usually discern different subsets of symptoms on a phenomenological basis (e.g. Derogatias & Cleary, 1977), i.e. based on their overt, often visual manifestations. Accordingly, contemporary diagnostics – as conceived in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V, American Psychiatric Association, 2013) – is based upon this description of symptoms. In other words, a diagnosis is based on a sum – or a list – of all the different, overt symptoms a patient presents us or tells us to suffer from.

However, a few important drawbacks have been discerned with this form of diagnostics. Most importantly, due to an absence of a theoretical framework that helps to structure both inter- and intra-individual varieties in the overt presentations of complaints, this plurality in the phenomenological field of symptoms cannot be reduced (Desmet, 2007). Hence, the diagnostic system becomes ineffective, as is illustrated in the large – and still increasing – amount of diagnostic categories in the DSM-V, with which comorbidity is the rule rather than the exception (Stefanis & Stefanis, 2002, pp 22-24).

 

I will not go into this any further; I just wanted to roughly outline the current psychiatric approach of psychopathology, and oppose this to the structural diagnostic system of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and practice. For, ever since the beginning of psychoanalysis, attempts were made to further structure the large set of psychological symptoms on the basis of their underlying, determining structures. In a Lacanian reading of Freud’s work, we could say that throughout his clinical work, Freud (1856-1939) has developed a diagnostic system containing three main categories: neurosis, psychosis and perversion. In this presentation, we will specifically focus on neurosis. At the most basic level of his theoretical model, Freud situated the ‘cause’ of psychopathology at the level of the libidinal drives (Freud, 1915c), which, in his view, determined both character formation – which mainly comes down to a characteristic, stable mode of relating to other people (Desmet, 2007) – as specific types of symptoms (Freud, 1908b).

As Freud’s analyses of neurotic symptomatology systematically led him into the interpersonal sphere, he described the underlying, determining structures of symptoms in interpersonal terms. Within the field of neurosis, two positions were discerned (e.g. Verhaeghe, 2004), based on the two interpersonal dimensions of the Oedipus complex. Simply put, the hysterical pattern is settled in the attraction towards a parental love object and later manifests itself in interpersonal behavior directed at fusion with others. The obsessional dimension, on the other hand, is rooted in aggression towards the parent who possesses the love object and who is thus experienced as a rival. Hence, this transference pattern results in interpersonal behavior aiming at isolation and distance from the other. Although both tendencies – towards fusion with and isolation from others – are present in every neurotic subject, generally one of these two dimensions predominates upon the other and marks the interpersonal functioning of a particular subject.

 

Next, following Freud, Lacan states that symptoms arise within these underlying structures, that they are products of these determining structures. In a Freudian-Lacanian view, symptoms are viewed as subjective expressions of an underlying psychic conflict between different elements that are experienced by the subject as vital to his or her conscious piece of mind (Freud & Breuer, 1895). Hence, these conflicts entail a considerable amount of psychic tension, in current terms ‘stress’. When the subject isn’t capable or willing to choose one part of the conflict over the other – as a choice would imply a profound loss in one way or another, something that the subject isn’t willing to give up – one part of this conflict is intentionally, but unconsciously, repressed (in Freudian terms) or pushed aside from the surrounding signifiers (in Lacanian terms); so that the consciously experienced tension decreases. This repressed or isolated material then returns in symptoms, which consequently carry ‘stories’ or symbols that have profound meanings in the subject’s life (Verhaeghe, 2004).

By consequence, a symptom is always inextricably bound up with the way the subject relates to others, or more specifically: relates to the lack and desire of others, and consequently to his/her own lack and desire. Lacan states that the hallmark of neurosis – compared to psychosis and perversion – is precisely the positioning of the subject towards this desire of the other, and, consequently, towards his/her own desire. While both hysterical and obsessional neurotics try to find a way to adapt themselves to this desire, hysterical subjects generally feel the need to meet the desire of others (with the accompanying feeling of “it’s never enough” and the keep-on-trying), while obsessional subjects try everything to keep this desire at bay, out of the fear of complying too much to it, which – in their experience – would mean they would disappear as a separate individual.

 

Types of symptoms linked to modes of interpersonal functioning

Having commented upon the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic approach of symptoms as being products of underlying structures that determine the way the subject relates to the lack and desire of significant others, I will now – very briefly – go into the link between type of symptom and type of interpersonal functioning.

Our central thesis here is that throughout psychoanalytic literature, several authors have explicitly linked the aforementioned return of repressed material in the body with hysteria, and the return of the repressed in the mind with obsession. In other words, (psycho)somatic symptoms would only – or predominantly – occur in hysterical neurosis, whereas obsessional subjects would only – or predominantly – present mental or cognitive complaints.

For instance, (a) in his ‘Studies on Hysteria’ (1978 [1895d]) – in which he dedicated a whole chapter on ‘Conversion hysteria’ – Freud described ‘conversion’ as the transformation of ‘psychic energy’ into ‘somatic energy’, a mechanism he identified as typical for hysteria; (b) in his comparison of ‘organic’ to ‘hysterical’ motor paralyses (1978 [1893c]); (c) in ‘The Neuro-psychoses of Defense’ (1978 [1894a]), in which he stated that in obsession “the total change has remained on psychic grounds” (p.205); (d) and finally in his famous case study of obsession, the ‘Rat Man’ (1978 [1909d]).

 

After Freud, a series of other authors – both post-Freudian and Lacanian – have explicitly commented upon or implicitly referred to this association between type of neurotic structure and locus of the repressed material (e.g. Blatt, 2004, pp. 155-157; Anna Freud, 1966; Soler, 1996).

 

Body and bodily symptoms in obsessional neurosis

In this paper, however, I will specifically focus on possible contra-indications for the presumed absence of somatic complaints in obsession.

It so happens that Freud himself already implicitly placed question marks next to his clear statements on this absence. For example, in ‘The neuro-psychoses of defense’ (1978 [1894a]), he wrote that the more serious cases of obsessional neurosis much less seek analytic treatment than do hysterical patients. In daily life, too, they mostly keep their conditions secret and only attend doctors in far advanced stages.

This claim is endorsed by Skolidis (2008), who wrote a very informative case study of a restless, agitated obsessional man who described to “never find peace in his body/to never be at ease in his body” – a condition that was very overwhelming and determining in his life, that occupied much of his time and energy, but about which no-one knew anything, except his wife and his psychoanalyst, because he didn’t present it, he didn’t stage it to others.

In ‘Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defense’ (1978 [1896b], p.771-772), Freud links a specific type of obsession with hypochondria as the fear for the physical harmful consequences of the sexual act performed during infancy, on which a self-blame is directed.

Further on, in ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’ (1978 [1905d]), he discusses the frequent intestinal disorders in obsession (p.64), for instance constipation.

 

Following on from Freud’s contributions, especially from his theory on the drives – which balances on the edge between the psychic and the somatic – Lacan made some crucial remarks on the body in psychoanalytic thought, which are very instructive to our understanding of the possible appearance of bodily complaints in obsessional neurosis. In fact, in Lacanian ontology, the body plays a principal part (Strubbe, 2004). For the construction of the psychic reality, in fact, runs parallel to the construction of the bodily reality. As such, when clinically working with patients – all patients, not just hysterical ones – subject and body cannot and may not be independently approached. The subject is pre-eminently a bodily subject and the body is pre-eminently a subjective body, which should be listened to as such (Strubbe, 2004).

To start with, the Lacanian annotator Nasio (1998) points out that ‘the body’ as viewed and approached by the psychoanalyst, is not the same as ‘the body’ as conceived or studied by the biologist, surgeon or philosopher. He adds that the psychoanalyst doesn’t study the ‘total body’, but the body as a symbolic-imaginary marker, in other words: the body as affected by speech (signifiers) and by images (meaning), as defense against a traumatic real, similar to the aforementioned concept of “object little a”. These three registers in Lacan’s work – Symbolic, Imaginary and Real – are also highlighted by Strubbe (2004), who provides an informative, chronologic overview of the Lacanian theory on the body. In Lacan’s early work, it was the Imaginary – the body image and meaning – that occupied a central place; which afterwards shifted to the Symbolic, highlighting the crucial impact of language, speech and signifiers. In Lacan’s later work, it was especially the register of the Real – of the traumatic, fear and enjoyment – that dominated.

The notion of ‘creating’ is important to draw attention to. Soler (1984) describes that the body – as conceived in Lacanian thought – has, just like the Ego, the statute of a constructed reality. Meaning that the body doesn’t exist from the start, from birth of the subject, but is constructed in relation to the Other.

In his first period of the Imaginary, Lacan places the concept of the body image to the fore, as that image of a ‘whole’ body, of a unity, which the child sees in the mirror and which is named by the mother (“this is your arm, this is your leg,” etc.) (Strubbe, 2004). In response to the gap the child experiences between this image of a whole and the disintegrated experience of its body, it identifies with this image, which has no lack, which ‘has’ something the child does not possess. In this context, Lacan explicitly stresses that this ‘knotting’ of the Imaginary with the Real does not occur in a vacuum, but in relation to the Other. The child learns to ‘know’ and experience its body as surface from outside, out of the gaze and the words (signifiers) of the Other (initially the mother).

In a second period (i.e. from 1953 onwards), Lacan’s focus shifts from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, to speech and to the signifier, as a condition for the coming-into-being-as-a-subject and the parallel construction of the bodily reality (Strubbe, 2004). In a nutshell, this is the speaking body, more specifically: the body as inhabited by signifiers that speak. As stressed before, these signifiers origin from the Other and both support as perforate the constructed body image. Soler (1983, p.49) emphasizes that these signifiers not only give us a body, but also mark this body, shape this body in a particular way. According to Strubbe (2004), one of the central lessons of Lacan’s theory is that language, the symbolic functioning of the body can modify its organic structure. Bodily functions – like the functioning of our hearts, our lungs, our intestinal tract, our movements – are not just biologically steered, but can be influenced by signifiers that nestled down into it. Like O’Brien (in Roth, 2001) said: “The body contains the life story just as much as the brain”.

Lastly, from his eleventh seminar onwards, Lacan turns to the register of the Real, as the traumatic, both fear- and enjoyment-inducing, part of the subject that cannot be symbolized and, therefore, keeps insisting in the chain of signifiers. It is the traumatic core around which all symbolic-imaginary material rotates, in an attempt to master it, to control it; which in the end always fails, as the Real always escapes every defensive attempt. This is why the subject can never completely coincide with his/her body; this is why our body is – in some way – always a strange “other”, a strange entity that surpasses our rudimental knowledge-system, on which our understanding of ourselves and of our surroundings is based (Strubbe, 2004).

 

In sum, a major merit of Lacan’s work pertains to the importance of acknowledging that psychic and bodily reality are inextricably interwoven in the life of every subject, that a principal part of the clinical work with all patients is working out how the body – or bodily parts – is affected by speech, images and enjoyment the patient is not consciously aware of, and that there exists an unbroken continuity between internal body processes and external interpersonal meanings and influences. The subject’s psychic and bodily identity/structure is constructed – and is constantly being constructed – in relation to the Other. By consequence, the symptoms the patient displays are always to be conceived as embedded within the relationships of the patient with significant others.

