In this short collection of essays, Phillips contrasts the methods that psychoanalysis and pragmatism use to help a person get the life that they “truly” want. “What ‘getting a life’ now involves has become an essential perplexity, partly dependent on the stories about lives that are available to us, but always beginning in the families or social groups we grow up in…. Beginning with our mothers, we are the targets and the recipients and interpreters of often confounding messages about what is wanted of us, what we are wanted for, and what we are encouraged and discouraged from wanting…. Without always knowing what they are doing, the people who look after children – mostly the parents, but not always – recognize and sustain the parts, the versions, the aspects of the child they prefer…. We then spend our lives seeking recognition for, and avoiding recognition of, the aspects of ourselves that our parents – and the societies they are part of – couldn’t face…. We are haunted by the versions of ourselves we have been unable to be.”
Phillips spends a lot of time deconstructing both Freud and Rorty’s thoughts: on the nature of the human mind, on the Self, and on the ways humans cope with living their lives in general. “Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters…. Pragmatism wants us to ask: what is the life we want—or think we want (and then, sometimes as an afterthought, why we want it)? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask: why do we not want to know what we want?” Phillips suggests both men were preeminently concerned with Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Funnily, they did not agree on what Freud meant. Or rather, Rorty had chosen to reinterpret Freud’s meaning to suit his own purposes, in pragmatic fashion. “The unconscious described by Freud was a ‘reservoir’—his word—of representations of instinctual life, and a form of thinking he would call primary process and that finds its most vivid exemplar and illustration in dreams…. Freud’s unconscious refers to our fundamental and founding unknownness to ourselves; to the bodily desire that ineluctably drives our development; so in Freud’s story we are not suffering from original sin, but from original frustration. His biologically based unconscious is, as it were, an enigmatic and insistent presence and pressure in ourselves, and in our lives…. The unconscious is in this story our hidden truth, our hidden drama going on behind the scenes; a truth and a drama we are often unable and unwilling to bear, and are by definition surprised if not shocked by…. For Freud, what keeps us and gets us going are our desires for our objects of desire; for Rorty, it is our purposes. These are two very different things; our purposes are made up by us, our desires not quite, or not only, made up by us…. Freud, as Rorty knows, redescribed our ideas about autonomy and the self in ways that virtually discredited them as in any way useful fictions, Rorty took them for granted…. Rorty is determined to reject the idea of the Freudian unconscious as some bewildering ‘primitive’ force driving us through our lives. A predatory voraciousness is replaced by what might be a visionary company; exploitation is made a virtue; an enemy is superseded by a potential friend…. Freud’s question is: what, if anything, can we do with our instincts? And then: what are our instincts doing to, and with, us? Rorty’s rather different question is: what do we want to make of ourselves?”
In Phillips’ view, it would seem that pragmatism and psychoanalysis are diametrically opposed, “What Rorty calls trying to get the life you want, to be what you wish to be, Freud could only be radically sceptical about; ‘the life you want’, for Freud, would be something you are by definition unconscious of – you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want…. And in describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture. Describing the life we want can sometimes be the most compliant – i.e., defensive – thing we ever do…. And not only are we unconscious of what we want and plagued by wishfulness, but there is a powerful force inside us, which Freud would eventually call the death instinct, that both wants us not to want, and wants us to harm ourselves and others; that wants the life we don’t want.” Phillips continues, “The pragmatist wants to assume that people want to get on, in both senses; the psychoanalyst assumes that people resist getting on…. In psychoanalysis, there is the unconscious and there are our ego-ideals; and psychoanalytic treatment is about how we fit them together, how we fit together who we seem to be with who we want to be…. Pragmatism tells us that we can only know, or surmise, who we want to be (not who we really are), and then make experiments in living to find out whether we are right…. So if pragmatism’s insistent preoccupation is about how we can, voluntarily, get the lives we want, then psychoanalysis’s preoccupation is about how we can survive and sufficiently enjoy our largely unconscious desires and determinisms…. Our nature as described by psychoanalysis – makes us radically unsuited to the lives we are capable of living (the very things that sustain us – our appetite, our desire – are the very things that torment us). And there is also, perhaps fortunately, a life instinct that contends with this death instinct in the unending war that, according to Freud, our lives really are.”
Finally, Phillips suggests that in fighting to get the life that we actually want we often use our interactions with others to offer up a kind of resistance as cope, “Ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say, whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it; whether they can see something in it that I can’t. Whether they can see what is being resisted and what is being invited. As though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, the parents and then anyone else who could be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations…. So we don’t always know – are unconscious of – what we may be resisting, and that we are resisting; and we are dependent on the recognition of others who by their words and their actions show us our resistances…. We resist articulating our needs to ourselves and to others; and we resist the experiment in living that expressing one’s needs often entails…. We are most likely to resist what is most important to us. That is how we know it is important to us; we resist acknowledging it.”
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