The ABOF
«All analysis, beyond the undeniably important technical operations one must master and conduct, could be summarized as follows:
First, learn to listen to everything;
Second, retrace memory knowing that it works by selection and is reconstructed each time (removal is only a particular case of selection);
Third, offer recognition as the condition of possibility for any further communication;
Fourth, learn to see differently what everyone takes for granted.
But all this ultimately presupposes something no analytical school has ever even indicated or rather takes for granted, leaving it in the unthought: that life is worth living, that in life there is a solid base, a center to which one can always refer, that bare life is good, and that this good can be experienced nonetheless.»
The following text is the Chapter 9 of Approaching the Navel of the Darkened Soul, IPOC 2013.
What is philosophically-oriented biographical analysis?
It is a type of analysis that takes biographical wisdom (whether implicit or explicit) as its starting point and method.
Biographical wisdom is composed of all those natural, implicit, everyday and specialized forms of wisdom that are inextricably linked to lived emotions and feelings and whose aggregate represents the story of a person’s life.
Biographical wisdom is matter and form in motion, in continual construction; and through analysis it can be examined in each of its parts, particulars and connections, leading to an understanding and reconstruction of its present, past and possible interconnections.
We always know something about the life that we lead, but we always know too little. And that little is more implicit than explicit; it is primarily an alleged wisdom, for it has not been accepted as such by and with others.
Biographical analysis tends therefore to make the implicit explicit through the help of another person, a privileged witness with whom the experience of research and construction is shared.
Biographical and auto-biographical wisdom[1] are necessarily linked: every autobiography is built from narrative materials uttered by others; as such, it presupposes at least an implicit biography that directs the course of investigation. In biographical analysis, the autobiographical narrative becomes matter for a new biography written by two people (the analyst and the analyzed); and this in turn becomes the material for a new autobiographical narrative.
1.
In our context, the word “analysis” inevitably harkens back to psychoanalysis and/or to analytic psychology. And rightly so, for we wish to draw attention to the many common elements and to the debts we owe, while highlighting our essential differences.
From the tradition of analytic psychology I have borrowed the hermeneutic practice of treating the imagination – in the form of dreams, scenes of play, spontaneous images, fables and myths – as an authentic “other form of thinking;”[2] the attentiveness to the dynamics of compensation between “conscious” and “unconscious;”[3] the harkening back to the process of individuation as a tension within and transcending the egoic position.
It seems to me that this is what Jungian teaching can bring to a renewed philosophy striving to listen to the soul’s pain – thereby becoming “clinical” – in order to dialogue with it and act as therapy.
Our choice of the word “analysis” refers precisely to the therapeutic method.
It is our intention to renew philosophy’s ancient therapeutic vocation, in the Epicurean sense of the word:
I hope this reference to Epicurus and to biographical analysis’s therapeutic vocation makes it clearer how our endeavor differs both from the philosophical consultation that is limited only to rational clarification, and from variants on depth psychologies.
Biographical analysis differs from philosophical counselling which is devoid of therapeutic intent, and which claims that the Hellenistic schools were not particularly philosophical as they were too concerned with changing the self and its ways of acting in the world[5].
Moreover, most – though fortunately not all – forms of philosophical counselling are marked by an argumentative yet superficial attitude towards depth psychologies[6] and to all forms of psychotherapy[7].
With its “philosophical attitude” (which I will shortly explain), biographical analysis must both assume and transform every technique, method and conceptualization which originates in the vast fields of depth psychologies and in psychotherapies in general, and which upon scrutiny may be considered geared toward understanding and deepening the analyzer’s possibilities of discovering a helpful biographical narrative[8].
Reciprocally, and therefore therapeutically, philosophical analysis is able not only to make extensive use of breakthroughs in psychotherapy, but also to follow their lead in order to change its method, and more importantly its position, by listening to and treating human passions.
I will again take our beloved teacher Epicurus as an example, when he writes that the end of philosophy must be to treat the passions:
Now if we are dealing with unnecessary and harmful natural desires, the wise advice of persuasion arrives at the notion of confutation or refutation (elegxos) that was fundamental to Greek philosophy. When confronting the causes of evil, Epicurean therapy aims to refute unnecessary and harmful natural desires, to eliminate unnecessary desires.
The Greek text of the first sentence quoted ends with an equally meaningful expression: philosophy is good for nothing if it does not “free the soul from the passions” (ei me to tes psuxes ekballei pathos), which if translated literally would sound brutal, but expressive: “if it does not throw passion out of the soul.”
To different degrees, and with different nuances and variations, this conviction was inherent to all ancient philosophy: passion and desires that lead to evil must be extirpated after they have been refuted.
Aristotle’s moderation and the Cynics’ extremism stand at the ends of a spectrum whose position is essentially the same with regard to evil desire – with the possible exception of the Sophist Antiphon, one of whose surviving fragments seems to indicate that he had a different outlook:
If we consider his fame as an interpreter of dreams and his idea that paintherapy should be conducted through the word, we could take Antiphon as the oldest example of the renewal of philosophical therapy that I am proposing. In any case, we must change our attitude towards the soul’s pathos.
Plato’s famous metaphor is indeed valid for almost all Greek philosophy: we must strive for a different way of guiding the black horse of amorous, carnal passion, the symbol of every inconvenient passion (Phaedrus, 25-256). We might call it the shaded side of the passions which are too often lashed and torn by the bit. We – particularly we late-moderns – must find a different way of taming the horse, one that is gentler and more confidently translatable into the equine language.