However, that doesn’t alter the fact that, generally, in psychoanalytic and other psychological literature, bodily symptomatology was and is still much more discussed, commented upon and both theoretically and clinically illustrated from the angle of hysteria. Theoretical contributions and clinical case studies on bodily phenomena in obsessional neurosis are scarce. Perhaps the reason for this is precisely to be found in the function of the symptom in relation to others, that is: to keep the other at bay, to annihilate the constraining desire and demand of the other in order not to disappear in it. Whereas hysterical subjects often stage their symptoms and their suffering to others and loudly complain about it, obsessional subjects don’t make a show of them, don’t go whining about it, but keep them hidden for the outside world – in Freud’s words: keep their conditions secret and, for instance, only attend a therapist or doctor in far advanced stages, when the suffering largely exceeds the gain the subject obtains from his/her symptom. This is what Soler (1996) refers to when she talks about the hysteric’s ‘intersubjectivity’ and the obsessive’s ‘intrasubjectivity’: when confronted with a problem, the immediate tendency of the first is to go out and talk with people (p.262-263), whereas the latter’s is to put his hand in his head and think without stopping (p.263).

The case study I’m about to present, illustrates that bodily symptoms do appear in obsessional patients, but maybe in a different, more obfuscated way than is classically the case in hysteria.

 

Case study: Pete

The case concerns an 89-session psychoanalytic treatment, conducted in a private group practice, which lasted for approximately three years, with an average frequency of one session per week. The therapist had received training in Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and at the start of treatment, he had six years of clinical experience. With the informed consent of the patient, all therapy sessions were audiotaped and transcribed, which made up the research material for this case study.

The patient, who I will name Pete, was a White, 33-year-old, married man who worked as a student counsellor at the local art school for high school students. After working hours, he spent most of his free time playing music in a hard-core band and riding his mountain bike. After a comprehensive diagnostic procedure, he was referred to the therapist by the University Hospital for severe tinnitus (a whistling sound in the ears) that could not completely medically be explained. Besides tinnitus, he also complained of periodic back pain, which, likewise, was medically unexplained.

During the whole course of therapy, Pete was very forthcoming as to the formal framework of therapy: he was always on time, always had the exact money ready and only once missed a session, because of overtime hours at work. At several times throughout the process, he stated that the reason why he came into therapy, was to gain insight into what he called “the mechanisms” of his tinnitus and back pain complaints, so that he could deal with it “more objectively”. He explained that it was not the “objective”, “physical” pain itself (in his ears or in his back) that he found so disruptive – “the pain is bearable”, he stated – but the (subjective) “dramatizing” of the pain, i.e. “the radars” in his head that started working and the anxiety and panic it provoked, which made him feel the pain a lot more intense “than it objectively is.”

Noteworthy, he always spoke of the mechanisms, the dramatizing, the fear, the tinnitus, and so forth – in a very rationalizing way, like he was talking about some interesting, general theory or about what he observes happening inside him in an observatory way, like he was not a part of it, like he stood outside and made notes.

 

Next, right from the start of therapy, Pete was incessantly concerned about and thinking through these mechanisms, brooding about his own share in the cause and worsening of the symptoms, what he might have done wrong, and how the consequences of it could possibly impede him in certain tasks in his life.

So, certainly at the beginning of therapy, there was no hysterical accusation of others, but the constant repetition in his discourse of two – rather obsessional – themes, namely: what have I done wrong and what am I doing wrong concerning these physical complaints, including the accompanying guilt feelings; and how do the consequences of this, the physical injuries I caused – by doing what I liked, playing both loud and physically intense music (which was very much against the will of his parents, as I will discuss in a minute) and by training hard (with his bike, before during kick boxing) – so, how do these consequences inhibit me in carrying out certain tasks in my life? (to which I will return in a minute)

Hence, during this first part of therapy, the therapist’s stance was mainly characterized by asking Pete to contextualize and concretize his statements, intending to widen Pete’s tight focus on the manifest symptom and his own blame in it to the broader context in which it occurred, including the involved protagonists. In doing such, the therapeutic labor exposed a series of contexts, which always turned out to be interpersonal and ambivalent in nature, revealing the function of the symptoms within his singular way of positioning himself towards the desire of significant others.

 

With regard to the tinnitus, it turned out Pete suffered since a few years from so-called “disco-tinnitus”, which means he had minor hearing damage due to playing loud music – and in the hours after playing this loud music, he temporarily heard this whistling sound. Back then, Pete was proud of this tinnitus, it was part of his hard-core identity, most serious musicians had it.

However, a couple of months before the onset of treatment, the tinnitus suddenly became a guilt- and fear-laden fixation point, which assembled a series of affects into it. “With the tinnitus, everything accelerated”, Pete stated. The immediate cause was the hearing of information on the news that a certain musician had committed suicide because of his tinnitus. Suddenly, Pete became intensely worried and anxious about the seriousness of the condition tinnitus, about the effects it could have on someone’s life. Because he attributed his own tinnitus to the playing of loud music, he suddenly became very anxious of loud noises, even hypersensitive to noise in general, and was afraid that if this would go on, in the near future he was not going to bear any noise – after which he gives the example “like the sound of mowing the lawn” – which refers to his “duty” as a husband and future head of the family to take care of the house and the garden, something his wife longs him to do. As a consequence, the panic “spreads unchecked”, he says, and gives him the subjective feeling he is not going to be able to manage “the tasks of life”. For instance that would not be able to work anymore, that he would had to sit at home all the time – which would mean, he said, he would not be able to pay for his loan for the house he recently bought with his wife; the loan he’s fixed to. He added that it was not him, but his wife, who wanted to buy a house; he wanted to further rent a residence, because buying corners you, makes it so definitive. Eventually they bought a very old house that needed much renovation work – “which means”, he said laughing, “that there is always something to worry about” and this worrying obstructs him in doing what he needs to do.” “I lose so much time by worrying and retrieving information on what I need to do”, he says, “(while, actually, I always know beforehand what I need to do), that in the end I have done nothing”.

 

Concerning the treatment process, I do not have the time to discuss all the various and complex elements in Pete’s life that were connected to the onset and the evolution in his tinnitus and back pain – that were, like all symptoms, “over-determined”. Therefore, I have selected the most important, central lines in his discourse, in which these symptoms were embedded.

All lines revealed profound ambivalences, experiences of incompatible elements between which he could not or wished not to chose – choices he avoided by becoming ill, as Freud said.

 

A first central line relates to the desires of his wife – to which I referred earlier when discussing how Pete felt constrained by the choices his wife “forced through” to buy a house and start a family. Pete and his wife had been together for over 10 years. At the beginning of therapy, he spoke very ambivalent about her: in the same spate of words he described they had a very good relationship, that they understood each other. “For instance”, he immediately added, “she senses when I’m angry and I’m better left alone to cool down. “I am not angry with her”, he said, “just angry”.

In the course of therapy, he learned to better articulate this anger and the aggressive outbursts he sometimes had towards her. He said he often blamed her for certain things, especially that she was the one who chose to buy a house and “that a child was coming”. Both a house and a child made him feel “restricted in the future”. “Just as with the back pain and the tinnitus,” he said, ‘one of my biggest fears is to encounter restrictions in the future”. So on the one hand, he went along with the desires of his wife, to which he actually had a lot of resistance; on the other, the creation of tinnitus and back pain permitted him to hold the immediate realization of them. In a nutshell, tinnitus prompted him to withdraw from all the bustle and noise around him and to retire to his study; intense backaches prevented him to continue working on the house, while he didn’t want to hire any workmen either. The thoughts about the renovation work “heavily weigh on my shoulders”, he often stated. In addition, anticipating the birth of his future child, he often worried if he would be able to carry the child in the first place, “with my back pain and such”.

That these physical complaints weren’t present all the time in all its intensity, but surfaced more in relation to these pressing desires of his wife, is further illustrated by the fact that – to his great surprise – at school, during work hours, or while training, he wasn’t bothered a bit, or only slightly by them. “Weekends are the worst”, he stated. At school, he was always taking initiatives, fixing problems, proving his worth, being patient, being busy. “But from the moment I come home”, he stated, “it disappears”. In session 3 he said:  “Saturday I was rushing myself like mad, I kept going off at a tangent, I have done something, but only for two hours (laughs). I mean, I can ride the mountain bike for three hours without feeling anything of pain and I have always been kick boxing and stuff and I had a little back pain because of the intensity of the sports, but at a certain moment, like this weekend, the pain becomes so unbearable and at that moment you link up the pain with something serious; just like with the tinnitus, it’s actually the same feeling,” after which he began to discuss the possible negative consequences of both complaints – for instance of becoming invalid, and thus unemployed, and thus being unable to pay for the loan of the house and to take care of his wife and child.

Throughout therapy, he progressively articulated his symptoms in relation to the signifiers “taking care of”, which brought along “pressure”. Pressure that nestled down onto (1) his head, leading to severe headaches – he once said “All that responsibility means that you have so many things on your head, in your head” – you could say while “releasing the steam through his ears”; and (2) onto his back, leading to periodic back pain attacks. Both tinnitus and back pain answered to Freud’s concept of ‘somatic compliance’, this is: he had minor hearing damage due to having played loud music and his back showed some signs of wear, due to becoming older and to having exercised much and intensely. At a given, significant moment in time, these minor physical damages became fixation points that gathered a sum of affects that formerly wandered around in his psyche.

Passing on to a second central line of symptom determination, it was noteworthy that while his discourse shifted to the crucial signifiers “taking care of” and “pressure” – which he suddenly began to relate to a lot of incidents in his past and current life – his discourse about his parents, and especially his father gradually began to change. Whereas at the beginning of therapy, his father was all bad, his absolute anti-model, and his mother was the poor victim, he gradually began to recognize some identification points with his father – which he formerly wouldn’t acknowledge, unless unconsciously via his symptoms – and recognize his wish to obtain recognition from his father; a third signifier that began to dominate his subsequent discourse.  Pete’s father was an alcohol addict, who – as the son of poor farmers – was occupied with “making safe choices” in life that led to financial security; certainly never doing anything risky. According to Pete, his father held others back in their initiatives, because of this pessimistic stance in life. In this sense, his father always advised against his desire to play music. He also sees the alcoholism and pessimism of his father as the main cause of the psychic troubles of his mother, who frequently (almost daily) called him up to complain about his father, about how she cannot stand it anymore, and to talk about her medical condition. Both his parents and his younger sister – about whom Pete never talked much – took a lot of medication. They never talked much about their feelings with one another, but often complained of headaches and other ailments, for which “medication was always present at the house”, he stated.

As someone who never accomplished anything in his life and made others’ lives a misery, his father was a huge anti-model for Pete. He certainly not wanted to become “the back pain suffering, beer drinking, chunk of frustration who gets totally absorbed by all the possible negative consequences whenever he hears about an initiative”. This prompted him to avoid his father as much as possible, as talking to his father always blocked him completely.

On the other hand, however, Pete gradually began to acknowledge that he actually always longed for the recognition of his father for his accomplishments. He described how the only times when his father wasn’t negative in relation towards him, were when he began working full-time as a student counsellor and when he bought the house.

In a nutshell: on the one hand, his father was – consciously – an anti-model for him and someone his mother always wanted him to push aside; on the other, unconsciously, his symptoms – especially back pain – enabled him to imaginary identify with his father. However, still on another plane, this back pain also prohibited him to fully realize the desire of his father, i.e. for him to inhabit a finished, safe house. In contrast, in his job – the second element that fell within the lines of his father’s silent approval – he did well and felt good, for him it was the only place where he felt he meant something, he was useful. Still, although he was very ambitious and had very innovative plans that could help improve the functioning of the school and its staff and students, he was very anxious to take up more responsibility and only felt comfortable working under the wings of a superior. As a consequence, he never got promoted to a function with more financial security – something that his wife would also have fully approved of.

