Klein is one of the ablest theorists of intentionality, and the following passage is crucial to his perspective:
1 he central objective of psychoanalytic c linical explanation is the reading of intentionality; behavior, experience, testimony are studied for meaning in this sense, as jointly exemplifying directive “tensions,” avowed, disavowed, repressed, defended. This orientation to explanation generates concepts that reflect a picture of individual development as a problem-solving, meaningseeking, meaning-organizing venture, involving and resulting from the constant reslution of incompatible aims and tendencies. 53
1 his perspective, which “aims at specifying the subject’s own vantage point,” 54 is sharply distinguished from traditional psychoanalytic metapsychologv, which approaches the person as an observed physical process. 1 he second approach is external, impersonal, physical, and mechanistic; it leaves behind the realm of meaning, purpose, and the subject’s experienced intention. The two approaches locate themselves in totally different perspectives, employ different concepts, give wholly different interpretations to the same term, and are satisfied by radically different criteria of explanation. It is perfectly clear which of these orientations is central to Klein:
My point is that it is the clinical orientation to explanation, and the concepts anchored to it, that are the most distinctively psychoanalytic—more relevant to psychotherapy and more applicable to other humanistic endeavors in which reading the directionality of man’s behavior is central. 55
Klein is equally clear that “clinical concepts are as abstract, and as theoretical, as metapsychology” 56 and that a crucial distinction is necessary “between experiential and functional concepts, i.e., between intraphenomenological concepts.” 57 If the basic data of the therapeutic encounter are the therapist’s inferences to the client’s experience, this material is interpreted through concepts that transcend the client’s lived experience.
Concepts like projection, introjection, and repression, which point to something in the mind of the patient which the patient does not experience but is part of his reality, are functional or extraphenomenological concepts. These are the class of concepts which are meant to account for, or in some way to illuminate or elucidate, those experiences of the patient which are not accessible directly. The analyst plunges into phenomenology, but goes beyond it to generalizations that connect accessible and inaccessible levels of experience. 58
The extraphenomenological concepts are meant to illuminate the experiences the analyst attributes to the client. It is precisely at this point that difficulties arise. For the basic functional concepts that articulate the significance of the client’s experience are clearly beyond the client’s experience. The client’s own vantage point, whose elucidation was previously described as the distinguishing mark of psychoanalytic explanation—“All the explorations and probes as well as concepts of the
clinical theory are dedicated to this effort —cannot be maintained. However much Klein may wish to preserve the notions of meaning and purpose as the basic functional explanatory concepts, these terms cannot retain the significance they possess in the realm of consciousness. The new metapsychology is required to explicate the meaning of "unconscious meaning” and supply an intelligible account of the relationship between this extraphenomenological realm and the vantage point of the client’s lived experience. T he theory seems to me to fail in this respect.
The difficulty derives from a central contention of Klein’s account, the notion of “two theories.” With the idea that psychoanalysis contains two perspectives, one clinical and the other metapsychological, I have no quarrel. The critical issue is the relationship between them. Klein, and those who have adopted his dualism, have severed the two aspects of psychoanalysis so completely that not only the content but the methodology of the two approaches have been reconstituted as each other’s opposite. The quickest way to confront this point is in the set of dichotomies Klein embraces: the division between why and how, and the separation of meaning from cause. The adoption of these polarities makes it impossible to understand the connection between the functional, extraphenomenological concepts, which are required to illuminate the significance of lived experience, and the meaning for the client of that experience as undergone. One can simply disavow “how” questions, that is, decide to reject the very relevance of mediating mechanisms that link unobserved factors to experience, but the penalty for this declaration is the fact that the connection is rendered unintelligible. If we do not understand the relationship between unconscious and conscious purpose, we are hardly in a position to understand what purpose means and how it is embodied in the lives of human beings. If we cannot reproduce the mediations that tie our conscious experience to the more disguised foundations of our being, we have no right to attribute our experience to such underlying factors.
The most unfortunate aspect of Klein’s approach to this point is that it is unnecessary. There are mediations besides those operating in the realm of physics. Just as the notion of energy has a perfectly intelligible meaning within human experience, so do the variety of notions which could serve to bridge the gap between functional concepts and phenomenological presentation, even if these concepts need to be reconstituted to become intelligible as mediations.