Here analytic listening, borrowed from depth psychologies, teaches us about “religious” care – where one of the original meanings of “therapy” comes into play –, love for the hermeneutics of words, gestures, images of every type, whether worked out or confused and approximate.
Analytic listening knows that highs and lows, good and bad (according to the standard of judgement of habit, ideology and even ideals) still need to be weighed, interrogated, contextualized; they must be understood and grasped until words regain the five or more senses of which they are the offspring, before we can take stock of their value, and thence judge ethically.
Care itself, in fact even the possibility of an ethical position, is at stake here, for it is not at all ethical for a thinking adult person to judge based on a received position: we must learn how to be autonomous if we want to enter the domain of the ethical.
Clearly, if the analytical support of listening is a part of a philosophical intentionality, it differs both with respect to philosophical trends, on the one hand, which come out richer in emotional, affective sensitivity and sensitivity to expressive possibilities, and to the psychoanalytic tradition, on the other.
The ethical questions runs through the philosophical trend[11] which can listen through the ancient practices of attention (prosoch,) and suspension of judgement (epoch,) which the other will have to draw out of him or herself.
Nevertheless, in its philosophical orientation, biographical analysis is not primarily directed at psychopathologies, unless the analyst is also specialized in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy or psychiatry.
Biographical analysis is directed at a person’s “healthy,” “normal,” areas. This does not mean that it is directed “only at the healthy,” but to a person’s normal, healthy areas, which are present to some degree in everyone, exactly like the psychopathological dimension[12].
But here an important, unavoidable question crops up: being philosophers means being convinced that there is an illness that enshrouds and penetrates every aspect of the existence of the healthy.
Philosophy becomes nothing more than the answer to the essential suffering and unhappiness of the life of “the many,” basically an answer to a part of the life of all people.
Various metaphors cover this meaning: the “body” for Socrates and Plato, disproportion for Aristotle, “the cry of flesh and soul” for Epicurus, the unnatural for the cynics, the vanity and futility of daily life for Spinoza; and for everyone, a life dedicated to the pursuit of wealth, power and glory.
All wise philosophical and religious paths the world over agree on this point.
The experience of the existential pain that afflicts the life of all men needs wisdom – recall that this is the “first noble truth” that Buddha teaches, and that the Abrahamic religions call “sin” not finding a way out of the labyrinth of suffering. This is the dramatic, necessary gestation of the philosophical quest.
The therapy of biographical analysis therefore differs profoundly from every other therapy, and conversely includes them all: once we have been healed, we are once again ill with regard to what is essential.
Life is dispersed and desperate when it is bereft of a meaning that makes it worth living, i.e. one that makes it an event worthy of being remembered and celebrated, worthy of thanks.
Notes, 1.
(2)This expression is extremely important, especially on the philosophical plane, and more important than its author C. G. Jung seemed to think. It is taken from the second chapter of C. G. Jung, 1952c. Though the original 1912 version of the text is considerably different from that of 1952, it already included this section. For a discussion of this work, see R. Màdera, 1998.
(3)The term “unconscious” is in itself a contradiction, unless one imagines it to be an irreducible transcendental backdrop to consciousness’s present. Moreover it is in danger of being stratified into senses, which make it utterly confused, for it would count together both suppression and what is termed a sort of original suppression that precedes conscious suppression. (See S. Freud, 1915b, pp. 161-215). The unconscious however also stands at the same levels as the implicit memory’s emotions and affectivity, which are tied to new-born, and perhaps fetal, experiences, but which are distinct from procedural memory, and from the implicit memory that can identify objects. (See Mauro Mancia, 2004). But we should not forget that the unconscious includes W. R. Bion and Roger Money-Kyrle’s “preconceptions,” distant, unavowed descendents of Jung’s archetypal images and of the idea of the collective unconscious. Such theoretical confusion could also be developed in a complex concept if clinical experience could generate some kind of necessity for it, while remaining sufficiently free from pervasive interpretative schemes that stem from unquestioning and self-confirming metapsychologies. I have been forced to note that clinical material is almost always inadequate according to interpretative presuppositions, no matter how off-the-cuff they may be: many analysts think they hear the “fetal unconscious” speaking, when they listen to and observe people whose movement and speech reveals a semantic, autobiographical content that require the etiology and cultural history of their time and situation to be understood. It is indeed amusing to recall Cesare Musatti’s spat with this psychoanalyst colleagues regarding the ridiculous things that occur when we retroactively attribute adult or child psychic life to fetal and newborn experiences. (See C. Musatti, 1984). For these reasons, I prefer to talk about something that, though it may be tested, and hence conscious (even if not self-conscious), still remains misunderstood, where the term “understanding” must be taken in Cicero’s acceptation when he talks about the stoic teacher Zeno in the Academica posteriora: “But after it [the presentation of an object] had been received and accepted as true, he termed it a ‘grasp’, resembling objects gripped in the hand – and in fact he had derived the actual term from manual prehension, nobody before having used the word in such a sense.” (Cicero, 1933, p. 449). This is the kataleptik, phantasía. But the term “comprehension” also contains the distinction between erklären and verstehen, in Dilthey and Jaspers’s acceptation. Therefore something that in some way has not only been perceived but also explained according to external causal laws, may not yet be comprehended. My observations stem from the great number of cases in clinical practice when the person undergoing analysis is perfectly able to explain what is happening to him or her, but is totally unable to grasp its meaning to him or her. It is unnecessary to hypothesize defenses against unconscious drives or other unconscious lived experiences in order to vindicate our attempt to grasp events biographically. It is economically sufficient to realize that we can live more intensely, with greater participation and meaning, avoiding consequences that stem from a potentially insufficient comprehension.