When talking so much about his father during therapy, the theme of aggression also began to surface. He said he has always been afraid of aggression. Going from memories of how his muscles frequently tightened up in confrontations with his father – and linked memories of how his mother repeatedly asked him to stand up against his father for her sake, because – she said – “you’re the only one he is afraid of” – he progressively started to recognize that it was he who tightened his muscles (for instance the muscles in his back) especially in contexts in which he was angry at someone (for instance at his wife for having “imposed” her will on him).

While I could go on for hours about this case, discussing all the complex determinations of the symptoms, I will finish here, having commented upon how these symptoms were meaningfully embedded in a few of the most important relationships the patient maintained with significant others; having illustrated the appearance of somatic phenomena in a case of obsessional neurosis and what function they – among other possible functions – fulfil for the patient within this interpersonal context.

I thank you for your attention.

 

Shana Cornelis

Missoula, 2014 August 1

 

 

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Strubbe, G. (2004). Het lichamelijk subject en het subjectieve lichaam binnen de kliniek. Pleidooi voor een terugkeer naar het verdrongene. Psychoanalytische Perspectieven.

Verhaeghe, P. (2004). On being normal and other disorders : A manual for clinical psychodiagnostics. New York : The Other Press.

[1] This paper represents the written record of the oral presentation held at the EPIS conference 2014 (Missoula, MT).

The Perception and Potential Modification of Self through Technology

Gary Kolb, PhD

[Read as Digital Publication]

Introduction

In this paper, I propose that a person’s use of technology may change his or her perception of self.  I have observed this in my work with clients. Those challenged by addiction, depression, anxiety, other mental health issues, or who have experienced trauma in their lives appear to be more vulnerable. Emotional disruption creates a void. I believe this void leads to a search for a modified self that alleviates the psychic pain. Technology now offers the possibility of a new form of socialization as well as an opportunity to explore fantasy. This is indeed an exploratory paper which may generate challenge and personal disagreement. My thorough literature review using cross analysis of words pairing the word technology with counseling, therapy, and psychotherapy in the professional therapy journals revealed that very little has been written on this subject. I found some articles about future use of technology in children and adolescents, possibly laying the foundation for future study. These articles are on the cutting edge of the evolution of the use of technology. Nothing has been printed as of this date on personality changes, except personality changes related to chemical addiction. This is truly virgin territory.

Cyberspace is the electronic space that came into existence during the 1960’s when various computer networks joined (Nusselder, 2009). It became a broad social phenomenon in the 1980’s and 1990’s. With the evolution of technology, people had the ability to connect to and explore different social dimensions. It is now possible to explore a wide spectrum of opportunities for engaging in portals of social experiences, which affords a person the opportunity to try on different personas. With the advent of game playing, fantasy is opening new dimensions for creating an idealized self/altered state. New technologies provide great opportunities for both growth and regression (Kourosh, 2008). The question arises, how might this adaptation change or modify an individual’s way of believing who her or she desires to be and, most importantly, how will exploration of these phenomena affect therapy, especially psychoanalysis, today and in the future?

In order to proceed to an understanding of some patient’s attraction to and the changes in technology, we must have some general understanding of the concepts of self, fantasy, and dissociation.

Development of the Self

There have been and continue to be many concepts of the self, and terminology can be confusing. The terms ego and self are sometimes used interchangeably as Freud did. Other times they are carefully distinguished one from the other (Kernberg, 1982). Forty years ago, almost no one had a self. People had egos, varying from weak to strong (Bach, 2000). Today, most people have selves that vary from true to false, and almost no one has an ego. “A review of the literature on the psychoanalytic self reveals little agreement about what the self is, where it belongs in theory, or what difference, if any, it makes in practice” (Bach, 2000, p.5).

Crastnopal refers to Barnett’s representational and operational self; Wolstein’s psychic center of self; Levenson’s cognitive and semantic manifestations of self; and Bromberg’s multiplicitous self states (2006). Mitchell wove Sullivan’s me-you patternings with Fairbairn’s drive for object relatedness and with Winnicott’s authentic experience as a core facet of self to define a relational concept of self (Crastnopal, 2008). Crastnopal suggested a configural self where all elements are related, some closely and others distantly (2008).  Stern described the self as being multiple, in a state of flux, and intersubjectively constituted, instead of being a separate center (2002). Wolf defined the self as a psychological structure that provides a person with a healthy sense of self and well-being (1991). Barnett viewed the self as the way the individual experiences his person and his relationship to the inner and outer world (1980). Kohut recognized that “experiencing selfhood is always constituted, both developmentally and in psychoanalytic treatment, in a context of emotional interrelatedness” (Stern & Atwood, 2012, p. 574). People sustain feelings of their own aliveness through ongoing awareness of their actual physical being, and also through the feeling that they exist and are remembered in the mind of others (Bach, 2001). Mayes saw the self as being a multi-layered, confusing, indistinct construct. She stated the self includes the domains of body image and social relatedness (2000).

Most modern psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self assume that the psychological self develops through perception of oneself in another’s mind as feeling and thinking (Fognagy, 1998). The self is represented as an intentional being with goals based on thoughts, beliefs, and desires, not on a physical entity.  Infants experience a differentiated sense of self almost from birth (Atwood & Safyer, 1993).  This sense of self is pre-designed to actively engage in relationships with caretakers. In this way, young babies develop an experience of separateness and togetherness. Psychoanalysts regard the development of a sense of self as a complex process, an intricate and multifaceted construction that is a central motivational concern throughout life and for which we are deeply dependent of other people (Mitchell, 2007).

The interpersonal self results from the direct perception of the relationship between the self and another person (Stern in Neisser, 1993). It forms from the social interactions with other people which provide objective information that is directly available to each. Interactions with another person are different than interactions with inanimate things, ideas, our physical selves, and our memories. Interpersonal encounters have many aspects. Of them, evoking, sharing, and mutually regulation of feelings may be the most significant (Stern in Neisser, 1993).  Feelings are always present in focused social interactions. If a parent cannot think about his or her child’s particular experience, it deprives the child of a core of self-structure he needs to build a viable sense of himself (Fognagy, 1998). Winnicott described the false self, the defensive organization created by the infant or child as a result of inadequate mothering or failures in empathy (1998).

Neisser identified five basically different kinds of information that people have about themselves (1993). Each kind describes a different aspect of the person. Ecological and interpersonal forms of self-knowledge are the first forms and develop in infancy (Neisser, 1993). They are perceived forms of self. The remembered, private, and conceptual selves develop later.  A self is not a special part of a person or of the brain. ”It is the whole person considered from a particular point of view” (Neisser, 1993, p. 4). People subscribe to a wide range of beliefs and assumptions about themselves. Considered together, these beliefs are the conceptual self, the self-concept.

“Technological innovations of the cyber age have altered fundamental processes of perception and experience”, and sense of self (Goren, 2003, p. 487). Technology provides the ability for us to re-create our own body images (Clark, 2003). Through technology, we can gain knowledge about who and what we are.  “New technologies can alter, augment, and extend our sense of presence and of our own potential for action” (Clark, 2003, p. 115). Technology can allow us to learn more about what really matters in the ongoing construction of our sense of place and of person-hood. “In success and in failure, these tools help us to know ourselves” (Clark, 2003, p.118).  The kinds of self-exploration that technology allows  ”will enhance and expand our sense of our own presence and our awareness of, and intensity with others” ( 2003, p. 118). Clark stated that we are “moving toward a world of wired people and wireless radio-linked gadgets” (2003, p. 126). There is ample room for truly hybrid biotechnological selves.

The most basic notion of the self is our physical presence in the world, “determined by our direct control-experiences that provide kinds of statistical correlation between motor signals and sensor feedback” (Clark, 2003, p.132).  However, the human self has another dimension. According to Clark, “we think of ourselves not just as a physical presence, but also as a kind of rational or intellectual presence” (2003, p. 132).  We think of ourselves in terms of a certain set of ongoing goals, projects, and commitments which are not static or arbitrarily changeable.” We view ourselves as unique individuals by recognizing our physical shape and form and some distinctive nexus of projects and activities” (Clark, 2003, p.132).

 

Fantasy and Dissociation

Fantasy and dissociation both draw people to technology  “Fantasy is culturally universal; it is energetically active in all cultures; and it seems irrepressible” (Egan, 2008, p. 17). Fantasies encompass a variety of emotions that interconnect with the challenges people face in reality. Egan noted that the main explanations of fantasy have come from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung. Freud explained fantasy as a primary process activity which operates, and generates its peculiar images, according to the rules of substitution and displacement.  In Freudian theory, fantasy can represent both a self deception and a valid metaphorical description of reality (Josephs, 1987). For Jung, fantasy is a result of spontaneous eruptions from the unconscious, perhaps liberating archetypes which become the subject for active imagination shaping the world (Egan, 2008). Fantasies are the base of both dreams and some types of mental illness (Arlow, 2008). Each person has a few major systems of fantasy that seem to persist throughout his or her lifetime, that may undergo changes in developmental epochs, and that may lead to a variety of expression in different developmental phases (Horowitz, 1992). People who are capable of becoming profoundly absorbed in fantasy, those who are fantasy prone, often use their talent as a temporary escape from reality.

Both children and adults experience conscious fantasies or daydreams. Fantasy worlds have a significant emotional and spiritual value, since they focus the mind away from the self (Egan, 2008). Egan argued that “the key to fantasy is to recognize genuine emotion and genuine human interactions“ (2008, p. 13). The characters of fantasies do not collapse to the child’s sense of self, so the child expands outward in the direction of the fantasy. During the evolution of psychoanalytic theory over the past century, Freud and those who followed him observed and documented that children, through fantasy, actually shape unconscious internal environments, instead of just recording the experiences they have with their surroundings (Ganaway, 1994). Egan wrote that fantasy may actually be a prerequisite for a range of intellectual skills, as well as for an imaginative and flexible engagement with reality (2008). Clearly there are cases where fantasy may combine with psychological problems and worsen them. Even in the worst cases, where the mind escapes from reality, fantasy could provide some coping resources.

Reality and fantasy cannot always be separated, since each affects the other, often in very powerful ways (Sandler, 1986). The relationship between inner experience and outside reality is complex (Cohen, 1989). Inner reality affects experience and shapes outside reality. A person’s understanding of the inner construction of reality casts its shadow on reality testing, which is a continuous process (Abrams, 1983). “We think of fantasy fostering reality testing, and it is reality testing which makes it possible to distinguish between reality and fantasy” (Abrams, 1983, p. 5).

Fantasy and actuality are interrelated and potentially enrich each other (Mitchell, 2007). Separating reality and fantasy is only one way to construct and organize experience. For life to be meaningful, vital, and robust, fantasy and reality cannot be too divorced from each other. “Fantasy cut adrift from reality becomes irrelevant and threatening. Reality cut adrift from fantasy becomes vapid and empty” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 29).

In early childhood, fantasy and reality are not experienced as being separable from each other. Instead, they interpenetrate with each other (Mitchell, 2007). Perhaps through technological  involvement and advancement, we are developing the ability to reconfigure our own reality with the constant investment and practice of entertainment and occupational upgrading through technology.

Like fantasy, dissociation is a healthy, adaptive function of the human mind (Bromberg, 1996). It is a basic process that allows individual self-states to function optimally in certain situations. Under normal conditions, dissociation screens out excessive or irrelevant stimuli to enhance the integrating functions of the ego (Bromberg, 1996). However, under pathological conditions the normal functions of dissociation are used defensively. Dissociation is the way that some people deal with trauma.