Klein contends that the extraphenomenological conceptions utilized in clinical psychoanalysis—notions like development, defense, resolution, repression, and transference—have not much to do with mechanisms. But it is perfectly reasonable to ask how transference operates and to insist that one does not understand the term without the explanation.
1 he difficulty is augmented by the second dichotomy: cause vs. meaning:
Psychoanalysis is, therefore, in the class of theories that concern themselves with the “why” of behavior, that try to state reasons rather than causes, that try to say that a behavior has a certain meaning, derived from the history of this meaning in the person’s life, that try to speak of the psychical functions through which the meaning is expressed. Thus to say that a wish is repressed explains a behavior without specifying how repression is accomplished. 59
But, the split between meaning and cause only compounds the difficulty and threatens to turn a legitimate concern with meanings and intentions into sheer mystification or a plea for ignorance. Meanings and causes are not contradictory notions. Causality sometimes operates through physical forces and other times through human comprehension and purpose. If there were not causal agency operating through meaning all learning would become impossible and human consciousness itself, unintelligible. The common experience of being required by the evidence to assert a given conclusion is sufficient warrant for believing that our grasp of meaning on one occasion has causal influence over our meaningful judgments on others.
Furthermore, if meanings were not causally linked, their real concatenations and distortions in the actual lives of human beings would be unintelligible. To say that behavior has “a meaning derived from the history of this meaning in the person’s life” either begs the question through tautology or simply reintroduces the notion of cause under the rubric of “derivation.”
An array of events becomes coherent (1) when a leading element, an organizing principle of the array, can be specified, and (2) when the clues or carriers of this leading element —its mediation —can also be specified. 60
This comment of Klein’s seems to me an acknowledgment of the role of causal mediation in the construction of intelligible account of human activity.
I believe that Klein obscures this point because he focuses on particular intentions and meanings rather than the notion of “intention” or “meaning” itself. A new metapsychology which intends to ground clinical practice cannot avoid this task. Klein touches this issue in his interesting and important discussion of repression. The heart of his approach to repression is the replacement of the energy model of cathexis and anticathexis with the notion of “a gap in comprehension.” 61 T his notion involves a “meaning schema” which continues to influence conscious thought and behavior, though its effects are uncomprehended. The schema remains dissociated from the person’s self-conception. “A dynamically unconscious idea is denied the attributes of self-relatedness,
is excluded from the self as agent, self as object, and self as locus.”* 2 The crux of the process is not the banishment of an idea from consciousness, but a failure to comprehend the meaning of the idea, which continues to operate in the quest for gratification, but without responsiveness to the consequences of the person’s acts.
There is a great deal in this account that marks a real improvement over traditional psychoanalytic emphasis on forbidden and banished forces. The view has strong affinities with a Marxist notion of alienation as the loss of control over the direction of the agent's continued activity. But the fundamental issue of the metapsychology of meaning remains unresolved. Klein cites approvingly Merleau-Ponty’s contention that while meaning is always lived out consciously, “not all such 'lived meanings are understood, i.e., cognitively represented.” To say that a meaning is being lived out only “unconsciously” can only mean that “comprehension of the leading element of a schema is lacking.” 63 I hus, although meaning is always lived out in experience, these “experiences may not include comprehension of their meaning.” 64
We are therefore left with a dichotomy between consciously lived out meanings and consciously lived out meanings that are not understood. The problem is confounded by the fact that “consciousness is taken to mean an experienced integration of meaning." 6,1 What, however, can we make of the notion of an “uncomprehended meaning,” or an “experienced integration of meaning” that is not understood? Are we being offered a form of Platonic theory in which meanings can persist independently of the agent who would entertain them? Perhaps the notion is plausible. It is at least clear that the idea of such a detached meaning raises questions that need to be pursued, and it is equally clear that Klein does not pursue them. That is why I conclude that the foundation of the new metapsychology has not been completed.