(4) Epicurus, 1926, p. 133 (Fragment 54).
(5) See Neri Pollastri’s critique of the importance Pierre Hadot gives to spiritual exercises, in N. Pollastri, 2004, p.177ff. It should be noted too that Hadot claims this importance for all ancient philosophy, not only Hellenistic philosophy.
(6) See Pollastri, 2004, pp. 87-128. According to Pollastri, the “philosophical” is what is left when therapy, relations and emotionality have been removed. My intention, on the contrary, is to view the psychoanalytic tradition as a search validated by forms of thinking and feeling, of corporality; a search therefore that broadens and deepens philosophical research.
(7) Gerd Achenbach, who inaugurated the profession of philosophical counsellor, holds positions that are rather more nuanced, and which could be summed up by considering the fundamental concepts of depth psychologies as mere working hypotheses, which the dialoguing pair must take as such. And that is exactly Jung’s position! See R. Màdera, 2003. Concerning his own theses on philosophy, philosophical counselling and psychotherapy, Achenbach curiously states that he has not strayed far from the thoughts of C. G. Jung (in G. Achenbach, 1984), and then extensively quotes Jung, 1966, p. 78.
(8) Here too I stick quite closely to Jung, and even closer to Ernst Bernhard, 1969. See R. Màdera, 1996. With regard to the relation between ethical positions, history and analytic psychology, I feel very close to that other great Jewish Jungian, Erich Neumann. I in fact contributed the introduction to the Italian translation of his Tiefenpsychologie und neue Ethik (1949), entitled Psicologia del profondo e nuova etica, tr. M. A. Massimello, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 2005; I encourage the reader to consult that work for further discussion about Neumann and Jung’s differences regarding the ethical-political nexus. (For the English translation, see E. Neumann, 1948). Biographical analysis, on the other hand, fully reveals its singularity when I discuss the meaning of “philosophical orientation” (see this essay).
(9) Epicurus, 1993, p. 109.
(10) Antiphon, in Antiphon, 2002, p. 193. See also Pierre Hadot, 2002, where he mentions that Antiphon was known to have developed “a therapeutics which consisted in healing grief and pain by means of the word” (p. 197), and that he was considered “an excellent interpreter of dreams.” (p. 198).
(11) It would be ingenuous to claim that the psychoanalytic tradition has never connfronted the ethical question, even bearing in mind Freud’s almost brutally frank assertion that one can be healthy but immoral. (See S. Freud, 1908, pp. 179-204). Nevertheless Jung did not share Freud’s belief that analysis might lead to the unity of the person, while not necessarily making him or her “good.” He believed, rather, that true morality could be reached only through the process of individuation, i.e. only with reference to the center of a whole, which is distinct from the ego. See E. Neumann, 1948, for a clearer and more categorical discussion of a new ethics. It would be too difficult, in a note, to justify Lacan’s attempt to treat analysis ethically; here it suffices to mention his assertion that human desire finds its meaning by being recognized by the other. (See J. Lacan, 1953, pp. 23-86). It is clear from Lacan’s article that he is trying to use Hegel to reread Freudian desire. And here again, it becomes obvious that trying to pit philosophy against psychoanalysis is utterly pointless. To do so would be to side with of all those, unfortunately too-numerous, psychoanalysts who would like to turn their discipline into a technical – and hence clinical – endeavor, and also to side with the growing number of philosophers who are resigned to seeing philosophy become self-referential. In my opinion, this supposed self-referentiality hides the fundamental tension that stems from the fact that philosophy is a part of each discipline, each action, each instance of man in the world. In this sense, there are no philosophers who do philosophy, there are philosophers, who by virtue of being such, teach any discipline philosophically, from music to botany to philosophy itself; they engage in counselling and analysis; they are psychologists and teachers, doctors and administrators, workers and farmers, priests, craftsmen, and obviously also panhandlers and unemployed persons.
(12) It would be ridiculous to try tackling the issue of health and illness is a footnote, but I prefer to avoid any ambiguity. Based on Freud, therefore, I imagine a quantitative continuum from normality to pathology. Such a view helps us to understand that, as experience shows, there are healthy centers in every psychopathology, just as there are psychopathological centers in even the most normal person. This difference in degree in fact allows us to recognize normality and pathology, when illness prevents one from constructing and maintaining working, affective relationships that lead to autonomy in the subject’s historical, social quest. Here again, some counsellor-philosophers claim to go beyond the question with banal babble about normality and madness, merely demonstrating their inexperience in the domain of psychopathology.
2.
Why call this philosophically-oriented analysis “biographical”?
First of all, because the object of analysis always presents itself as a fragment of a story, or at least of a “text,” of an expression – embodied or imagined – that is marked in and by the bios. Where bios, as Jaeger teaches us,[13] no longer refers to human existence in its historical development, but reworks it in a unified, meaningful whole, as a “conscious form of life.”
Not only is the object of analysis biographical, but its method is too. Biography thus provides the analytic method with an origin and a destination, in the precise sense of reworking in a unified narrative the psychophysical unity which is its first condition, but which is eaten away by the divisibility of the psyche itself.
Biography becomes a method, a path to a figure of the whole, for in it, subjective singularity hosts the world, without reducing it to itself as biography, but rather revealing itself as a conditioned expression of the world[14].
