Alternative Philosophical Conceptualizations of Psychopathology

Abstract

Alternative conceptualizations, which often turn into acrimonious oppositions, already abound in psychotherapy. The humanists condemn the behaviorists; the existentialists defend the patient as subject against what they take to be Freudian objectification; family therapists define themselves in opposition to individual therapists. Nevertheless, I wish to propose an alternative to these alternatives, since I am convinced that these oppositions pale in the light of two fundamentally opposed but complementary views of the mind. I will call these alternative conceptions of the mind and of psychopathology, epistemological and ontological, and will contrast Freud’s fundamentally epistemiological approach with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological account.

Footnotes

1/Copyright H. L. Dreyfus, 1983. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a Symposium on the Conduct and Framework of Therapy sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education, June 16 to 18, 1983.

2/For Freud, even instincts in order to affect our behavior have to be mediated by representations: “An instinct can never be an object of consciousness-only the idea that represents the instinct. Even in the unconscious, moreover, it can only be represented by the idea.” Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in General Psychological Theory ed. Philip Rieff, Collier Books, p. 126.

3/Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work,” in Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff, Collier Books, p. 157. 2/ as psychoanalysis... shows to perfection, though resistance certainly presupposes an intentional relationship with the memory resisted, it does not set it before us as an object; it does not specifically reject the memory. It is directed against a region of our experience, a certain category, a certain class of memories. The subject who has left a book, which was a present from his wife, in a drawer, and forgotten all about it, and who rediscovers it when they have become reconciled once more, had not really lost the book, but neither did he know where it was. Everything connected with his wife had ceased to exist for him, he had shut it out from his life... although we know of it, because our memories and our body, instead of presenting themselves to us in singular and determinate conscious acts, are enveloped in generality.“ Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception Routledge & Kegan Paul, N.Y.: The Humanities Press, p. 162.

4//Merleau-Ponty gives us no account of how some range of items connected with a specific person or event could drop out of our awareness and become the context of our experience. Here the appeal to generality simply covers up a phenomenon which can be better explained on the basis of Freud’s notion of unconscious intentional content.

5/Ibid, p. 83. (Translation slightly modified).

6/Ibid., p. 442.

7/Ibid., p. 83 (My italics).

8/Martin Heidegger, Bein~and Time Harper and Row, Sections 29 and 32.

9/Silvan S. Tompkins developed a similar idea in “Script Theory: Differential magnification of Affects,” but he only speaks of affects as amplifying and generalizing but not as totalizing.

10/Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought Harper & Row, p. 61.

11/Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., p. 270.

12/Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and TremblingPrinceton University Press.

13/Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis Simon and Schuster, Part I.

14/Phenomenology of Perception p. 445.