I alluded a few pages earlier to a second major difficulty in the newer attempts at metapsychology: their almost total avoidance of the social dimension of human activity. In regard to the neurophysical theories this lacunae is no surprise; the body is hardly a place to perceive the origins, as distinct from the effects, of social existence. It is somewhat more surprising that writers like Schafer and Klein remain within so limited a perspective. More than any other consideration this repetition of traditional psychoanalytic parochialism indicates how tenaciously Freud’s recluctionism has persisted in what appear to be novel forms. The substitution of object relations and interpersonal meanings for Freudian tension reduction merely instinctualizes some variant of the nuclear family, a position already present in Freud’s account. The source of meaning is as narrowly prescribed as the source of cathectic behavior in the orthodox position. Two brief illustrations will have to suffice.
In distinguishing his own position from that of existentialism Klein notes that the
analyst will not rest with the assumption that intentionality is exhausted in what the patient is able to avow consciously; he does not believe that he is abandoning the objective of reading the patient’s own vantage point when he looks for directives which even the patient himself cannot admit. . . . However. any account of such disavowed aims must encompass what the subject can experience or insists upon as the "real” reasons. 66
Now here is it suggested that social mystification may make it impossible for the client or the analyst to grasp the connection between accessible and inaccessible dimensions of experience. It is assumed that psychoanalytic practice is sufficient to raise the veil that separates the agent's meaning from the larger existence of the social world. In other words, the reasons for our acts are viewed as not only residing in our individual psyches but as originating in individual consciousness as well.
An even more mystifying illustration of the same social naivete occurs in the course of Klein’s discussion of active reversal of passive experience—the capacity of the individual to initiate experiences that have previously been imposed. The significance of repetition is not that it is an expression of a primary drive to constancy, nirvana, and death; rather, it represents the tendency to “recreate in an active mode an event that has been passively experienced as in some respect unacceptable, unrelated’ or alien to the self.” 67 By actively creating what was previously a matter of alien imposition, the self becomes integrated, syntonic, and capable of mastery of its world.
The functional importance of such repetition of experience is that it produces a form of control or integration: the self is able to make the experience happen. The basic aim is to “own" the experience; its alien status and disconnectedness from the self are reduced by a self-governed re-experiencing of it. 68
Thus a basic assumption of the principle is that to “ make sense out of' things and to bring them into connection with a continuing self-identity is a f undamental tendency of development. We “own" our experiences as we own an object. Conversely, an object may be perceived as strange or uncanny, with an accompanying feeling of “not making sense,” of discontinuity. Just as the hammer in one’s hand to make a table is a tool experienced as an extension of the self, so can the table be experienced as “my table” as against a “table made for me.” When events have been thoroughly self-accommodated they are no longer focally experienced. It is when discordance appears—experiences that cannot be "placed,” that “don’t fit,” in short, that have no ready reference point to the self—that we have a condition for focal awareness, with consequent efforts toward making the discrepancy self-syntonic [emphasis added]. 69
These are marvelously illuminating passages—when read in their social context. That we do indeed “own our experiences as we own an object” is the heart of the matter. For the form of ownership to w hich we are subject is precisely the form of commodity fetishism—the tendency for our social relations to take the character of entities imposed on us, beyond our choice and understanding. So, on Klein’s account, we should expect our selves to be equally reified. But this fetishism, which converts our agency into passivity, is not a private aberration derived from the misfortunes of childhood, ft is a necessary form of the pathology of capitalism, a form of mystification “which has its origin ... in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces [it].” 70
To own our experience as we own such commodities is to stand in a fetishized relationship to our own selves; to perceive ourselves under the form of the commodity—private, alien, imposed, and beyond human determination. But what of the reversal of voice, the change from passivity to agency? Pathetically, such reversal is the exact form of selfsubordination of capitalist democracy, the procedure by which we come to adopt, as “our own,” the forms of domination previously imposed upon us. Because Klein deals only with the superficial form of reversal, the deeper structure and f undamental content of the system is ignored.
Yet bourgeois democracy operates precisely through the mechanism that requires individuals to impose upon themselves “voluntarily” what has been previously inflicted by the power of others. It is the illusion of self-determination that is the heart of liberal ideology. Our selves, unhappily, are as much or as little our own as the commodities that surround and infiltrate our being. On this point Klein is certainly correct. The social relations through which our selves are produced are the same social relations through which we ostensibly “grow” and are “humanized.” These are social relations that function as the simultaneous ground of domination and the illusion of self-mastery. We learn to “make happen” on our “own” what is required for the reproduction of the system in which our forced compliance is a continuing necessity.