In conscious research each person can find and invent his or her individual irreducible participation in the world. Its essential philosophical vocation consists in this involvement between the figure of the whole and the individuality that cannot escape it without mutilating it[15].
Once again, the therapeutic specificity of analysis is contained in this “internal”[16] horizon: it is psychic divisibility[17] that produces the greater or lesser fractures of neurosis and psychosis; and the care will then be the reconstitution or new weaving of connections and bridges, i.e. symbolic work at its highest.
But the psyche’s pathological divisibility is the other side of the specifically human ability to “imagine differently,” and thus to give life to a genuinely human world, to the variety of instruments, techniques and procedures that constitute the cultures that allow us to lead a life.
The pathologies of individuals, of collective cultural catastrophes, of the most daring and sublime institutions and cultural constructions are linked by a common root.
The necessity for ethical choice is founded on culture’s original freedom, on its being born of a single, fundamental possibility of ruin and salvation. And for this reason, all therapeutic power is eventually rooted in it.
From this vantage, the figures and concepts of analytic psychology take on a new wider meaning: complexes, as partially autonomous personalities, shadows, the effects of auto-occlusion that conflicts and lacerations produce on thought and feelings, turn out to be methods of psychic divisibility, unconsciously heading towards the ruin of the historical, psychophysical unity of the individual in question.
In order to be therapeutic, therapy must try consciously to rediscover the crossroads, the ethical enigma, which leads instead to articulating and reunderstanding the various aspects of the personality, as retold in a biography that makes sense of the whole adventure of life.
An adventure, moreover, that only becomes authentic when it perceives, feels and thinks as life within the life of the whole.
For a solely psychic therapy – one, i.e. that stops well before world-history, as is the case at least methodologically with Freud, Jung and the great majority of depth psychologies – cannot discern, and therefore cannot heal this division[18].
In fact it risks unconsciously colluding with the ideology that opposes the public and private spheres, the collective and the personal, helping to shape an automatic, impersonal device (on the side of common history), and a jumble of inabilities (on the side of individual biographies) that are emotionally unloaded in a difficult, generalized, reciprocal rage.
But, inversely, only an adequate emendation of the intellect, an authentic catharsis of thought, can bring philosophical intention to its desire for truth, by speaking itself, and especially by its way of living.
Discourse, in fact, suffers not only in pathologies, but also in the most earnest normality, from feelings of affection that lead it into confusion, where it mutilates itself, preventing it from becoming “true,” from reaching the heights, and depths, of self-examination without self-delusion, such that the conscious ego is able to accept its essential inter-intra-dependence on others and on the world.
Here, so called “work on defenses”[19] can be useful for unleashing the forces of discourse, which had been concealed in refused affection, and compressed, or disjointed, in the figures of the pathological rhetoric of division, repression, negation, denial, projection, identification, rationalization, idealization and idealogization.
This work must direct itself according to the dynamic of compensation between the visible and the hidden[20].
The criteria of this practice are in the creation of a third point of view that is variable but unitary and balanced, always conscious of the horizon of the whole within which it has been placed.
This individual harmonization must conceive of itself and feel itself to be a limited part of a living whole in the world and in others.
A good name for this regulative idea of philosophically-oriented therapy might be Epicurus’ eustatheia, a “just balance,” a good balance of the nature that is in us and the nature of the whole.
Biography means a life story. A life story only has meaning in the context of the history of the world, and therefore biographical analysis is fundamentally historical, unlike the prevailing forms of depth psychology[21].
Even the myth that runs through and conditions it is not meta-historical (and here Ernst Bernhard is right to talk more precisely of mythobiographic analysis).
On the contrary, it is by retracing its essential historicity that it becomes possible to graft onto the old plant a new branch, a new declension that myth can take on in the re-visitation, narration and re-narration of a conscious biography.
Our analysis is therefore explicitly geared toward narration, toward weaving a text[22]: nevertheless, storytelling must rest on life and return to it; it must verify its plausibility in it, and therefore it is essentially ethical.
But this does not reduce the story to the concretization, to the semiotic corre-spondence, of events: the story houses symbolic life.
It has become familiar with the figures of imaginal rhetoric not only because it has learned to listen to its voices, but because symbolic life knows how to transmit the intuition of the whole to the emotions and the body. In its concreteness – as the assumption of a particular that alludes to an indefinite alterity that is nevertheless full of possible similarities and resonances – it displays both the origins of the human as an ability to see differently, and its call to express the whole.
From this point of view, logical formulations and all of common sense language are a particular form of the symbolic: language-exchange becomes a particular instance of allusive language.
But the contrary is also true: the symbolic cannot even come into being without the particular expression of a logical distinction.
We could refer to this as a “symbologic”.
And biographical narrative is precisely the interweaving of logical and symbolic, and vice versa: ratio, the measure of both.
Where is language originally inscribed, and where does it become true and sound weakened?
Where is it most deeply cultivated and most credibly verified?
In the body of course.
Biography is written above all in the language of the body.
Biographical analysis must know how to listen to and form body-language, freeing it from the purely passive, interpreted role that the great majority of depth psychologies have assigned to it[23].
In western philosophy, moreover, the body is excluded from true spiritual exercises, on the one hand, while on the other, bodily exercises precede other forms of exercise, as Pierre Hadot has noted[24].
The inclusion of the body in philosophical practices[25] is not only a response to the need to involve oneself entirely in biography, but it harkens back historically to the disproportion of licentiousness[26], a form of therapy that truly tested limits.