Kirmayer pointed to studies that show high hypnotic susceptibility among Dissociative Identity Disorders patients and implied these individuals are highly suggestible (1994). There is also some current thought that some aspects of the self as alternate personalities may give reason to the dissociative experiences through mass media influence and commercialism, possibly even the Internet. Suggestions gain power when they are reinforced by social, cultural, and economic factors. With the advances in technology, as well as programs of interest, the potential for dissociation is phenomenal. It can be speculated that there is an influence and a high possibility of integration of these experiences in memory. The perception of self may even be reconfigured with the powerful influence on psychological and physiological processes.  Kirmayer stated that it is his experience dissociative phenomenon is often subtle, delicate, and involves the interaction of ordinary cognitive and social processes related to imagination and self-characterization through memory and narrative (1994). Bowers proposed that people high in hypnotizability and dissociation control can effectively change or moderate their physiological and psychological interpretations and reactions when faced with the desire to escape their reality (Speigel, 1994).

Technology and the Evolution of the Mind

“The advent of the internet and interconnectivity has released an explosion of human creativity, the like of which may never have been seen on this planet” (Kourosh, 2008, p. 105). Clark, a neuroscientist, believed in the natural evolution of the mind, “a special and distinctively human nature, a cognitive hybridization” (2003, p. 3-4). He proposed that learning involves a cognitive fossil trail, by which a person learns an historical procession of potent cognitive technologies.  Clark labeled this procession of development “a cascade of mindware upgrades: cognitive upheavals in which the effective architecture of the human mind is altered and transformed” (2003, p. 5). According to Clark, all humans are cybernetic organisms or cyberretically controlled organisms (cyborgs), and the trace of recent developmental acquisitions is framed with the advent of texts, PCs, co-evolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices, “the mind is just less and less in the head” (2003, p.4).  He theorized the human mind is “a fortress that has been built to be breached; it is a structure whose virtue lies in part in its capacity to delicately gear its activities in order to collaborate with external, non-biological sources of order to better solve the problems of survival and reproduction” (2003, p. 5). Clark proposed that the biological brain is expert at recognizing patterns, at perception, and at controlling physical actions; it is not so well -designed for complex planning and long, intricate derivations of consequences.

Clark continued with his idea that people are “natural-born cyborgs, always ready to merge our mental activities with operations of pen, paper, electronics, that we are able to understand the world as we do” (2003, p. 6). People have always been adept at dovetailing their minds and skills to the shape of current tools and aids (2003). However, “when those tools and aids start dovetailing back, when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor themselves to us just as we do to them, the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed” (2003, p. 7).  These types of technologies will be less like tools and more like part of the person’s mental apparatus, in the same way neural structures, such as the hippocampus and posterior parietal cortex that operate unconsciously are tools. A person does not really use his or her brain. The operation of the brain makes the person who and what he or she is. Clark believed this will also be true for these new waves of sensitive, interactive technologies. Human minds are special precisely because they are made for multiple mergers and coalitions (Clark, 2003).  Humans possess an extended cognitive system whose constancy lies mainly in its continual openness to change. The line between biological self and the technological world was never very firm (Clark, 2003). We are now on the horizon of challenging much of what we think we know about who we are, what we are, and even where we are. “Multitasking with self and other seems to be always in motion” (2003, p. 8).

Clark identified himself as a cognitive scientist. “The more I have learned about the brain and the mind, the more convinced I have become that the everyday notions of ‘minds’ and ‘persons’ are open-ended and plastic systems fully capable of including non-biological props and aids as quite literally parts of themselves” (Clark, 2003).  Clark called the invention of the cell phone “a mindware upgrade, an electronic prosthesis capable of extending and transforming one’s personal reach, thoughts, and vision ” (2003, p. 10). He claimed that as technology becomes more portable, pervasive, reliable, flexible, and increasingly personalized, our tools will become more and more a part of who and what we are (2003). Clark further explained “what makes us distinctively human is our capacity to continually restructure and rebuild our own mental circuitry” (2003, p. 10). According to Clark, the term cyborg “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments (2003, p. 14). Clark explained that “our brains are essentially the brains of natural-born cyborgs, ever eager to dovetail their activity to the increasing complex technological envelopes in which they develop, mature, and operate” (2003, p.26). Clark stated that “the computer is thus drawn into the real world of daily objects and interaction, where its activities and contributions become part of the unremarked backdrop upon which the biological brain and organism learn to depend” (2003, p. 30).  In the future, people may become so dependent on technological apparatuses that they will begin to expect and trust the input from a technological monitoring apparatus as much as they would the input from their own unconscious brain (Clark, 2003). Those ideas have the possibility of shaping our lives and our sense of self.  Clark stated that technological processes are constantly contributing to a person’s emerging psychological profile.

A human brain comprises of a variety of relatively distinct, but densely inter-communicating subsystems. For example, the posterior parietal subsystems which operate unconsciously when we reach out to grasp an object, adjust hand orientation and finger placement appropriately. Clark proposed that both parts of the brain, the conscious and the unconscious, learn to factor in the operation of various non-biological tools and resources. This creates an extended problem-solving matrix with a degree of fluid integration that can sometimes rival that found within the brain itself (2003).The process of fitting, tailoring, and factoring creates extended computational and mental organizations: reasoning and thinking systems distributed across brain, body, and world. Much of our distinctive human intelligence inheres in the operation of these extended systems (Clark, 2003). Human cognition “subsists in a hybrid, extended architecture (one which includes aspects of the brain and of the cognitive technological envelope in which our brains develop and operate) that remains vastly under-appreciated” (Clark, 2003, p. 33). Who we are may depend as much on the specific socio-technological matrix that a person exists in as on the various conscious and unconscious neural events that occur in the physical body. (2003). ”Even the technologically mediated incorporation of additional layers of unconscious functionality must make a difference to our sense of who and what we are; as much of a difference, at times, as do some very large and important dimensions of our own biological brain” (2003, p.34).

Interactions between mind and technology are able to become transparent. When a technology is well-fitted and transparent there is the potential for it to impact what a person feels he or she can do, where the person is located, and the kinds of problems the person is capable of solving (Clark, 2003). The tool itself fades into the background and becomes transparent in skilled use. “New waves of almost invisible, user-sensitive semi-intelligent knowledge-based electronics and software are perfectly posed to merge seamlessly with the individual biological brain” (2003, p.34). Clark explained that “in quasi-evolutionary times, the product is poised to enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship with its biological users.”  Technologies simultaneously shape and adapt to the cognitive profiles of biological users.  Technology becomes pseudo-neural. “Personal information appliances, functioning robustly, transparently, and constantly, will slowly usher in new social cultural, educational, and institutional structures” (Clark, 2003, p. 45).

Clark believed the sense of self, what we know of who and what we are, is surprisingly plastic and reflects ongoing experiences of thinking, reasoning, and acting, rather than being some rigid preset biological boundary (2003).  He predicted the near future will include the development of lightweight, constantly running, personal computers and new techniques which will blur the boundaries between the virtual and the physical. Blending technology and human biology has the potential to be a harmonious interaction (Clark, 2003). Wearable computing will be designed to fade into the background when it is being used. It will provide support while it allows the person to focus on the task at hand, not on the technology. Clark contended there will be “a blurring of boundaries between physical and informational space” (2003, p. 53). This kind of blurring creates humans that become complex biotechnological hybrids who move between real and virtual worlds. Clark explained “a traversable interface creates the impression of a seamless join between the real and the virtual, and encourages users to frequently and naturally cross over between the two realms” (2003, p. 53). Clark pointed out the under-twenty five young people’s thumbs have overtaken fingers as the most muscled and dexterous digits simply as a result of this age group’s extensive use of handheld electronic game controllers and text messaging on cell phones(2003). He proposed that the same kind of user technology co-adaptation can occur at the deepest levels of neural processing” (2003, p. 86).

Some suggest that non-biological technology does not control and/or choose a person’s actions. That is the function of the biological brain. Therefore, non-biological aspects should not be counted as part of the real cognitive system. From that perspective, the mind cannot be a hybrid built of biological and technological parts. Human minds are biological, although they “enjoy a nice wrap-around of power-enhancing tools and culture” (Clark, 2003, p. 136).

According to Rosen, complete reliance on technology can make a person appear to have either schizoid personality disorder, defined by emotional coldness and extreme social withdrawal, or schizotypal personality disorder, in which the person exhibits odd speech and thought patterns, magical thinking, delusions, and seeks isolation (2012). He contended that people having such complete reliance on technology may even have brief episodes in which they actually experience these disorders (Rosen, 2012). A healthy lifestyle includes face-to-face interactions that give the context and cues for socialization (Rosen, 2012). Rosen proposed his research indicates that the use of media and technology is highly correlated with social withdrawal and isolation (2012). For his research the degree of media use in most technology groups was correlated with schizotypal behaviors, signs, and symptoms in all age groups, but especially in those born in 1980’s and 1990’s. Rosen found that the more time a young person invested in media and online technology, the more likely he or she was to display characteristics of schizoid disorder, becoming more socially isolated and emotionally distant (2012, p. 173). Rosen concluded that “from being online and using social networking, to texting and instant messaging, to playing video games and listening to music, the more people engage in technology-related activities, the more they exhibit schizotypal behaviors” (2012, p. 181).

Research conducted at Oxford University on the science of the mind and the growing use of social media showed this technology actually is changing the brain (Rosen, 2012). Neuroscientists recognize that the brain is constantly changing in response to both external and internal stimuli. This is neuroplasticity, a constant process of strengthening and weakening nerve cell connections in the brain as a function of experiences (Rosen, 2012). Each technology a person uses engages his or her brain. “When a person multi-tasks with several technologies, the brain is even more engaged, perhaps with a near maximal amount of neuronal activity (Rosen, 2012). There is evidence that when the activity stops, for example when a video game ends, the residual neurological effects remain for a period of time. Multi-tasking and electronic devices may be creating a brain that can’t deal with the real world because the real world is less stimulating (Rosen, 2012).   Excessive multi-tasking may actually be harmful to the brain. Those who multi-task more are less able to identify human emotions, and those online more than ten hours a day have less brain gray matter than those who are online less than two hours a day (Rosen, 2012).

On the positive side, technology is related to higher IQ, a better memory, and the ability to process information more quickly. On the negative side, it is associated with signs and symptoms of one of many psychotological disorders: narcissim, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, depression, attention deficit disorder, social phobia, antisocial personality disorder, hypochondriasis, body dysmorphic disorder, schizo disorders, and voyeurism.

Addiction and Technology

Weiss and Schneider explained the 2011 American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) definition for addiction includes process or behavioral addictions (2014).

“Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of the brain’s reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.  Dysfunction in these circuits leads to the characteristic biological, psychological, social, and spiritual manifestations, which are seen in a person who is pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and/or other behaviors” (Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p. 134). Weiss & Schneider emphasized that “to qualify as having addictive potential, the behavior or substance must bring the user an experience of pleasure in some way” (2014, p.134). Three key symptoms of addiction are loss of control (inability to do the things the individual hopes, tries, promises, or wants to discontinue); continued use despite significant adverse consequences; preoccupation to the point of obsession (always the focus in the addict’s mind). In addition, addicts can develop a tolerance to the behaviors that they abuse. As time passes, the addict has to spend more time engaged in the addiction activity in order to achieve the same level of pleasure, distraction, or escape.  Some addicts will escalate not only the amount, but also the level of intensity. When the addict loses access to the behavioral distraction of choice, he or she experiences emotional cravings or signs of physical withdrawal occur.

Many technology-based activities have addictive potential, since they evoke feelings of extreme pleasure and satisfaction while serving as a source of profound, although temporary, distraction (Weiss & Schneider, 2014).  Weiss and Schneider noted that the problem of addiction has always been driven by human technological advances (2014). “Technology in all of its forms delivers an increasingly wider array of powerful substances and experiences that are, for some, emotionally, psychologically, and/or physically unmanageable” (Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p. 135).

