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ABSTRACT
This essay considers the two-way relation between critical realism and psychoanalysis. Critical realism vindicates and deepens our understanding of ontology by drawing on the sciences for which it underlabours. From its original through its dialectical and metaReal forms, critical realist ontology develops its relation to psychoanalysis. (1) In its original form, it relates depth ontology to the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, ideas of mental mechanism and unconscious motivation. (2) Dialectical critical realism develops the general ontology/ particular science relation to psychoanalysis by focusing on complexity and interelationality through concepts such as the compromise formation, entity relationism, dispositional identity and holistic causality. (3) There is further convergence around an ontology of love, where critical realism in its metaReal form may draw on Freud’s later structural metapsychology. This strand in Freudian metapsychology considers love central to the human animal who feels and thinks. These capacities ground the possibility of deep metaphysical (metaReal) experience.
Notes on contributor
Alan Norrie is Professor of Law at Warwick University, UK. He is a former President of the International Association for Critical Realism, and the author among other books of Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (Routledge, 2010). He is at present working on a book on moral psychology and criminal justice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This paper was presented at a plenary panel at the annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism, held at Southampton University, 29 July–2 August 2019. Andrew Collier, whose work I discuss, taught for many years at Southampton, and was the subject of a panel at the conference. This essay remembers his contribution to critical realism. I thank Nick Hostettler, Doug Porpora, Craig Reeves and Amanda Wilson for comments from which the paper has profited.
2 By ‘science’, I mean the broad sense of the term found in both critical realism and the accounts of psychoanalytic method considered here. Critical realism argues that any science must be adequate to its object, so that in the human sciences, it must reflect the role that subjective meaning and action play in any possible naturalist scientific explanation. In psychoanalysis, Jonathan Lear’s (Citation1990) account, discussed below, of a ‘science of human subjectivity’ reflects a similar concern with how human being in nature may be understood. Compare the titles of Bhaskar (Citation1979) and Lear (Citation1990) and see note 8 below.
3 My discussion is mainly limited to this particular strand. I do not extend broadly across the range of psychoanalytic approaches, for example, in terms of object relations, or poststructuralist, or feminist forms. I do however draw on Melanie Klein’s (Citation1997, Citation1998) work to discuss persecutory ethics below, and also on Jessica Benjamin (Citation1988, Citation2018), whose feminist psychoanalysis develops an important account of love.
4 Collier (Citation1994, 217–224). Collier described psychoanalysis as one of three disciplines where critical realism had made an exemplary intervention, the others being socio-linguistics and economics.
5 For other discussion of the relationship between critical realism and psychoanalysis, see Clarke (Citation2007), Kran (Citation2010), Pilgrim (Citation2017). For an important and novel critical realist account of citizenship under late capitalism based in psychoanalysis, see Dean (Citation2003). For path-breaking critical realist discussion of love, see Gunnarson (Citation2014). For a critical standpoint on the relation, see Archer, Citation2003, 38.
6 I suggest in the fourth section that the core ontological point about mental mechanism concerns the capacity of the human mind to become ‘enformed’ and ‘to represent itself in terms of what is inside it and what is outside’ (Lear, Citation2017, 196).
7 ‘we must credit Freud with extending, through the concept of the unconscious, the range of application of the concepts of belief and desire, and hence of the scope of the pattern of the naturalistic explanation of human action’ (Bhaskar, Citation1979, 123).
8 The links between critical realism and the kind of psychoanalytic theory discussed here extend into questions of philosophical method, where a transcendental realist mode of enquiry sustains both. Critical realism’s question is ‘what the world must be like for such-and-such a human activity to be possible’ (Bhaskar Citation2016, 25). Compare Lear: ‘I have been inquiring what the world must be like, given the psychoanalytic understanding of human existence’ (Lear, Citation1990, 143). He adds that this resembles a Kantian position, except that the enquiry is not a priori or independent of experience. What would turn his into a basic critical realist account would be the kind of depth realism canvassed in this section, recognising the need for a posteriori retroduction from observation to theory development. Lear’s later account of Loewald’s philosophical roots in Kant (Lear, Citation1998, 316–317) invites resolution by a transcendental realist position.
9 The idea of stratified levels of being identified by different sciences implies both a locus of sui generis activity and limits on it in any case. I read Bhaskar to be saying more: that sociology and physiology circumscribe the autonomy of psychology because of the greater import of these two levels in explaining human activity. If it were simply a standard matter of how different levels interact, there would be no need for the additional comment on what it is ‘reasonable’ to deduce.
10 The second sentence is opaque. It relates to the fact that historical change is central to a dialectical account of identity, so that ‘to be is not only just to be able to do, but to be able to become’ (Bhaskar Citation1993, 77). The development and change implied by this formula are central to the dispositional quality of identity.
11 I use ‘metaphysics’ because I want to take in both Collier’s ‘Spinozism’ and Bhaskar’s metaReality, though I eventually focus more on the latter. It is a tricky term in that it can denote (1) the general commitments in any intellectual position as well as (2) a more specific sense of underlying spiritual or universal connections. It is (2) that is developed by Bhaskar in his account of metaReality, by Collier in his reflections on Spinoza, and by Freud in his reaching out to the ‘divine Plato’ and also Paul (Freud, Citation1985, 119). From the point of view of (1), however, one can say that a critical realist metaphysics that includes the early commitments to depth, structure and change and spiritual/ universal elements (metaphysics in the more specific second sense) represents its most adequate representation. I use the more specific meaning in what follows to cover a range of spiritual or universal approaches caught by the term. My thanks to Craig Reeves for reflections on this.
12 Margaret Archer is critical of these claims for psychoanalysis, arguing that the analyst starts from the position of knowing another’s mind better than the person herself (Archer, Citation2003, 38). Yet, that can be said to happen in all human relations, at least some of the time (see Lear, Citation1998, 24–25; cf from a non-psychoanalytic perspective MacIntyre Citation2016, 161–162). To see the general nature of how we share understanding is not to discount the ontological significance of first person accounts or indeed the possibility for abuse in the analytical setting.
13 It is true that love may be observed in Bhaskar’s dialectical work in various immanent forms, including his accounts of freedom and solidarity and the eudaimonic state of the flourishing of each and all. Ideas of underlying universal identity and love are unnamed yet present. It was, however, still an important step to deepen the analysis by making the implicit explicit.
14 This section draws on Loewald (Citation1980) and Lear (Citation1990, Citation1998, Citation2015) as well as Benjamin (Citation1988). I have developed the argument more fully in connection with guilt in Norrie (Citation2018, Citationforthcoming).
15 The ego is created out of love and itself is an entity invested with love: love takes on the form of an ego. The enforming of libido energy (the id) as a working ego sees it ‘forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object … by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too – I am so like the object’’ (Freud, Citation1984, 369).
16 There is also of course the later phase of superego formation, but I focus here on the ego, since it is its development that sees love move from animal drive to mental process, from ‘the flesh’ to ‘the word’. On the superego and guilt, see Norrie Citation2018, Citationforthcoming.
17 ‘To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?’ (Kaufmann Citation2000, 493). There are two questions here, how the particular human animal can make promises, and how a particular human capacity becomes translated into a legal right. The first question is addressed by psychoanalysis, while the second, an enquiry in human action, law and politics, is not reducible to it. Nietzsche's question short-circuits the issue.