Only by re-establishing limits, in their bio-cultural roots, can we hope to center the whole personality, and this is so necessary within the framework of the rampant pathology of identity crisis[27].
Notes, 2.
(12) It would be ridiculous to try tackling the issue of health and illness is a footnote, but I prefer to avoid any ambiguity. Based on Freud, therefore, I imagine a quantitative continuum from normality to pathology. Such a view helps us to understand that, as experience shows, there are healthy centers in every psychopathology, just as there are psychopathological centers in even the most normal person. This difference in degree in fact allows us to recognize normality and pathology, when illness prevents one from constructing and maintaining working, affective relationships that lead to autonomy in the subject’s historical, social quest. Here again, some counsellor-philosophers claim to go beyond the question with banal babble about normality and madness, merely demonstrating their inexperience in the domain of psychopathology.
(13) See W. Jaeger, 1943.
(14) This is the unifying theme of R. Màdera, 1977, the second part of which is entitled “Storia e biografia.”
(15) This is what I mean when I call my philosophical endeavor, “biographical philosophy.” See
R. Màdera and L. V. Tarca, 2007. I would like to stress that although I undertook this particular exposition of philosophically-oriented biographical analysis, it is deeply connected to the works of Luigi Vero Tarca, both with regard to the figure of the whole and to the individual’s co-implication in it, and to the fundamental communitary, political dimension that permits and requires the development of subjectivity.
(16) I am following Luigi Vero Tarca in adopting this term. See his essay in AA. VV., 2006.
(17) It would take too long to list all the places where Freud and Jung reduce the various forms of psychopathology to the possibility of dividing, countering and hiding the links among the various parts and functions of the psyche.
(18) On the same subject, Umberto Galimberti, 2005, was published between the conference in Venice, at the beginning of June, and the reworking of that conference paper, at the end of 2005. The zone of consensus and of differences is nevertheless so dense, raising both conceptual questions as well as those that require terminological explanations, that it is impossible to discuss, briefly yet thorougly, the book’s theses in an article such as this.
(19) Given its breadth and complexity, this topic can alas only be dealt with cursorily. I steer away from the Freudian use of the term “defenses,” which is forcibly limited to drives; indeed, I expand it into an entirely different metaphor as the obstacles that the ego unknowingly creates to feelings, to thinking that one is part of the whole, to the “oceanic feeling.” And quite rightly so, for in its regressive, reductive immediacy, the oceanic remains on this side of the ego’s constitution, and can therefore only be experienced as psychotic fragmentation, as the devouring within the world-body of the primordial mother imago. But this leads to madness, for by renouncing its own sacrifice, the ego renounces the sacredness of its belonging to the whole that subordinates it as it elevates it to the level of the necessary and eternal, thus consoling it and welcoming it into the joy of the estatic-cosmic mind. Secondarily, this means that the ego is reinforced, for how do we distinguish between a mystic and a madman? Every contemplative tradition teaches us simply and concretely that the mystic is much better adapted to daily life. Living with the awareness and feeling of the whole means feeling and thinking one’s own limits with great attention and precision. From among the very many texts on this subject that I could cite, I would like to mention one of the most beautiful and most agreeable to my own sensibility, Elvio Fachinelli, 1989, from which I quote: “Analysis that is systematically based on dismantling defenses will at every turn encounter the danger that made it build them. Thence its renewed impulse to defend itself. Analysis then takes on the form of endless deconditioning. And it I do not mean that one can jump the barrier cleverly, by surprise. Once again these barriers form the limit of action. It would be better to let things flow, flow away, dip, swim in the current. The defensive stakes will perhaps end up drifting away.” (pp. 20-1)
(20) The reference to Jung’s theory of psychic dynamics is obvious.
(21) It is clear that this critique cannot be applied to Erich Fromm or Milton Erickson’s therapeutics, for example; nor does it adequately explain many aspects of the work of Bion and Money-Kyrle, nor of that of Bernhard and Neumann, to say nothing of other psychologies, such as Gregory Bateson’s.
(22) To get an idea of the immensity and comlexity of the subject of psychoanalysis and narration, see: J. Hillman, 1983; G. Starace, 1989; E. Morpurgo, V. Egidi, (eds.), 1987; A. Cotugno, M. Malagoli Togliatti, 1998.
(23) With the notable exceptions of at least Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen.
(24) On the exclusion of the body, see Hadot, 1995, and as a preparation for other exercises, P. Hadot, 2002.
(25) See I. Gamelli, 2005. Gamelli was the first to attempt to combine philosophical motives and bodily movemenents into exercises.
(26) On the topic of licentiousness as a pathologizing disproportion of desire that stems from the socio-economic structure, see R. Màdera, 1999, and R. Màdera, L. V. Tarca, 2007.
(27) Ibidem.
3.