It is striking that Klein refers to the extension of selfhood in the hammer as a tool and the table as an artifact of our construction. For if applied to the massive forms of corporate property which in fact dominate our lives, the illustrations would immediately announce their absurdity.
With increasing bureaucratization, it becomes plain to all who would see that man is to a very important degree controlled by his social relations to the instruments of production. This can no longer seem only a tenet of Marxism, but a stubborn fact to be acknowledged by all. quite apart from their ideological persuasion. Bureaucratization makes readily visible what was previously dim and obscure. More and more people discover that to work, they must be
The Demystification of Freudian Theory 129
employed. For to work, one must have tools and equipment. And the tools and equipment are increasingly available only in bureaucracies, private or public [emphasis added]. 71
It is only through the guise of individual subjectivity, the illusion that what appears to us in our consciousness is the determining force of social life rather than its outcome, that the reference to tool and table makes any claim to sense. Unfortunately, the hammer and the table are forms of property as consumption, the results of a system of production whose power over us is so massively alien as to defy the parameters of Klein’s considerations. It is not merely that the wood and the hammer must themselves be purchased at prices that are imposed, or that the table we construct is made for a home whose social properties and costs fluctuate beyond our will. These are minor points. The basic fact is that what we make privately, what we consume through our own efforts, takes its meaning from the converse realm of alienated power, of corporate property and bureaucratic domination against whose impervious presence the very meaning of private self-determination receives its fragile illusion.
What is particularly striking in Klein’s account is its illuminating, if inadvertent, revelation of the ideological functions of individual therapy. Therapy is the paradigm of self-delusion in an age of democratic capitalism. For in therapy the ultimate forms of power which shape selfhood are bracketed. The changes admittedly wrought in the lives of individuals through therapeutic encounters are presented through the powerful, if unspoken, assumption that such transformations are the basic forms of human development. In the quiet seclusion of a private office, through the means of contractual exchange, a journey is undertaken into the self through the retracing of its history, the excavation of its childhood, the reliving of its ancient chaos. The realms of being are suspended; the stubborn obduracy of social life detached; the modes of culture, history, public life, and political obligation severed from the interior passage of the self through its own incommensurate labyrynth. In the immense dyad of the therapist and client the minuscule infinity of the world is effaced. The cries of the wretched are more difficult to hear; the new alchemy of private transubstantiation need not be distracted by their intervention. The alien power of the world has been contained, though “tragically” affirmed, through the power of rational technique to remake the human psyche. Individuals, in their separateness, can declare themselves, again, the ultimate source of their own being, the ultimate power of their own affliction and transformation. What can be individually purchased, lived and possessed is marked again as the measure of reality. Like the tool and the artifact, therapy is itself another form of private consumption:
The categories of bourgeois economy . . . consist of forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. 72
We need only replace the reference to bourgeois economy with bourgeois therapy to maintain the relevance of Marx’s account. For therapy remains the paradigmatic illustration of the reversal of voices, expressing with “social validity,” that is, as an accurate reflection of the relations of pathological social power, the relegation of individual selfcontrol to a realm of subordinate self-deception.
It is now possible to look back upon the two criticisms I have made of the neometapsychology and note their connection. The fact that the new position does not trace its metapsychological assumptions to their roots simplifies the avoidance of social categories. It becomes stylish to talk of meanings, purposes, and intentions without noting the particular manner in which human agency is structured in its social dimension, its class context, its economic exploitation. The cast of humanism is worn easily through the lightness of its mantle. It is particularly ironic for psychoanalytic thought, which congratulates itself so effusively for its tragic view of life, its willingness—as opposed to the brief, and superficial counterfeit therapies—to look hard into the eyes of truth, to remain so smugly unaware of the grounds of social evil that surround its modest enclave. We need by all means to look at human agency and meaning. But we need to see them as they are disfigured in the world which simultaneously forms them and receives them again in contours beyond their “original” intention.
In conclusion, we have determined that Freud’s work cannot be dichotomized. Neither the metapsychology nor the clinical practice can be independently preserved. The demystification of Freud’s theory must proceed differently, and it is to this task that we now proceed.
CHAPTER FIVE