Not only is psychoanalysis questioned on its scientific credibility and therapeutic efficacy from other disciplines, it is even disputed within contemporary psychoanalysis itself. Criticized for its problematic epistemology, theory of mind, and scientific merit, psychoanalysis is at the limit.
In chapter 1, M. Guy Thompson reviews specific philosophical problems inherent in Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious including unresolved spects of his topographic and structural models as well as his thesis concernng two principles of mental functioning. Situating Sartre’s phenomenologial theory of consciousness, Heidegger’s existential ontology, and Laing’s conception of experience within psychoanalysis, Thompson offers a phenomenology of unconscious experience that is compatible with Freud’s ontological commitments on unconscious processes.
Joseph Newirth (2003) recently reminds us that the unconscious is generative, a thesis that was originally promulgated by the German idealist F.W.J. von Schelling (1800), a contemporary of Hegel.5 What I am interested in exploring throughout this project is not only how the unconscious is generative but also how it generates being, that is, how psychic reality is constituted. Reality is constituted by mind as agentic process that emerges, grows, and matures from its basal primitive form to more robust configurations of conscious life, self-reflection, and social order. Psychic reality begins as unconscious experience constituted through presubjective events that collectively organize into an unconscious sense of agency. The coming into being of this agentic function signals the coming into being of subjectivity, which becomes the fountainhead for future forms of psychic life to materialize and thrive. What this means is that, before we can speak of the infant, before we can speak of the mother or the attachment system, before we can speak of culture or language, we have to account for the internally derived activity that makes consciousness, attachment, and social relations possible.
“I,” or, more appropriately, the “sense of I,” is not a declarative we make from the start, unlike Fichte’s (1794) notion of the absolute I (Ich) that posits itself into existence and declares its being ex nihilio.6 The I develops naturally and organically proceeds as an epigenetic architectonic, self-organizing achievement.
Here we must begin with prebeginnings, with addressing the philosophical notion of how agency first emerges from the psyche’s unconditional embodiment. This requires us to address the mind/body question from the inception of unconscious life before the ego of consciousness is aware that it is embodied. Here it is necessary to explore the notion of Trieb as a pulsional bodily organization. The specific question of how agency emerges from drive and, even more specifically, how self-directed teleological processes emerge from teleonomic pressures inherent to the bodily pulsions, is closely examined.
Schemata comprise the building blocks of psychic reality. They may be viewed as microcosmic units or self-states that have various characteristics or properties peculiar to their own internally derived constitutions, such as specific contours, impressions, affect, or desirous-riddled content that compose the microdynamic processes relative to a particular schema.
Schemata are information-emitting and information processing microagents, or self-states, that form communication channels and linkages through their semiotic relations. They may facilitate or oppose linkages by ingressing into – hence incorporating – one another or by negating one another through defensive fortifications..
the underworld mythos interweaves at least four major interdependent elements that constitute human unconscious dynamics: (1) a domain and dominion of obscurity, negation, death, and unknown forces that condition the soul, waking consciousness and cultural phenomena; (2) the omnipresence of turmoil and suffering is permeable and capable of being tamed by agentic forces that intervene to create stability and concord; (3) an antithetical yet orderly co-existence of opposites between danger and safety (good and evil) mediated by emotion and reason; and (4) a moral tribunal where competing desires and conflicts are adjudicated by basic principles of truth and justice.
This book is a treatise on the unconscious mind. It attempts to reclaim and clarify many key elements from classical psychoanalytic doctrine through a Hegelian revisionist perspective I have called dialectical psychoanalysis, or process psychology.
What I am interested in exploring throughout this project is not only how the unconscious is generative but also how it generates being, that is, how psychic reality is constituted. Reality is constituted by mind as agentic process that emerges, grows, and matures from its basal primitive form to more robust configurations of conscious life, self-reflection, and social order. Psychic reality begins as unconscious experience constituted through presubjective events that collectively organize into an unconscious sense of agency. The coming into being of this agentic function signals the coming into being of subjectivity, which becomes the fountainhead for future forms of psychic life to materialize and thrive.
“I,” or, more appropriately, the “sense of I,” is not a declarative we make from the start, unlike Fichte’s (1794) notion of the absolute I (Ich) that posits itself into existence and declares its being ex nihilio.6 The I develops naturally and organically proceeds as an epigenetic architectonic, self-organizing achievement. It must emerge from the organic contingencies in which it finds itself
Following a naturally organic and developmental process of dialectical unfoldings, the unconscious soul erupts from its corporeality to find itself as a sentient affective life that is desirous and driven by lack – a lacking or absence it wishes to satiate. But, unlike a wish or a drive, desire cannot be sated. It is an endless striving that seeks fulfilment through many circuitous routes and endless forms of content-specific appetition. In the initiation and wake of desire lies the causal force behind the dialectic, namely, the engine of appetitive motivational longing within which mind finds itself immersed
In this age of the brain, the notion of mind has largely become relegated to a reductive category subsumed under some form of materialism spearheaded by cognitive neuroscience and philosophies of mind. Indeed, some developments in cognitive science and neurobiology are content with displacing a dynamic unconscious altogether, instead substituting the language of dissociation, attachment processes, and the implicit forms of memory that are, in turn, shaped by corresponding brain asymmetry (see Siegel 1999)
Certain conclusions made by contemporary theoreticians and researchers – such as that there is no dynamic unconscious or that non-conscious encoded events implicit in memory structure displace our previous understanding of unconscious activity (see Iannuzzi 2006)
For these reasons, the mind/body conundrum needs to be bracketed from the materialist enterprise and engaged from the standpoint of ontology that is compatible with the language of embodiment and the interstices of human experience without evoking a causally reductive argument under the banner of science and at the expense of philosophical sophistication.