- First and foremost, it means that analytical-biographical therapy is directed at the “healthy.”For philosophy – or at least for ancient philosophy, Christian philosophy and certain modern philosophers – what is commonly considered “pathological,” in both bodily and spiritual medicine, is a sometimes malignant variant of the single, general pathology that is commonly considered a normal, healthy life[28]. Philosophy is thus the therapy of “healthy” life, and therapy begins by realizing that “normal” life is a pathology[29].All eastern and western religious, philosophical paths to wisdom unanimously assert this to be the case.Nevertheless, from Freud onwards, the treatment of pathologies also teaches us a great deal about the normal functioning of the mind, the soul and the body.For this very reason, our philosophy will in principle make use of any therapeutic practice or technique that radically helps to treat the unconscious life of the self, which is beset by passions that it has accepted uncritically without gauging their affinity of feeling.But we do not simply wish to explain the concept of “philosophical orientation.”In reality, the therapeutic question has long overrun the boundaries of every psychopathology: common experience tells us – and this is clear in the language that associates therapy to a myriad of prefixes (art, music, horse, pet, comic…) and combines it with every type of consultation – that every difficulty in life and, more specifically, every change in identity (birth, adolescence, relations among the sexes, work, old age, illness, death) which is part of every culture, causes us to feel uneasy about our inability to deal with transformation.The more that collective ideology petulantly demands risks, mobility and permanent tragicomic revolutions of personality, the more we all sink into anxiety-inducing impotence. This is not a vague note on sociological phenomenology, it is the direct consequence of social relations that are automated and directed by the dynamics of economic gain, now at a point when capital has taken over the world, both at the surface and in the depths, and has a surplus of human energy at its disposal.[30] Due to the trans-national mobility of capital, the world’s labor surplus has become so great that human life no longer has to be channelled into the orderly growth of a normal personality. Any such normality would, in fact, be a rigid obstacle to ever-changing fashions, tastes and values: the highspeed rota of the ephemeral and the futile end with us, in our concrete life stories. Inevitably even therapies, if they remain part of the world, are part of this growth of consumption and may very well ape its futility and incon-sistency. As always, we have to know how to be in the world without belonging to it. A serious philosophy ought to have these characteristics in its genetic code and it ought to resist the functional modification of its genetic code. We must therefore respond to the “normal” worries of existence, legitimating their request for care, precisely because our world is no longer able to accommodate human growth – although it has other ways of taming it. Doing so would also allow us to avoid improperly using the terms from psychopathological diagnosis, something which is very common in psychotherapy, and which often only serves to confirm our own way of thinking, by reassuring us that we are doing our job as therapists. It might be possible to become less specialized, when specialization isn’t really necessary: the philosopher-analyst can also be a therapist of the soul, and the psychotherapist can be a philosopher[31].
- In any case, Jung’s lead is all the more valuable for philosophically-oriented biographical analysis, for the method is the analyst, beyond the boundaries of schools or disciplines.All the more so because, for a practicing philosopher, the nexus between discourse and life-style is fundamental, as we have relearned from Pierre Hadot’s vital, magisterial lesson[32].
- Therefore, whereas many schools of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis divide professions from life, in our vision the philosopher must be a philosopher in his existence, dedicating himself daily to the spiritual exercises that are part of his vocation, as a first condition of becoming a philosopher-analyst.Nor are we referring to a special case, stemming from a type of profession, but only the reaffirmation of a general condition that holds for any profession that the philosopher finds him or herself exercising in communal life, as well as for any role in personal and family life[33]. The practice of philosophy is and must be all-inclusive.
- Since our goal is not to be cured of a pathology, but to live life as a self-examination and search for meaning so that we may be cured of the most common pathology of unconscious living, philosophical analysis necessarily has no end[34]; it finishes only when the pair of researchers believe they have learned what there was to learn, barring eventual verification to the contrary.
- Yes, what there was to learn, for philosophical analysis is an explicitly educative, learning process, and one that is obviously reciprocal.Jung had admitted even this much[35], and like many of his ideas that are less common to other depth psychologies, it is marginalized by most Jungian schools. We wish to be absolutely clear that we are talking about education through listening to oneself and to the other, to the third that is formed by the relationship, and to the field that welcomes and accompanies it. What we wish to study is not some pre-established knowledge, but the implicit, possible biographical philosophy that the quest reveals and reworks. But it should be clear too that the quest cannot be conducted if we imagine that the philosopher-analyst and the patient have no presuppositions, for the very fact of their meeting implies an analytical frame-work.But this framework must not be a form of indoctrination, for I believe that a philosophy that chooses the biographical method is able, precisely because of its presuppositions, to engage in the open search for possible philosophical constructions – for felt conceptions of the world – in harmony with the life of the other person. And, vice-versa, other philosophical methods may be inappropriate to or totally incapable of performing this task of renewed maieutics.
- The hermeneutics of philosophically-oriented biographical analysis does not work from a presupposed meaning that is already given yet remains concealed, hidden even, nor from a meaning given by psychic nature, but from the possible meanings that are always tied to the associations of context[36].Hermeneutics opens up these meanings and the anamorphoses of already established meanings that belong to only one member of the pair or group[37]. Verifying possible meanings is heuristic, i.e. it is tied to the retrieval of a meaning that is able to account for the totality of experiences in a certain domain, and to guide attitudes and actions in the present and the future.
- Such an analysis is essentially ethical: it is not only true that in human relations no meta-psychological idea, no therapeutic technique, no in-terpretation can succeed in shedding every philosophical implication, but each of the pair or the group’s more or less explicit expectations, each comment, each implication and all affectivity, is built into an ethical judgement, even those that favor ethically indifferent therapy (as with Freud), on the pretext that they are more effective. Pure judgement about efficiency is also involuntarily ethical, as it attempts to distinguish good and evil for the analytic pair. The bio-cultural nature of the human species necessarily carries with it a request for meaning, and therefore also questions about good and evil.Emotions themselves are situational signal devices, steeped in ethicality in the concrete phenomenology of their occurrence: think of the guilt complex, indignation, shame, fear, pleasure[38]. Imprecise or insufficient understanding of the ethical dimension of depth psychology practices has delayed a possible, important develop-ment in that same ethical thought: without awareness of shadow aspects, without the assimilation and integration of the listening attitude of “unconscious” (or in my terminology, “misunderstood”) dimensions, every ethical discourse remains truncated, and every therapeutic practice risks becoming dependent and irresponsible, thus hampering therapy. In historical terms, our project corresponds to the waning of patriarchy’s negative ethics, which is tied to repression and sappression, and corresponds to the birth of a truly autonomous new ethics centered on the whole and on the real figure of the idea of a community of free individuals[39].