There may be a genetic predisposition toward addiction. Although a propensity for addiction and emotional vulnerability may exist, human technological advances could increase the odds of actually developing an addiction (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). Technology (via digital, mobile and social media) has provided increased intensity and inexpensive access.  “With today’s highly refined, carefully manipulated, digitally transmitted, instantly accessible, and seemingly endless supply of material, is it any wonder that some of the more emotionally vulnerable among us repeatedly turn to it for comfort, distraction, and emotional escape?” (Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p. 137).

Internal fantasy processes are involved in the etiology of addictive personality disorders, habit patterns, and attachments (Firestone, 1993). A child deprived of emotional support, or threatened by separation anxiety, may depend increasingly on fantasy gratification, which reduces some of the tension and relieves some of the pain. The child develops a self-parenting process in which he or she is both the parent and the object of parenting (Firestone, 1993). Self parenting includes self-nourishment and self-punishment. A young child may suck his or her thumb, masturbate, or have other self-gratifying behaviors. Adults feed themselves more directly with food, alcohol, and various chemicals and develop eating disorders or substance abuse. Self-punishment is seen in internal destructive “voices,” self-critical attitudes, and self-harming behavior. The same defenses children use to protect themselves from overwhelming anxiety in childhood lead to developing an inward, addictive lifestyle as adults. Relying on fantasy becomes incapacitating because that dependence interferes with goal-directed activity in the real world (Firestone, 1993). Eventually the person prefers the addictive patterns over the satisfactions in his or her interpersonal environment. Winnicott observed that withdrawal into fantasy has a dissociative quality (Colombi, 2010).

There is considerable confusion, even among therapy professionals, about addiction, in part because many potentially addictive behaviors are healthy behaviors for most people. They are healthy, life-affirming activities that involve little concern or personal struggle. Some of these activities are perceived as enjoyable distractions (Weiss & Schneider, 2014).

Some addictions such as eating and sexual activities are keyed to survival objectives, and our brains are programmed to encourage participation in these behaviors. These activities trigger a neurochemical response in the reward center of the brain, which results in feelings of pleasure.  This neurochemical pleasure response is seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the brain. These studies clearly show that the neuroarousal patterns of someone who abusing cocaine and someone who is sexually excited are virtually indistinguishable. It is this biochemical pleasure process that is a key to developing and maintaining both substance and behavioral addictions. Some people who struggle with underlying emotional or psychological issues can subconsciously learn over time to manipulate the brain’s pleasure response by ingesting a particular substance or engaging in a certain activity. This is a misguided attempt to cope with stress and/or to distract the person from emotional pain (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). Addicts want to feel better, usually by feeling less. Participating in the desired behavior allows the addict to temporarily disconnect, numb out, and experience pleasurable distractions.

Accessibility, affordability, and anonymity drive online addiction (Weiss & Schneider, 2014).  The internet provides endless amounts of highly distracting, emotionally rewarding, and pleasurable games, material, and activities. This proliferation of access causes tremendous problems for many people who have pre-existing addictive disorders, social inhibitions, impulsivity, early trauma, or attachment and mood disorders. All of these can contribute to long-term; very harmful repetitive patterns of behavioral acting out (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). Internet addictions include social sites and chat rooms, games, gambling, compulsive shopping, sex, and love. Mental health professionals and other professionals are seeing clients with personality adjustments, fixations, and the emotion of the development of expanded and false perceptions. In recent years help lines have expanded exponentially due to financial constraints, as well as the lack of understanding of technological addictions by many counselors and therapists.

Most people now have access through technology to a whole new social connectedness dimension which can escalate to the point that it interferes with daily life (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). This behavioral addiction offers the opportunity to escape real life or avoid what is commonly called normality. It may create a strong social dependence on internet relationships. Some argue that technology is the future for providing our basic need for social connectedness (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). But this technology may actually prevent young people from learning the face-to-face interactive social skills they need to negotiate successful adult relationships, romance, and work relationships (Weiss & Schnieder, 2014). Young people growing up in the digital age are using networked public spaces as crucial environments to learn socialization and well as identity development (Palfrey & Glasser, 2008). They learn what it means to be friends, to develop identities, to experiment with status, and to interpret social cues online (Palfrey & Glasser, 2008). Digital relationships are often fleeting; easy to enter into, and easy to leave.

 

Social addictions

A person can become addicted to internet relationships without knowing who the other person really is.  People can experiment with multiple identities online (Palfrey & Glasser, 2008).  “Most people represent themselves honestly online, but cyberspace does create an opportunity for an individual to develop an alter ego whom they then present to others” (Adamse & Motta, 1976, p.63). An alter ego is essentially a misrepresentation of factual personal data or personality characteristics.  It is closely related to the false self that Martin describes as what a person wants others to think of him or her (2006). People want to portray themselves in an acceptable social manner throughout their lives (Haase, 2008).

Some people may have more than one alter ego, depending on their mood or intention (Adamse & Motta, 1976). Often alter egos are just slight variations or exaggerations of the person’s actual characteristics, but they may also be complete fabrications and be of different sexes than the real individuals. While most users present alter-egos deliberately, alter-egos can also develop unintentionally. “A slight exaggeration here and there can build into more and more misrepresentations” (Adamse & Motta, 1976, p. 71).

The major reason for developing an alter ego is to express sides of the personality that a person seldom, if ever, expresses because of fear or lack of opportunity. The internet eliminates both obstacles. Using a cyberspace name and having seemingly endless rooms and bulletin board postings from which to choose, a person can play in safety.  Adamse and Motta emphasized that “the Internet is the perfect technological medium that allows expression of anything you want in almost complete anonymity” (1976, p.65-66). Online chat rooms provide this opportunity.

Most Internet relationships never progress beyond the screen; therefore, alter-egos usually go undetected (Adamse & Motta, 1976). However, there is the possibility of progression from online to phone contact at some point, a transition to real-world meetings (Adamse & Motta, 1976).  Each transition helps generate new information. There is an enhancement of the screen image in either a positive or a negative direction (Adamse & Motta, 1976). On the Net, there is a tendency for people to present positive attributes and use the medium as a way to hide flaws-either real or imagined (Adamse & Motta, 1976).  A person may be able to cover insecurities that become apparent in a real life connection. “Hiding insecurity, however, is different from projecting and illusion,” (Adamse & Motta, 1976, p.67).

Text-based interactions on the Net take place without the normal sensory cues. With no visual, olfactory, tactile, or auditory channels to help, it is very difficult for one person to evaluate another. As human beings, we depend upon these cues to size-up another person. “We are missing essential pieces of information that our ancestors used to quickly determine if someone was friend or foe” (Adamse & Motta, 1976, p. 66).  In a text-based online social contact, the human mind will complete an image of the person based on information the person has shared. The information is incomplete, so the mind provides the missing information and creates a whole person (Adamse & Motta, 1976). All the information is projected, based on the person’s need and desire at the time. The projection also depends on the person’s personality, beliefs, and attitudes toward other people (Adamse & Motta, 1976). Personal interpretations of information help form and solidify our perceptions. Distortion may eventually develop and become a problem. When a relationship develops, it is based on trust. A person involved in a text-only Internet relationship may eventually sense or discover information that does not match his or her projection of the other person and become disillusioned.

In online social interactions, the participant controls the degree of anonymity and has power over information that he or she shares. This is nearly impossible to do in real life. A person does not have to wear a social mask on the internet (Adamse & Motta, 1976). The internet alter ego is premised on a person’s desire to enhance his or her image. This could become a problem when the alter ego persona gets more attention and interest from others than would the person’s real-life presentation (Adamse & Motta, 1976). Using the internet for social interactions has the disadvantage of possibly tarnishing self-esteem.  However, using the internet can be a positive way for a person to develop more confidence in self-expression and self-acceptance, behaviors that can be practiced in real life.

People can also become obsessive about their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). These people want to have the most friends or followers, to get positive responses to their all posts and tweets, or to get attention by posting or tweeting incessantly about what they are doing and what a wonderful life they have. “Thus social media, an entirely digital phenomenon, can become an addiction unto itself and a quick and easy substitute for true self-esteem, real-world relationships, and genuine intimate connection” (Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p. 151). Those with social networking addictions will not bother to call or meet with friends, but will obsess over their My Space and Facebook profile pages. The addict may even fail to perform the most basic responsibilities as he or she loses a grasp on reality.

The world of internet relationships can be a seductive medium. You can virtually connect with others in any way you can imagine so long as you have a willing individual or group on the other end. In the history of communication, it has never been so easy to impersonate yourself or others. The only limit is your creativity. There is a tendency to be much more free-spirited on the Net than in real life (Adamse & Motta, 1976, p. 72).

 

Love addiction

Another interesting addiction through use of technology is the concept of love addiction. Weiss and Schneider described this type of addiction as “a compulsive search for romantic attachment as a way of dissociating from and/or self-medicating uncomfortable emotions and underlying psychological conditions” (2014, p.149). Digital technology is broken down into “romantic chat rooms (both text and video), apps, and even social media sites that have become a new and socially acceptable place to peruse intimate photos, gain personal information, seek out hot chats and meet for virtual or in-person encounters” (Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p. 149).  Furthermore, love addicts increasingly describie these networks as a primary location in which they lose themselves in their obsessive search for romantic intensity (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). A love addict’s experiences with romance, sexuality, and emotional closeness have more often than not been painful emotional experiences, rather than experiences gifted with real intimacy or love (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). Love addicts live in a chaotic, sometimes desperate, world of need and emotional despair (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). They fear rejection and being alone. A love addict continually looks for that special relationship that will make him or her feel complete. The addict fears he or she will never find that special person, or may meet that special person and find him or her lacking and unworthy of the love addict’s love and affection (Weiss and Schneider, 2014).

Love addicts spend their lives focused on the search for sexual and romantic partners in every situation (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). They put up profiles in relational searches. If the profile is a contrived persona, it may be very creative and maintaining it becomes critical and very involved. Eventually the person may become invested and fearful of disbanding this orchestrated creation, possibly even becoming split from past recognition and familiarity of aspects of himself or herself and the newly created person. New personality components may be formed.” Love addicts are attached to the same type and level of emotional/neurochemical intensity as sex addicts, and they are usually just as detached from the reality of their situation and its cost to their lives” ( Weiss & Schneider, 2014, p.150). The obsessive behavior involves searching for a special person to become the sole object of their focus and needs. Love addicts search on dating sites and social media, post about it, tweet about it, and text and sext to find and/or keep their perfect partner.

 

Treating Internet addictions

Roberts explained addiction as the process of medicating unwanted emotions (2010). Most people who come to seek help from cyber addiction experience difficulties in relationships. “Sometimes those difficulties are a direct result of the compulsive cyber use, but other times existing social problems are what propel users to an alternate reality” (Palaian, 2009, p. 82). Repeated exposure to certain behaviors permanently changes the brains of addicts because specific brain neurons (nerve cells) change as a result of such exposure. The brain simply adapts to the new chemical environment caused by the addictive substance or behavior. “Gamers often find themselves lost in an online fantasy world, while compulsive users of social networking sites lose themselves in online fantasy relationships” (Palaian, 2009, p. 82). The games and social networking profiles become veritable extensions of the person.

Recovery from an addiction requires avoiding the behavior itself and the situations that cause the addict to recall the good feelings the addictive behavior produced. In cyber addictions, potentially anything that triggers memory can take the recovering addict into relapse (Palaian, 2009). Recovering cyber addicts will find computers and game consoles all around them, constant reminders of pleasure that makes recovery increasingly difficult.

