Abstract
Lacan claimed that the unconscious is “structured like a language,” but there are significant pre-linguistic dimensions of unconscious functioning folded into our conscious experience. Three neurologists who addressed this issue are Sigmund Freud, Karl Stern, and Iain McGilchrist. They posited two fundamental ways of knowing and engaging with the world: Freud’s primary and secondary processes, Stern’s poetic and the scientific modes of knowledge, and what McGilchrist describes as right- and left-hemispheric competences. Much as they converge on certain issues, they construe the relationship between the two modes of knowing and being and their impact on our mental health rather differently. Freud sought to strengthen secondary processes (the ego) at the expense of primary processes (the id). By contrast, Stern and McGilchrist attribute the malaise of modernity to the diminution of the poetic mode of knowledge, the increasing dominance of left-hemispheric attitudes and approaches to life.
Note: Parts of this chapter have been reprinted with permission from “Freud, Stern and McGilchrist: Developmental and Cultural Implications of Their Work.” Eidos: A Journal of Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 3, 2 (8), 2019.
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- 1.
According to many of Freud’s contemporaries, like Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Max Scheler, empathy is a trait (or ability) that plays a central role in psychic formation and all intimate interpersonal relationships. By contrast, empathy seldom (if ever) appears in Freud’s discussions of the latter. However, many of Freud’s ideas about unconscious identification and “thought transference” (or telepathy) attest to Freud’s awareness of its role in human affairs. For an excellent discussion of unconscious identification in Freud, see Ricoeur (1970). For an illuminating discussion of Freud’s ideas about telepathy, see chapter 4 of Marsha Hewitt’s recent book Freud on Religion (Hewitt 2014).
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In light of these overarching similarities, it is also instructive to note that in Erich Fromm’s estimation, alienation (in Marx’s sense) has intensified steadily since the decline of feudalism as a result of increasing tendencies toward the quantification and abstraction of experience under capitalism—tendencies that are entirely consistent with a culturally induced hypertrophy of Stern’s scientific mode of knowledge and McGilchrist’s depiction of left-hemispheric values (see, e.g., Fromm 1955, chapter 5, section 2a). Though a detailed discussion of this issue exceeds the scope of this chapter, Stern’s poetic and scientific modes of knowledge and McGilchrist’s account of right- and left-hemispheric attitudes and competences also bear a certain family resemblance to the Being and Having modes of existence discussed by Erich Fromm (see, e.g., Fromm 1976).
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Burston, D. (2020). Of Two Minds: Language and the Unconscious in Freud, Stern, and McGilchrist. In: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34921-9_4
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