- What is specifically, uniquely philosophical, what can accompany every practice – even of depth psychology – and transform it into a philosophical practice?I.e., what differentiates the nature of philosophically-oriented biographical analysis from every other purely psychological analysis?It includes accepting Pierre Hadot’s three transcendences as criteria of philosophical practice, reaching beyond the oppositions of individual philosophies[40] and preceding the development of theoretical and practical philosophy[41]. These are: transcendence of the ego’s centrality in the search for truth,[42] transcendence in relations with the cosmos, and transcendence in relations with others.To these, I would add a fourth, the transcendence of the ego as the center of the personality, i.e. sacrificing the ego by concentrating on the symbolic figure of the internal teacher[43]. An attentive reader of Pierre Hadot will certainly have noticed how these four tran-scendences form the goal of all ancient spiritual exercises. Hadot in fact lays them out thus: a) exercises for the body and for the soul; b) exercises for concentrating the ego and the relationship to the self (going beyond the centrality of the ego through asceticism, and by exercising the present and death, by examining one’s conscience); c) exercises regarding our relationship with the cosmos, and the expansion of the ego (again going beyond the ego’s centrality within the cosmos, looking down upon things, the study of nature); d) relationships with others; e) and the figure of the wise man. And this is precisely the goal of biographical analysis: its philosophical orientation means that it is directed at philosophy, towards opening the path to a way of life that demonstrates its quest through exercise.Biographical analysis is therapy oriented towards transcending the ego, showing it that, if it is not the master of its own home – as analysis teaches – it is capable of transcending itself and recognizing that it is a part of the truth, of the cosmos, of humanity, and therefore a student and lover of wisdom[44].The philosophical way of identifying the ancient path and the present one, means going beyond the self, acceding to the universal, which through its transcendence of us places us in the deepest and truest part of ourselves.Biographical analysis aims to be a preparatory course and a harbinger of the philosophical path in individual experience.
Notes, 3.
(28) I will quote neither Epicurus nor Epictetus, nor even Socrates or Plato, for their sayings and writings are rife with, even presuppose, the idea that “the many” are seriously mistaken about the notion of a “healthy,” “happy” life. Instead, I’ve chosen a famous passage by Spinoza: “For I saw that my situation was one of great peril and that I was obliged to seek a remedy with all my might, however uncertain it may be, like a sick man suffering from a fatal malady who, foreseeing certain death unless a remedy is forthcoming, is forced to seek it, however uncertain it be, with all his might, for therein lies all his hope. Now all those objectives that are commonly pursued not only contribute nothing to the preservation of our being but even hinder it ”. B. Spinoza, 2002, 4 (§7).
(29) This does not in the least mean that pathologies are healthy, nor that the mad are wise, etc. On the contrary, it means that in order to be treated by philosophy, we must be “healthy enough,” i.e. not doubly ill.
(30) On these topics I must refer the reader to R. Màdera, 1999, and to the numerous works on globalization and its socio-anthropological aspects. One work that has greatlhy impressed and persuaded me is David Harvey, 1989.
(31) A careful reading of Jung would help to point out an open, fruitful direction centered on the principle that the analytic method is the analyst himself. For a discussion of the steps that take up the nexus between philosophy and the practice of pyschotherapy, see R. Màdera, 2003.
(32) See Hadot, 1995 and 2009.
(33) Francesca Rigotti’s philosophical stance on this subject is particularly noteworthy. See F. Rigotti, 2004.
(34) Despite the very learned analyses on this subject, I do not think that psychoanalysts have resovled the difficult question of the purpose of analysis, which Freud himself had brought up. In fact, I believe the problem is the initial assumption that the purpose is to “cure.” This assumption comes in many sizes and shapes, but I do not believe that anyone has ever truly examined its root, i.e. that something has happened to the patient, or that he or she has imagined or perceived something that has disturbed and continues to disturb the psyche until it is able to metabolize the disturbance. But what if this something continues to happen not because of pre-biography, but because of the continuous imagination that accompanies the present? Jung had tackled the problem, and had in fact identified the ability to have a relationship to the unconscious as an element of good analysis. Correct. And yet life is still full of events, and even this ability sometimes requires new enounters in order to be revitalized and confront new situations. Clinical experience has taught me that without preconceived obstacles, most patients of analysis return, even if only for short periods. This occurs in many cases, even those that have been “concluded,” but since many analysts hint, however indirectly, that returning is not a good thing, patients simply change analysts. We should deal with the reality of the situation, rather than the preconceived litany that “the patient had clearly not been thoroughly analyzed,” a formula that justifies everything, unfortunately even the Popperian critiques of psychoanlaysis.
(35) For a discussion of the works of Jung that relate to this topic, see R. Màdera, 2003.