In addition to individual internet addictions, the clinician must be conscious of the potential for cross-addictions. Cross-and co-occurring disorders are quite common among all types of addicts (Weiss & Schneider, 2014). To make the clinician’s job even more difficult, nearly everyone can appear to be addicted at various points in life. Endless fantasy and imagination is possible with current of technology. Experience with technology may morph into a multitude of experiences, some attractive and some to be avoided. With technology in the world of human connection, options are endless and are becoming more and more available.

In the shadows of the net: Breaking free of compulsive online sexual behavior.  Patric Carnes, Ph.D; David Delmonco, Ph.D ; Elizabeth Griffin, MA.  Hazelden  Center City, Minnesota  2007.  CDG (p1) cites  some of the problems created with internet access. “The opportunity is too enticing, alluring, fulfilling, immediate, and powerful.” “So much is available. There is so much opportunity and stimulation available that it’s difficult to control. And hard to stop. For some it is seemingly impossible to stop. CDG (p.1) labels the shadow side to the Net to be of concern. “The shadow world of cybersex is overtaking and overwhelming…” CDG (p.3) proposes that “of the estimated 322 million individuals who actively use the Internet, and estimated 40 million adults admit to regularly visiting pornographic Web sites.” “Many people struggle alone and in silence, too embarrassed of guilt-ridden to seek help, not knowing where they can find help, believing that no one else would really understand anyway.” One of the most fascinating experience I have discovered as a therapist is that many people find themselves in a kind of online trance or time warp, during which hours just slipped by. Another interesting variable is when individuals, develop friends in sexual chat rooms who become more important than their family and friends in their life.  CDG (p.5) states that “It’s almost impossible to imagine it now, but only ten short years ago, most of us knew little, if anything about this mysterious creation of communication called the Internet.” “Today, however, its burgeoning growth and wide accessibility are altering patterns of social communication, business activities and interpersonal relationships.” Cdg (p.5) further states that “the Internet has profoundly changed many aspects of our lives.” CDG (p.5-6) states that “authors like Lynn White in a classic book on Middle Ages, Medieval Technology and Social Change, and Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, have argued that new technological developments can actually created change in human thinking patterns and in how we see the world-changes that re known as paradigm shifts.” CDG (p.7) notes that “some social scientists have noted the educational potential of the Internet, citing the greater availability of information about sexuality and the potential for more candid discussions of sexuality online.” “The Internet can also offer the opportunity for forming online or virtual “communities” in which isolated or disenfranchised people can communicate with one another about sexual topics.” CDG (p.13( references a developed medial model for measuring the attraction of people to the Internet to engage in sexual activities, called the Cyber Hex for understanding the reasons why the Internet is so attractive and powerful for individuals.”  “The cyber Hex contains six components (a hexagon) that combines to create a “hex-like or trance state for online users (CDG p13). The sides of the hexagon include: integral, imposing, isolating, interactive, inexpensive, and intoxicating.

According to CDG (p.14) , the Internet has become an integral part of most people’s personal and work lives. Internet has become a way of life. Avoidance of the Internet is difficult, if not impossible  CDG (p.15) states that the Internet is becoming more and more often a necessity. “It is being integrated inot our lives, its use is, in a sense, being externally imposed on us by society.” The imposing factor suggests “a loss of contrl in that we have fewer options to decline using the Net.” Likewise “The very breadth of the Internet’s content is, in and of itself, formidable and imposing.” With Isolation, CDG (p.16) refers to “the most powerful component of cybersex. Intoxication occurs quickly and privately. The opportunity is available for separating oneself from others and to engage in whatever fantasy you prefer, well beyond the distraction of reality.” “The internet system is interactive system, with a pseudo-intimacy with others. The Internet equipment provides a low-cost alternative to part methods of material. Intoxification from the process and available content can produce and euphoric response.” There is an abundance of choice for communication and materials.” This also presents the possibility for instant gratification.” “The variety of choices in retrieving and connecting provide an enormously alluring and creates an intoxicating trance.” CDG (p.18) states “the opportunity of people to “develop sexual fantasies and objectify others without the fear of rejection.” Also, the user is free to become part of the fantasy without responsibilities or consequences.”

CDG (p.39) emphasizes that “part of the power of cybersex is that It’s one step removed from reality.” “Having thoughts and urges and fantasies and then acting on them via the Internet seems different from acting on them in real time.” “We are not face-to-face, literally, with another human being.” “We can’t look into their eyes, feel their touch, read their emotions, or in any other way physically interact with them.” Cyber-interactions feel more remote, and safer.” “We can be whoever we want to be…” CDG (p.43) warns of experiences where “addicts progressively go through stages in which they retreat further from the reality of friends, family, and work.” “Eventually, what other people know is a false identity.” “leading a fantasy double life is a distortion of reality.” “Addiction is a system, one with its own momentum.”  CDG (p.43) claims that “the addictive system has various component “parts,” the first of which is a belief system.” Most important to recognize is that the addiction begins with delusional thought processes, which are rooted in the individual’s belief system.” “That is these people begin with core beliefs about themselves that affect how they perceive reality.”

CDG (p.43) maintains that “each of us has a belief system that is the sum of the assumptions, judgments, and myths that we hold to be true.” “It contains potent family messages about our value or worth as people, our relationships, our basic needs, and our sexuality. It is continued, CDG (p.44) within it is a repertoire of what options-answers, solutions, methods, possibilities, and ways of behaving-are open to each of us.”In short, it is our view of the world.” Our belief system, therefore, filters through what behavioral conduct we make choices.” Coping mechanisms is another consideration when viewing addiction. Online experiences may reinforce unhealthy coping mechanisms learned earlier in life.  Dissociating mentally and emotionally helps one to detach from unsuccessful experiences. Interpersonal skills may not be practical on an emotional level in real life. Consequently, the person may become dependent on creating distance in real-life relationships which leads to prevention of intimacy.” CDG (p.45) state that the “Internet is a way to interact with others while keeping a barrier between you and other people.” “It is especially useful if you never learned healthy ways to engage with or relate to other people or if you don’t trust or feel safe with them.” “You can remain anonymous and distant and never have to reveal you true identity or anything else about yourself.”

“Cybersex provides the ultimate pseudo-connection with another person-the perfect impersonal personal relationship-with no hassles or demands or connection.” “Cybersex enables users to truly objectify the person on the other side of the computer connection.” CDG (p46).  “In many ways, according to CDG (p.46), the Internet allows people to create a kind of cyber-dissociation.” “They remain detached from those with whom they are interacting.” “The cyber-world offers the ultimate form of detachment.”

CDG (p.46) points out that with one’s belief system, when considering addictive behaviors, one creates  the set of interacting faulty beliefs. Furthermore, what develops are distorted views of reality and delusional thinking to support the sustainment of their behaviors.” “The delusional system provides the rationalization of justifying ones behaviors. With addictions, a preoccupation of what is important for oneself may even be perceived as a trancelike state.

 

Conclusion

No one can argue that technology has made inroads into daily life. The internet has created opportunities that didn’t exist in the past. Many are positive, but the internet also has a negative potential.

The development of the self is no longer based solely on face-to-face interactions with other people. Information about who we are also comes from Facebook, Twitter, chat rooms, instagram, texts, and email. I would like to emphasize that information from these sources comes in a significantly different dimension for communication and perception (on a screen) from a one-on-one direct human conversation (in person) and lacks many of the cues that enrich the conversation (tone of voice, facial expression).

The internet provides the potential for altered dimension of self. There is an increased likelihood for a person to create one or more alternate selves on line either consciously or unconsciously. With the anonymity the internet provides, people can indulge even their most extreme fantasies. In addition, the internet provides many opportunities for people to dissociate from reality. These characteristics of the internet may lead to addiction, a compulsive behavior related to a dependency on the internet.

The human brain is being rewired. I believe that current literature suggests that analysts and therapists adapt to a conformity of cultural change and the ever expanding use of technology. However, I propose caution in ignoring the deeper effects of technology on the self. As I mentioned by the case studies, the relational aspect between the analyst and client has become more complex due to relationships with technology. Technology is changing relationships in the areas of fantasy, dissociation, and even the vocabulary we use to communicate. Technology is already impacting analysis. What will the future bring?

 

 

References

Abrams, S. (1983) Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre.  6: 145-218. Scientific Forum on Fantasy and Reality in the Organization of the Oedipal Situation.

Adamse, M. and Motta, S. (1976).  Affairs of the Net: The Cybersrinks’ guide to online relationships.  Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communication, Inc.

Atwood, G.  and Stolorow, R. (1984). Structures of Subjectivity:  Explorations in Psychoanalytic  Phenomenology . Hillsdale N.J: The Analytic Press.

Bach, S., Mayes, L., Alvarez, A., Fonagy, P. (2000), Panel  1:  definition of the self. Journal of Infant, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy, 1:5-24.Bach, S., Mayes, L., Alvarez, A., & Fonagy, P. (2000)), Panel 3:  Fratasy life ad the self. Journal of Infant, Child, & Adolescent Psychotherapy, 1:51-62.

Bromberg, P. M.(1996) Standing in the spaces:  The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship; Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 32:509-535.

Clark, A. (2003) Natural-born cyborgs:  Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cohen,  S. (1989) The reality of fantasy-making. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 44:57-72.

Colombi, L. (2010) The dual aspect f fantasy:  Flight from reality or imaginative realm? Considerations and hypotheses from clinical psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 91: 1073-1091.

Crastnopal, M. (2002) The dwelling places for self-experience. Psychoanalysis Dialogues, 12:259-284.

Crastnopal, M. (2006) Untangling views of self in interpersonal and relational theories. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 42:529-533.

Egan, K. (2008) Conference: Achieving educational goals with imagination. Tract: d27 Paper: d:776.

Fonagy, P. & Target, M. (1998) Mentalization and the changing aims of child psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogue, 8:87-114.

Firestone, E.W. (1993), The psychodynamics of fantasy, addiction, and addictive attachments, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 53:335-352.

Ganaway, G.  Dissociation (1994). clinical and theoretical perspectives. Ed.: Steven J. Lynn and Judith W. Rhue  . Transference and countertransference shaping influences on dissociative syndromes.  New York; The Guilford Press.

Goren, W. (2003), America’s love affair with technology: The transformation of sexuality and the self over the 20th century, Psychoanalytic Psychology. 20:487-508.

Haase, A. (2008) Coming home to your true self:  iving the emptiness of false attractions.     Douner’s Grove. IL: IVP Books.

Josephs, L. (1987), The paradoxical relationship between fantasy and reality in Freudian Theory.         The Psychoanalytic Review. 74:161-177.

Kernberg, O. (1982), Self, ego, affects and drives. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic      Association, 30:893-917. Kirmayer, La. (1994) Pacing the void: Social and cultural          dimensions of dissociation. Ed. David Spiegel, M.D.   Washington, DC; American    Psychiatric Press, Inc.

Kohut, H. (1990) The Restoration of the Self.   International Universities Press, Inc.

Kourosh, D. (2008). Video games:  Play and addiction, a guide for parents. New York: Universe, Inc.

Mitchell, S.  (2000). Relationality from Attachment to Intersubjectivity.  Hillsdale, N.J.: The             Analytic Press.

Nusselder, A. (2009) Interface fantasy:  A Lacoian/cyborg ontology. Cambridge, MA: Th4 MIT         Press.

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008) Born digital:  Understanding the first generation of digital natives/      New York:Basic Books.

