Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Abstract

This realisation of language, now only serving as an eff"aced coin passed from hand to hand in silence . . . indicates the pure function of language, which is to assure us that we are, and nothing more. That one is capable of speaking to no purpose is just as significant as the fact that, when one speaks, in general it is for a purpose. What is striking is that there are many instances when one speaks although one might just as well remain silent. Ah, but to keep silent just then is precisely what is most cunning. -The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique. 1955-1954, p. 157 The disputes between the intellectual heirs of Edmund Husserl and those of Sigmund Freud are many and storied. With respect to the object as well as to the methods of their investigations, these midwives to twentieth-century philosophy appear, at first glance, to be working at cross-purposes. But from the vantage point that history affords, however, it seems far more important that, rather than how, they ef fected a significant retooling of the philosophical projects of their predecessors. When Jacques Lacan announced in 1949 that the "I" discovered by Freud necessitated a rejection of "any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito," he was issuing a challenge not only to the International Psychoanalytic Congress, but to the discipline of philosophy as well ("The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Ecrits, p. 1 ).' Certainty had suddenly become much more elusive. Whereas Descartes' doubt is satisfied only by the assurance of the cogito's self awareness, Freud insisted that it is the obvious gaps in the data of consciousness that make the turn toward the unconscious "necessary and legitimate" ("The Unconscious," SE XIV, p. 166). On the other hand, phenomenology had also left Descartes' method behind by this time, but in a way which delimited a field of inquiry apparently irreducible to the analytic experience. In an explicit dialogue with Descartes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty attributes to Husserl's investigations the answer to the question of intersubjectivity as well as access to essences by demonstrating that relations between subject and world "are not strictly bilateral" (Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix). While I must be fastidiously aware of myself during the act of reflection, as the analytic situation would encourage me to be, the world that is thereby given to me has priority over that act, however painstakingly careful my interpolation of the lacunate data might be. Phenomenology is fundamentally "a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing" (ibid., p. viii). This disparity exists on a much broader level as well. The schools of thought that carry on the projects of their founders2 orient themselves around different philosophic goals. Indeed, it is in the wake of these founders that a more systematic and informative distinction can be divined. In his study of the legacy of Freud's thought, Paul Ricoeur differentiated the two movements by characterizing phenomenology as an exercise of faith, psychoanalysis (along with perspectivism and historical materialism, its contemporary siblings) appearing en face as an exercise of suspicion. While this divide has obviously been staked out in order to support Ricoeur's own project, it is illuminating in two important ways. First, it exposes phenomenology as an attempt to restore meaning. This implies a belief that such a thing needs to, and can be, done: "it is a rational faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks, through interpretation, a second naivete" (Freud and Philosophy, p. 28). Clearly, a return to the things themselves that invites a more than cursory examination. And Merleau-Ponty, at least, professes to occupy a thoroughly sanctified position: We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive. In more general terms we must not wonder whether our self evident truths are real truths, or whether, through some perversity inherent in our minds, that which is self evident for us might not be illusory in relation to some truth in itself. …