(36) This technical difference with respect to the method of Freudian free assocications is extremely important. Jung had already objected that the centrifugal movement of free associations with respect to the image-word prompt erases the text’s particularlity and always ends up at the dominant complexes. His suggestion is to bring the associations back, one by one, to the image-word prompt in a returning, centripetal movement. I think it is important steadfastly to distance ourselves from the associative method and situate ourselves within the usual hermeneutical work of contextualizing a text that at first glance appears difficult. Here, text and context are situated in different narrative dimensions (pieces of life story, the home, collective history, mythologems, the analytical pair’s dialogues) that are bound together in representations and symbolizations.
(37) Practicing biographical-solidary communication and its rules has taught me to modify the concept and practice of psychoanalytic interpretation, which is too often linked to the idea that the surface covers the depths. (See R. Màdera, L. V. Tarca, 2007). For anamorphic hermeneutics, the surface contains the possibility of other gazes; surface and depth depend on the observer’s stance.
(38) See the first lecture in Ernst Tugendhat, 1993.
(39) See my introduction to the Italian translation of E. Neumann, 1949.
(40) Hadot, 2002.
(41) Ibidem.
(42) Logical truth is an important, though not exclusive, feature of philosophical truth as a whole,
i.e. truth that belongs to a discourse that is indissolubly linked to a manner of living. The search for truth means searching for the word of truth, the effort to speak the truth and, most importantly, the exercise of training oneself to discern the truth. Philosophical truth essentially transforms a person into a receptacle for truth. Similarly, the truth as an end that transforms the searcher is a truth that is found in all paths to wisdom. This is the deepest reason for the ecumenism that characterizes our biographical philosophy. See R. Màdera, L. V. Tarca, 2007, as well as A. Huxley, 1945.
(43) The reference to Jung’s theory of the Self is clear. I believe that the theory is only the psychological version of Jung’s universal tradition of the relation between master and disciples. All the same, the new psychological version is useful for symbolizing and internalizing the relationship among student, teacher and the figure of the Wiseman, a relationship that can easily degenerate into idolatry and personalization. It goes without saying that this nexus is both the philosophical and psychological basis that models every relationship of transference, springing from the archetypal dimension. (Jung had clearly seen this, even if the great majority of Jungians have forgotten or have never understood it.) Concerning my position on Jung’s archetypal theory, see “Costanti antropiche, modelli culturali e mitobiografia storica,” forthcoming from Studi junghiani.
(44) The section of my analysis that leans heavily on Hadot is apparently subject to the objections that Hadot himself made to Foucault’s notion of the “care for the self,” outlined in his last writings. In fact those objections are even stronger here, for Foucault himself had reproached psychoanalysis for a sort of objectifying psychologism with respect to unreason. I therefore wish: briefly to bring up Hadot’s criticism of Foucault; then to show that Hadot implies that Foucault fails to understand the central theme of the transcendence of the subjective plane in ancient philosophy; thence to state that the introduction of philosophically-oriented biographical analysis is directed precisely at the exercise of this transcending. If philosophy is clear and well-grounded in the vision and practice of the four philosophical transcendences, then the philosophical essence of analysis, its universal vocation, is assured. This piece from Hadot synthesizes his critique of Foucault and clarifies the idea of contemporary practice, by making clear that transcendence of the self is an essential prerequisite to philosophy: “In this way, one identifies oneself with an ‘Other’: nature, or universal reason, as it is present within each individual. This implies a radical transformation of perspective, and contains a universalist, cosmic dimension, upon which, it seems to me, M. Foucault did not sufficiently insist. Interiorization is going beyond oneself; it is universalization. The preceding remarks are not intended to be relevant only to an historical analysis of ancient philosophy. They are also an attempt at defining an ethical model which modern man can discover in antiquity. What I am afraid of is that, by focusing his interpretation too exclusively on the culture of the self, the care of the self, and conversion toward the self – more generally, by defining his ethical model as an aesthetics of existence – M. Foucault is propounding a culture of the self which is too aesthetic. In other words, this may be a new form of Dandyism, late twentieth-century style… Personally, I believe firmly – albeit perhaps naively – that it is possible for modern man to live, not as a sage (sophos) – most of the ancients did not hold this to be possible – but as a practitioner of the ever-fragile exercise of wisdom. This can be attempted, starting out from the lived experience of the concrete, living, and perceiving subject, under the triple form defined, as we saw above, by Marcus Aurelius: 1. as an effort to practice objectivity of judgment; 2. as an effort to live according to justice, in the service of the human community; and 3. as an effort to become aware of our situation as a part of the universe. Such an exercise of wisdom will thus be an attempt to render oneself open to the universal.
More specifically, I think modern man can practice the spiritual exercises of antiquity, at the same time separating them from the philosophical or mythic discourse which came along with them. The same spiritual exercise can, in fact, be justified by extremely diverse philosophical discourses. These latter are nothing but clumsy attempts, coming after the fact, to describe and justify inner experiences whose existential density is not, in the last analysis, susceptible of any attempt at theorization or systematization. Stoics and Epicureans, for example – for completely different reasons – urged their disciples to concentrate their attention on the present moment, and free themselves from worries about the future as well as the burden of the past. Whoever concretely practices this exercise, however, sees the universe with new eyes, as if he were seeing it for the first time. In the enjoyment of the pure present, he discovers the mystery and splendor of existence.” – Pierre Hadot, 1995, pp. 211-12.
«Only the withdrawal of the sacrificial projection onto the scapegoat – which here stands for our inner shadow – can allow us to cross the battlefield and arrive at wholeness within ourselves.
Outer peace can be won only by accepting the inner civil war (…).
Thus, psychological clinical work, through the ongoing labor of repossessing the projected shadow, carries within itself the possibility of a clinic for the world.»