Palaian, S. (2009)  Spent: Breaking the buying obsession and discover your true worth.

Minnesota: Hazelden Center City

Sandler, J. (1986), Reality and the stabilizing function of unconscious fantasy. Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre. 9:177-194.

Spiegel, D. M.D. and Vermutten, E. M.D.  (1994) Physiological correlates of Hypnosis and Dissociation. Ed., David Spiegel, M.D.   Washington, DC.; American Psychiatric Press, Inc.

Stern, D. (2002), The self as a relational structure:  A dialogue with multiple-self theory. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 12:693-714.

Stolorow, R.D. & Atwood, G.E. (2012), Deconstructing the self of “self psychology.” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 7:573-576.

Weiss, Robert & Schneider, Jennifer,  (2014).  Closer together, Further Apart: the effect of      technology and the internet on parenting, work, and relationships.  Carefree,            Arizona: Gentle Path Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1986), “Home is where we start” in C. Winnicott,  R. Shephard, & M. Davis           (Eds.), Essays by a psychoanalyst/ New York:  W. W. Norton & Company.

 

The Ontology of Me — Phenomenology Meets Neuroscience

Richard Curtis, PhD

Summer 2014

[Read as Digital Publication]

Non-philosophers are probably puzzled that we ask questions like: What is a thing?  There has been much disagreement about such questions.  Aristotle’s answer is that it is a substance and its particular accidents.  I will take that to be basic to thingness, what we call ontology (being).  Is the number four a thing?  No.  Plato thought so, but not us, not any longer.  If I say, dolphins are my absolute favorite things; am I talking about a thing?  No.  The language of things is useful, and it is this utility that causes confusion.  When I say, “I”, am I talking about a thing?  People often think so but the best answer is probably No.  Thing language is remarkably useful for talking about selves too.  Like other things that are not really things, “me” is an experience.  I do not mean what the census means when it counts selves.  I mean what I call myself, to myself.  The I that refers to itself and now understands itself to be typing.  That self is a not a thing, but we are very used to talking about it as if it (it is thing language) were a thing.

I was watching TV the other day and an ad came on for a pizza place that used images of “Tweets” and other social media forms, including – allegedly – “content” from real people.  There has been more and more of this lately.  My first reaction was to think it wasn’t worth the trouble.  The culture seems to want me to join in the whole social media phenomenon and I just am not interested.  A moment later, I felt like I really ought to because it would promote a feeling of belonging – which, of course, is what the marketers are intentionally trying to create.  But the feeling of belonging is real, even while it is manipulated by something out of sight, seemingly less real.

Consciousness and free will are like that.  What does that mean?  Well, it means that even when what we do isn’t really free the feelings involved are nonetheless important and real on their own terms.  This matters for many contexts but I would like here to describe my view of what a self is and how that self can be understood in the psychotherapeutic context.  These insights generalize to a number of different social contexts.

This paper seeks to describe the ontology of the self in terms of phenomenology but informed by the insights of modern neuroscience.  These two paradigms for thinking about psychological functioning are seemingly very divergent but I would like to suggest that they can be understood together if one comes at the understanding in a particular way.  The way I will describe is my own model for talking about these issues, which has developed over the course of my professional career as I occasionally come back to the question of free will.  That will be the focus for this paper and I think it provides an especially helpful lens for making this ontology relevant to the real world, and in particular psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic practice.

Consider this speech (from Cher’s character Loretta in the movie “Moonstruck”):

A person can see where they messed up in life and they can change how they do things and they can even change their luck.  So maybe my nature does draw me to you.  I can take hold of myself and say “yes” to some things and “no” to some things.  I can do that.  Otherwise, you know what, what good is this stupid life god gave us?  For what?  Are you listening to me?!

 

It is a great speech and of course the whole point of the movie is that Loretta cannot help herself.  She does fall in love the person who makes life complicated, not the one she wanted to choose to make life easy.  But think about that language for a moment, “not the one she wanted to choose.”  Who is choosing and who is doing the wanting?  I submit that what matters in all of this is the experience of both wanting and of being swept away.  This is curious because it is normally the wanting that we think matters.  As in the speech, otherwise what is the point?  This is a profoundly important point, but not exactly what it seems.

In the early 1970’s a young philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson won the abortion debate with an article we now call the Famous Violinist Argument.[1]  Religious objections have not recognized this yet, but in the secular world it is a done deal (as reflected Roe v Wade).  That argument shows via a brilliant analogy that people naturally choose autonomy over life if those two principles are placed in conflict with each other.  The deep philosophy is a resolution of what is called “The Murderer at the Door Problem” from Immanuel Kant.  Kant held, in his last published work, that even little white lies are not permissible.[2]  He argued that in taking up a challenge that involves having to choose between lying and being unwillingly involved in a murder.  Kant was just digging in his heals, we hope, as it is not really clear what to do with what seems like such a bizarre conclusion.  But the point is the problem sets up a very basic problem for Deontological systems of ethics – how does one decided which principles trump which others?  Thomson showed that we spontaneously choose autonomy, as Loretta did in the speech.

Something vital seems to be lost if we lose our autonomy.  But ironically enough, something different seems to be lost if we are not also swept away from time to time, especially in love.  We want our emotions to move us almost as much as we want to be self-determining.  Can we have both?  Yes, as long as one understands that these are experiences we have, not realities with which we are in touch.  I believe we evolved to have and to value both of these sorts of experiences, so much so that we seek them out or act out when those desires are frustrated.

These sorts of conversations are philosophically difficult because it is easy to get confused about the subject.  Neuroscientists are accused of this all the time.  They will say things like, “the brain wants this…” or “the brain decided that….”  If you talk with people they will say, “I want this…” or “I decided that…,”  When the neuroscientist is talking this way they are trying to portray brain activity but have only anthropocentric language to do that.  So they say that brains do things and want things or presuppose things.  Are they confused about the subject?  I think some may but the language is just an unfortunate artifact of the culture that has built in limitations.  To say anything in the English language is to be subjected to its limitations, to work with the parameters of that language as I know it in my time.  I heard V.S Ramachandran on a TED Talk recently discussing paralysis and one pernicious problem that afflicts about half of people who have limbs amputated after a period of paralysis.  Because the patient’s brain has been sending signals to try to move a nerve damaged limb that does not respond the brain learns the paralysis.  It becomes a learned paralysis.  So when the limb is amputated in a misguided attempt to resolve pain, the surgeon creates phantom limb pain.  This does not always happen but does about half the time.  Ramachandran discovered that if he can show the patient an image as if the limb were functional (he discovered this can be done with mirrors as well virtual reality) that the pain often goes away.  It is as if the brain learned that the limb could move, at least briefly, and that allowed the felt spasm to resolve and the pain to disappear.

Is that difficult to follow?  Who is learning?  The patient in some sense is learning, but this learning is sub-conscious, they are not aware of it.  The effects are very real.  So who learned?  The patient did but did not know it.  To express this idea we say, “the brain learned.”  This way of talking is straightforward when we think about Pavlov and his dogs.  The dog does not have to consciously know that food is one the way.  The brain pathways fire on their own, that is what we mean by learning.  The brain has developed an awareness of a pattern and when the first part of the pattern is noticed (the stimulus, dogs hear bell) the brain anticipates the pattern (responds, the dogs salivate).

What people find most elusive and difficult to fit into a naturalistic account of self is the phenomenology of the recursive quality of thought.  My brain, essentially three pounds of jelly, can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and itself contemplating infinity, but not just that, it can write about itself contemplating itself contemplating infinity.  In that TED Talk Ramachandran says that the recursive quality of human thought is consciousness.  Phrased this way is it really so elusive?

Before I get back to Free Will and the main line of the conversation I would like to introduce one way to understand what is different about human consciousness.  Neuroscience has found that the Angular Gyrus is large in humans and smaller in related primates.  It is the place where synesthesia seems to occur (the experience of senses crossing, like numbers having specific colors).  Synesthesia is eight times more common in artists, writers and poets than the general public and it runs in families.  It is also known that patients who have damage to the angular gyrus lose the ability to understand metaphor.  Consider: “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.”  Normal functioning people can understand that Juliet is not being identified with a flaming ball of gas; that is literal interpretation.  Metaphor seems, then, to be very human.  We engage in art, where animals we teach to paint engage in a craft.  We want to see those elephants as intending art but that is anthropomorphizing them – in particular, it seems, it is assuming they too have a large angular gyrus, and they don’t  (taken from Ramachandran, his examples as well).  What makes humans human seems to be this combinational activity, which enables complex phenomenon like metaphor possible.  I submit that part of what gives the world its feeling of mattering to us is this mixing of senses that enriches experience and allows for poetic expression, even calls for it.

What I have in mind specifically is support for a version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of selves woven into conversation with a reductive neuroscience that seems, on the surface, to deny the plausibility of Sartre’s approach.  But that is just the surface.  If we peek below the surface a new, combined model becomes possible.  The model for this is Inside versus Outside what I will call “The Myth of Free Will.”  The phenomenology of the self is all about freedom, that experience of autonomy I discussed above.  The conclusions about the self from neuroscience are about experiences.  The self is experienced, is an experience and not a thing.  This part is most vital for any coherent understanding of human beings.  The experienced self is focused on freedom, while the brain producing that experience is bound by its materiality.  Thus what neuroscientists find must be included if we are to have a fully informed ontology.

For my purposes then I want to explore an understanding of what it would mean for existentialists and neuroscientists to both be right.  Let me start with an overview of the existentialists view.  Sartre famously says things like: “To act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange means in view of an end.”[3]  This is an intention and specifically an intention of consciousness to bring about that which is not the case.  “Man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world.”[4]  In this transformation of the world we see the activity of consciousness.  “Man’s relation to being is that he can modify it.”[5]  It is generally understood that he was saying that it is through our actions, intentional actions; that we become persons, we form selves.  We become not a consciousness-in-itself but a consciousness-for-itself through our choices, or decided actions in the world.

One criticism of this view is that it is not situated in the same way human beings are situated in a social context.  That social context is a facticity into which we are born and Sartre’s view, in his early work, say the social as inherently conflicting with the individual.  This is common to the existentialists, of course.  I think that critique is fair and in fact Sartre himself makes it explicit by going on to write his other major work.  For our purposes here though we are interested in his early and more pure existential thought.  This view is compelling but must also incorporate the social context and I think that much is not controversial and so there is no need to develop that line here.  The other criticism is the one that interests me especially.  Sartre’s view seems incompatible with modern science, and especially neuroscience.  I am here suggesting that this critique is not correct as one can bring them together, as I will.

The most intellectually challenging aspect of what science tells us about the brain is that it is a material system existing in a causally determined universe.  William James wrote about this in his psychology text book over a hundred years ago.  It is a deep challenge.  I want to suggest we meet that challenge head on and accept those findings.  For one example, there is a very famous study called the Lippet Experiment.[6]  The experiment appears to show that awareness of a decision to act follows the action.  The findings are disputed both scientifically and philosophically.  I think both types of challenges are expressions of wishful thinking.  We wish this was not the case but it is.  On the scientific side it seems to me that the evidence just is compelling.  On the philosophical side it seems to just be quibbling over words.  In the business, we (I am a philosopher by training) have two dominant models for Free Will.  The most popular is “Soft Determinism.”  This view holds that we do indeed live in a deterministic universe and so yes of course what we do and think is determined, but that is not what Free Will is really about.  What it “really” is about is a social conversation regarding ordinary and extra-ordinary determining factors.  A person is acting “freely” on this view is they are not being physically constrained or coerced.  This control could be exercised by an external agent, like a person compelling me to do something, or internal like a psychiatric conditioning.  This is the view of “free” that our legal system uses.  I am free and thereby culpable if I am not insane and not being otherwise forced to do something.