Contra postmodern psychoanalytic theories that displace metaphysics, process psychology attempts to situate phenomena, contingency, and contextual complexity within a subjective universality that accounts for individual variance and plurality within an encompassing holistic governing totality, despite the concession that this totality is never complete, united, or unified. Conflict, negation, and strife are its very essence, the engines propelling development, the positive significance of the negative.
That is, before the breach into consciousness, the dialectical unfolding of the psyche originally constitutes itself as the coming into being of the unconscious ego, which acquires agency as a teleologic determinate being-for-self. In its generative activity of self-enactment, unconscious agency institutes its own network of semiotics as the original mode of signification and meaning relata.
Unconscious semiotics initially materialize and unfold as agentically assigned and often segregated units of embodied affective sentience that disperse yet simultaneously coalesce as a plurality of unconscious schemata under the rubric of the unconscious ego. Unconscious schemata take their incipient forms as somatic and emotional organizations that may be partially autonomous from one another and comprise nonconceptual pre-reflective representations of internal experience that further execute and convey their own meaning relations through a combinatory of signifiers within its embodied affective resonance states
Schemata are information-emitting and information processing microagents, or self-states, that form communication channels and linkages through their semiotic relations. They may facilitate or oppose linkages by ingressing into – hence incorporating – one another or by negating one another through defensive fortifications, of course depending upon which movement of the dialectic is operative at any given moment within each schema’s internal structure.
For Hegel, mind is an active process of becoming forged through negation and confilct. His metaphysical system is a grand and dauntless attempt to derive unity from disunity, order from disorder, and purpose from pattern by highlighting particularity and contextuality within a dynamic self-elucidated and complex universality. (p6)
Our dialectical system is teleological, but it has no proper beginning or end. That is, there is a purposeful, persistent, and meaningful order that is not predetermined or predesigned, nor is it superimposed; rather, it is determinate and procreative as it progressively unfolds through various maturational contingencies that are derived from its own interior constitution. The system is unifying, not unified: it is always maintained in a state of flux and process, which can never be complete or static, yet everything is intertwined.
Psychic reality begins as unconscious experience constituted through presubjective events that collectively organize into an uncon- scious sense of agency.
“I,” or, more appropriately, the “sense of I,” is not a declarative we make from the start, unlike Fichte’s (1794) notion of the absolute I (Ich) that posits itself into existence and declares its being ex nihilio.
The unconscious is real although it is not an entity. It is more appro- priately understood as a spacing or presencing of certain facets of psychic realty having loci, shape, and force in the indefinite ways in which they manifest as both the interiorization and external expression of agentic events
Here we must begin with prebeginnings, with addressing the philosophical notion of how agency first emerges from the psyche’s unconditional embodiment
Although neurobiology is a necessary condition of our embodiment, it is not a suf- ficient condition to explain the complexifications of lived experiential reality. For these reasons, the mind/body conundrum needs to be brack- eted from the materialist enterprise and engaged from the standpoint of ontology that is compatible with the language of embodiment and the interstices of human experience without evoking a causally reductive argument under the banner of science and at the expense of philosoph- ical sophistication.
What I fundamentally believe the human psyche strives for in all its unadulterated instantiations is the wish for unity and peace, free of trauma and violence – whether externally imposed or self-implosive. What resonates within us all is a wish to be free of negativity, of our suffering, or pathos (πάθoς), which is none other than a dialectical renun- ciation of, yet paradoxical call for, death – for termination, the desire to end the lack.
I.1 Mind is constituted as process. I.1a Process is the essence of all psychic reality and the indispens- able ontological foundation of all forms of mental life. Every mental derivative – from unconscious to conscious, intra- psychic to relational, individual to collective – is necessarily predicated on process. I.2 Process underlies all experience as an activity of becoming. I.2a As becoming, process is pure event, unrest, transmogrifica- tion, and experiential flow. I.3 Essence is process.
III.1 Mind is composed of a multitude of schemata, which are the building blocks of psychic reality. They originate from an unconscious nucleus of desire ensconced in negativity as Being-in-relation-to-lack, the ontological precondition, ground, and symbiotic unity from which the unconscious ego emerges