Abstract
Psychoanalysis appears to intellectual historians and anthropologists as a general theory of dreams, trances, hallucinations, and certain physical symptoms that derives from nineteenth-century German Romanticism and arrogates scientificity to itself. It embodies a further stage of metaphysical subjectivism, attributing what is seen in dreams, trances, hallucinations, and certain physical symptoms to unconscious drives, desires, anxieties, and conflicts in the subject. These are posited, deduced, by interpretation. The interpretations vary with different psychotherapeutic schools and criteria for the reliability of interpretations are in question. Anthropologists find that psychoanalysis does not succeed in explaining all the phenomena covered by the general conceptions of other cultures. The Surrealists devoted themselves to the products of the unconscious, but instead of using them for therapy, set out to integrate them into conscious life. This led them away from metaphysical subjectivism and revealed the ethnocentric character of psychoanalytic doctrine.
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Notes
- 1.
Breton obtained his auxiliary doctor certification in 1919, but abandoned his medical studies in 1921. On the eve of the Second World War Breton was inducted into army on Sept 29 1938 as an assistant medical officer, then put in reserves after 10 days. He was called back on August 22, 1939, and discharged in July 1940.
- 2.
During World War II Dali lived half the year in the United States, half the year in Paris. When the war was over he returned to Spain and Port Llegat. He publicly praised and flattered Franco, espoused the Catholic Church. He also abandoned surrealism in art; he launched his Catholic, then Nuclear Mysticism styles. He induced the Spanish government to purchase a theatre to be made into a museum devoted to his works.
- 3.
Freud’s psychoanalysis figures within the vast movement of subjectification in modern ontology. Teleology, with Francis Bacon, and efficient causality, with David Hume, were relocated from the “outside” to the “inside,” that is, they are conceived in the mind and projected outside; space and time were, with Immanuel Kant, taken to be apriori forms of the mind. The secondary qualities of observed things were, with Descartes and Locke, relocated “inside.”
Sensations … properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind . . . Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. (Whitehead 1967, p. 54)
- 4.
André Breton was repelled by this preoccupation with the vulgar and the base, and called Bataille an obsessive and an excremental philosopher – while Bataille called even Breton’s adhesion to dialectical materialism idealist. Breton wrote:
M. Bataille’s misfortune is to reason: admittedly, he reasons like someone who ‘has a fly on his nose,’ which allies him more closely with the dead than with the living, but he does reason. He is trying, with the help of the tiny mechanism in him which is not completely out of order, to share his obsessions: this very fact proves that he cannot claim, no matter what he may say, to be opposed to any system, like an unthinking brute (Breton 1972, p. 184).
- 5.
“Systematic sexual education can only be meaningful if it leaves intact the incentive toward ‘sublimation’ and finds the means of transcending the mere lure of ‘forbidden fruit’. The only possible approach is that of initiation, with the whole aura of sacredness—outside all religions, of course—which the word implies, an initiation providing the impulse for that spirit of quest which the ideal constitution of each human couple demands. This is the price of love” (Breton 2002, p. 408).
- 6.
“Much of what we in the West call psychological and locate in some sort of internal space (‘in the head,’ ‘in the mind,’ ‘in the brain,’ ‘in consciousness,’ ‘in the psyche’) is understood in many cultures in manifestly nonpsychological terms and located in other ‘Spaces.’ … To declare such articulations inadequate, as some Western thinkers . . . have done, is, in my view, an act of intolerable cultural arrogance … Sudden blindness, mutism, and paralysis, aphonia, tics, and other motor disturbances, anaesthesias and paraesthesias, glossolalia and echolalia, mimetic behavior, all accompanied by a belle indifference. For all of these a demon (with a particular character and desires) was held responsible. Cures were spectacular: communal exorcisms with elaborate trance dances, possession crises, and acts of self-mutilation” (Crapanzano 1992, p. 142).
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Lingis, A. (2017). This Immense Fascination with the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Surrealism. In: Legrand, D., Trigg, D. (eds) Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 88. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55518-8_15
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