Defenders of Soft Determinism argue that this is what “Free Will” has always meant and in using this language we are simply confirming this historical usage.  Some will add that if we did not live in a deterministic universe we would have no basis for anticipating what anyone would ever do and so this determining model is necessary for any social actor to be understandable.  According to this view “Free Will” is a linguistic convention that refers to a lack of external control and ordinary cognitive functioning.  It is reportedly the most popular view among professional philosophers today.  I think it is mistaken, however.  The “Hard Determinist” position has been defended by people who simply say that Free Will is an illusion and that as a result all social rules are not legitimate and have to be eliminated.  This view is not social useful and so is rejected on those grounds.  But I think there is a more coherent way of explaining Hard Determinism.  That view says to Soft Determinism, if our society actually had a functional justice system then it might be the case that the Soft Determinist view was correct.  But as long as that view is only coherent inside complex philosophical models that never make it out to the world to influence policy then that model is itself useless.  Hard Determinism, reasonably defended, argues that we live in a deterministic universe and so our ordinary moral terms are problematic, but they can be rescued by reference to social ethics.  On the deterministic view it is unethical to put people in prison regardless of proof they committed the crime because the person was not free to do otherwise, in a full and complete sense.  (They are free to do otherwise on the Soft Determinist account because it says we mean was the person externally coerced; but that is not what people really mean so that language is confusing.)  The accused was not free to do otherwise in any meaningful sense of the English language, because s/he does not have a free will.  This seems to say that we cannot then do anything about crime and so we need Soft Determinism back.  But that is just laziness.  There is work to be done to integrate these understandings.  It starts with the observation that society has a fair basis to remove people from society, either permanently because they are dangerous to others, or temporarily to try to teach them to behavior differently.  What is not moral is treating those people badly, as we do currently.  Since our so-called justice system is anything but, this shows that we need to do the philosophical work of developing a system that is morally defensible, a system that honestly accepts conclusions from science it has not good reason to reject.

Well, why do people reject the science?  It has everything to do with The Famous Violinist Argument.  We value our sense of autonomy.  Ethics then must account for the fact that this is an apparent universal human value, yet it is scientifically unsupportable.  What is supportable is the observation that this autonomy is not really real but is really experienced.  We experience ourselves as free and we value that experience above all others, it seems.

I should immediately remind the reader that consciousness itself is an experience.  Ramachandran said it is the experience of the recursive nature of human thought in particular.  This is also the model proposed by my favorite Soft Determinist philosopher Dan Dennett.  Dennett’s model of consciousness is that it is like a narrative web of our thoughts and deeds as these happen over time.  Consciousness is awareness of the focus of these experiences being constructed around a central narrator.  We tell one story at a time as we go through life.  In fact the Lippet experiment shows that this is true at the neurological level.  Our brains, at a level below conscious awareness, are acting all the time.  They hear, taste, see, feel and smell the world all the time.  We have needs as well, some very natural others culturally conditioned and we act on those needs.  As we act our brains are telling a story to justify the actions.  I am doing this because…I wanted ice cream.  I discovered that I wanted ice cream in my acting to acquire it or in the growing awareness of thoughts directed towards planning how to get the ice cream.  I did not choose to want ice cream and I do not choose how to get it – although it seems to me that I am choosing how to get it.  The sense of autonomy that we are so keen to protect is the illusion that something called Me wants ice cream and it evaluates how to get it.  In truth a brain having a certain set of experiences, called Me in my case or you in your case, processes various desires and possibilities based on previous experience and inner states and that information processing ability sets about solving what is presented to it as a problem.  I want ice cream.  In thinking about solutions to this problem I become aware that thinking is happening and this thinking is organized such that what I call Me owns the thoughts.  They are my thoughts.  But are they free?  No, they just occur to me.  I have these thoughts.  One of them will be about how to get the ice cream and once that is figured out I will own it too.  I figured out how to get ice cream.  No, my brain figured it out and that brain is organized to experience all of that activity in the form of self-ownership.

“I” am always a second order phenomenon of what my brain, the brain my body carries around, constructs of what it experiences as being of a Me.  Perhaps this will help: I do not think of my cats as having free will.  I think they have desires and anxieties (both are rescues and quite neurotic) but they do not choose any of that, any more than I choose my anxieties.  When I watch them run around the house they seem in control, like when hunting.  The cat is scanning its environment and deciding what to do.  But then suddenly the dog (who is equally neurotic) notices one of them and a chase begins.  The cat does not then seem to be making any decisions.  It just runs and as it encounters obstacles it maneuvers around them and tries to use them to confuse the dog, the predator now chasing.  The cat does not decide that the couch is useful for this, it simply encounters the couch and scoots under it.  The cat’s brain is scanning its environment looking for things that it can fit under or over, both means of escape it already knows either from previous experience or its genetics (I don’t really know how much of either is involved).  My point here is that in full chase it seems clear that neither animal is acting on a free will, even it might seem that way when they are just exploring.  Well, we are the same, except our brains are organized such that the experiences have this unique first person perspective – they are my experiences.  For humans, though, the most interesting contexts are social and the ways in which our innate desires to be social and fit in run into contradictions in society making conformity the price, which challenges my autonomy.  We do not choose this but it is vital, and when it does not work well the creature, whether cat or human, become neurotic because normal functioning was frustrated somehow.  Or when I am in full flight I too am no longer aware of myself as decider, I simply do.  This is what martial arts training is about.  Deciding can drop away because the details are no stored in muscle memory.  But what is that?  It is the memory I am not aware of having.  When I get on a bike and can ride after many years of not, it is not that I decide how to do it from a storehouse of possibilities, no my brain just knows, the memory is there but not in the storied form of consciousness.  What I am saying is that even when things move slower and it seems to me that I am deciding, that this is just an illusion that slower movements allow.  What is really happening is just like when I am at full speed and not aware of the decisions; it is just that when things are calm there is time for the myth of that ownership to be created.  This is a very powerful illusion too as it makes possible all of higher culture.  It is in human culture that we seem to feel most free, because that is realm in which creativity is possible, novelty is possible (to get us back to Sartre).  In acting I experience myself as Sartre described; but we know from science that this experience is not the reality – it is an experience.

Even these examples are reminiscent of the complex interplay between free and unfree that we seem to value.  Like love taking me away, the memory of how to ride takes me away when I am on the bike again.  My drum teacher told me that when performers are really on and it is working they lose that first person and get swept away in the experience.  We lose the ego, in his language, and the music just comes through.  In fact, he said, when the ego is present the music does not flow.  His “ego” has qualities of “super-ego.”  Either way, my point here is that this is another example of ways in which we value losing that sense of being in control, but only in certain ways.  I do not seem able to control having those experiences at will, but I seem to cultivate them nonetheless.  I try to get to that place where the ego has faded to the background and I call that a pure consciousness.  Buddhism and Hinduism have made this a cosmic principle.  In ecstatic experiences of all types the self seems to drop away, and mystics have sought out these experiences for millennia.  Both are valued though they seem opposites.

All of that has been Outside the Myth of Free Will talk.  When I am inside the myth I sound like Sartre.  Here it might help to remind the reader of Camus’ position on Free Will.  He said that he doesn’t care because all he knows is the experience.  Well, I agree with that but I think if we just stop there that we have only have the story – the phenomena.  If we want to understand, let alone help or treat, then a deeper understanding is necessary, and available.

 

What I as narrator or author, I-A, calls the present is actually a slight fraction of second later than it happened – due to neural distances and processing time.  Curiously one of the things I-A is telling a story about is what I in a different sense did in that fraction of a second ago called now, what the behaving I did, I-B.  I-B does things and I-A is narrating the life of I-B while owning what I-B does because it is all I.  The recursive quality of thought is the author I, I-A, owning what the behaving I, I-B, does.  So to experience there is one I, but in the world there are two senses, two aspects to the ontology.  One tells the story and the other does stuff, including says stuff.  Most of the time the I-A is just about on top of the I-B and that is what we call in control.  Sometimes the I-A gets a bit behind and that can lead to a moment when the I-A does not like the story twist and scolds the I-B.  “I can’t believe I did that!”  Really, “I-A cannot believe I-B did that.”  That author seems very Super-Ego like and I suspect is part of what Freud was talking about.  The I is not self-made, and so what an I-A would judge one way or another is mostly culturally conditioned.  Id certainly seems very I-B, so that one is easy.  Ego itself is perhaps the experienced self, qua experienced self, the actual phenomenon.  Self is a happening, a phenomenon after all and not a thing, so it makes sense if we use these details to make Dennett’s theory useful.  That seems like it should be three aspects but in this model the narrator or author is evaluating, reacting as well.  For the sake of analysis that is three parts and so Freud’s model, curiously, still fits.

Taking another run at this – I encountered a philosophy text book that asked, Why bother with philosophy?  The answer was: “Perhaps because the unexamined life is not a life chosen freely in awareness of alternatives, but a furrow mindlessly plowed.”[7]  If free will really is just an illusion of sorts, a creation of how our brains experience the world and themselves, then a “life chosen freely” is only a sort of illusion, and a remarkably important one.  We think of ourselves as deciding and intending but all of the evidence suggests this is a constructed experience.  Clearly that experience of seeming to be free is central to our psychology, basic to ethics, and presumably evolutionarily advantageous.  It appears we can think more complicated thought, solve more complicated problems, if we have our selves in the thinking.  Creatures that pass psychological tests for self-consciousness have in common the ability to solve very complex problems.  One theory I encountered somewhere is that a key cognitive ability in this is mental time travel – the ability to project self into past or future.  We can learn more complex lessons from our experience as a result, and we can plan an imagined future.  All of this is vital to how we function.

We know that human brains have some built in habits and some basic primate needs.  We know that we narrate a story of our lives to ourselves as go along, apparently rationalizing what our behavior and even thoughts to ourselves based on past experience and current emotional state, which may or may not be clear to the individual.  What I mean is we can react emotionally and not really know what the feeling was, and this why we find psychotherapy useful.  The psychotherapist is in a position to interrogate our rationalizations.  What strikes me as useful for understanding these things is to go back to Freud.  In his scheme what is me?  I think me is what he called ego.  This me is torn by demands made by my id, my desires and emotions taken as raw data.  This me is managed by a superego that seems to be the product of primate evolution and how attachment patterns evolved.  I have to fit in social, to some significant degree, and so this super-ego keeps track of what are taken to be the demands of being social.  Now, of course, what the id wanted and what super-ego demands might be misunderstood by the ego, and that is neurosis.

Remember my goal here is not an updated understanding of Freud but an ontology of me.  I submit that this me is what Freud called ego, but it is not really mediating between id and super-ego, but as the narrator it seems to have that role.  In truth the ego is an after the fact story teller and so cannot be deciding, but as the record keeper it is in a position to tell the story such that it, ego, seemed to be mediating between id and super-ego; but this mediation is not happening prior to behavior but rather after and so it rationalizes behavior by telling the story of seeming to mediate between competing demands.  In my earlier language this ego is a happening, it is the experience of the storytelling, not the story teller.

[1] Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971).

[2] From “On the Supposed Right to Lie” which was an appendix to his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, 433.

[4] Sartre, 24.

[5] Sartre, 24.

[6] Benjamin Lippet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action,” Behavior and Brain Sciences, Vol. 8, 529-566, 1985.

[7] Stephen Law, Forward to 30-Second Philosophies, Barry Locker, ed., NY: Metro Books, 2009, 6.