Preliminary: E-mail is far more like conversation than it is like considered text. And in part I'm trying in this (and the earlier posts in this sequence) to think my way into my subject(s) on the run, to see what I think by seeing what I say. (Much real knowledge exists independently of language, but all theoretical understanding is language bound -- though even theoretical knowledge is independent of language in that it is always paraphraseable.)
Kelley wrote:
> mike: psychoanalytic theory IS a theory of how the social shapes the
> individual.
Kelley, this may be. It is *a* theory. The question is is it a correct theory -- and the basis for saying that it is not a correct theory is that it is not, from its foundations, based on anything real, but rather appeals *either* to concealed religious *or* concealed vulgar biologjist premises -- and hence its explanations of *anything* are not to be trusted.
Actually, I suspect, psychoanalysis has never been anything else but a theory of literature, which is why it is so much more appealing to literary critics than it is to people actually concerned with individual behavior of actual people. I have been reading a short article in Vol. 1 No. 1 of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, "Psychoanalysis as the Enemy and Ally of African Americans." Much of it is a lengthy analysis of a rather dull and racist joke that Freud was excessively fond of. As long as it sticks to that joke it is highly entertaining, and while not very convincing in what it says about Freud's inner motives, highly convincing it its exploration of the [possible] verbal reverberations of the joke. Put otherwise, the analysis does not uncover the joke's *unconscious* meaning (for "unconscious meaning" is an oxymoron) but rather spreads out for inspection all the quite rational and conscious states which might find expresison in the joke. So -- as long as the psychoanalyst has a real or imaginary text in which to romp about, he/she is fine, but as soon as she/he turns to people, it becomes dull and detached from any concrete reality or connection to actual human life. This also explains why Harold Bloom's *Anxiety of Influence* is so excellent as literary history and so dull and unconvincing as an explanation of human motive.
But even that is not the worst of it. You say it is a theory of how the social shapes "the individual." That is not possible. Every actual individual is enmeshed in a web of contingencies that make it absurd to speak of explaining his/her particular life, by psychoanalysis or any other means. Society is not one thing, the individual another (like a potter and his clay), which is implied when you speak of society
shaping the individual. Neither my skin nor my skeleton nor my nervous system shapes me -- I *am* them. It is just as absurd to speak of society shaping the individual. All forms of psychology (cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic, what-have-you) end up with a mechanistic conception of the human person and a dualistic account of the "relation of society to the individual." You can have a theory of how GM shapes the Chevrolet --
but not of how society shapes the a human person. All Chevrolets are the same; every person is a unique history -- *is*, NOT *has* a unique history. It is an utter fantasy, and an arrogant one, to believe that there can be a science (or systematic knowledge) of individuals. Science
(or any kind of systematic knowledge) does not consist in the multiplication of labels more or less equal in number to the phenomena it tries to explain (or pretends to explain).
> marxist and socialist feminis,.for ex., drew on
> psychoanalytic theory when marxism seemed to fail to provide an
account of
> why sexist oppression was so extraordinarily hard to get rid of [cf.,
> juliet mitchell, dorothy dinnerstein, nancy chodorow, etc]
What kind of oppression has *not* proved extraordinarily hard to get rid of? Marxism, as a matter of fact, has so far failed to provide an adequate account of the strategy for uniting the working class of an advanced capitalist nation around a socialist agenda. That is why there can be such debates as occur among Marxists on all the maillists. So if your argument proved anything, it would simply prove that we should drop marxism and follow the approved method of accounting for failures in bourgeois ideology: Back to the Drawing Board. But in fact there will continue to be more failures than successes in working class struggles, regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of our theories or the weakness or excellence of our practice. (Perhaps that is one advantage of suffering a lifetime of depression: one becomes less skittish and intolerant of defeats.)
Given the vast multiplicity of "theories" possible in the atomized society of advanced capitalism, I do not doubt that somewhere some astrologer has created a very impressive account of the genesis and nature of sexism. That account will not attract me to astrology. (Juliet Mitchell, along with a number of other of Freud's defenders, discredited herself intellectually in her replies to Sebastiano Timpanaro in the pages of the NLR.)
> they argued that it was entrenched in the very process of psychic
> development. i've got problems with lacan/zizek but
There *is* no identifiable (generalizable) "process of psychic development." That is an illusion of bourgeois individualism. That is what various of us in these threads have been arguing in our many references to contingency, to the uniqueness of each individual history, in the impossibility of giving "systematic accounts" of human motive (except in more or less tautological terms). The cause of Doug's so grotesquely misreading my references to neuroscience as "explaining" my depression is probably his mechanical assumption that *everyone* has a theory of the "process of psychic development," and since I mentioned neurotransmitters, they must represent my theory. But I don't *have* a theory of it -- I deny that a theory of it is possible. I claim that all those who claim to have such a theory provide arguments that are ultimately reducible to either religion or a vulgar biologism. You and Doug simply are deficient
in your tolerance of contingency. Both of you should be sentenced to reading Gould for two hours a day for a year or so.
I think if you were to go to the archives and review a discussion some months ago of the history of the word "identity" you could see part at least of what the argument is. The question of "Who am I?" is a question created by capitalism (though one can see innumerable foreshadowings of it in earlier literature -- e.g., Augustine). For Socrates, as for St. Thomas or Dante, the question meant, "What is my place in a visible order." With capital's destruction of all visible order (read any poem by the great Romantics or their successors such as Stevens and Frost), that rational and intelligible question became mystified. Psychoanalysis is just one of many attempts to give a rational form to an essentially mystic question.
> of all the psychologies
> i've ever studied, it is among the most capable of pressing toward an
> analysis that addresses the social structural concerns you raise.
Why bother? I really don't understand why people think they need a psychological (religious or biological) theory of the individual in order to study social dynamics.
> some ppl like
> cognitive sci, but if you look closely it's founded on the basic
principles
> of psychoanalytic theory.
That is perhaps why I don't think much of cognitive psychology either.
Carrol