References
- I owe thanks to Dr. Joel Kovel for permission to quote from unpublished material presented at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. I also thank him, and Sandy Levy, for commenting on earlier versions of this work. My initial research on this topic was in preparation for a thesis presented to St. Andrew's University under Terry Bloomfield; my time there was financed by the Rotary Educational Foundation. My thanks to those involved. My conclusions are my own, not those of any person named.
- Casey (1976, 207). Casey sets forth some of the historical dichotomies by which this neglect has been organized. This account I give here comes from this article. (Hereinafter works are cited in text by year and page number.)
- Harney (1978). Although this essay makes liberal use of Ricoeur's analysis, the author's approving citation of such critics of Freud as Sartre and Szasz (p. 71) causes me to wonder whether she, like Ricoeur, believes that analytic discourse must retain some language of force, an energetics.
- One might generalize this objection by re-writing his own retort to Freud (1971, 241) to read: it is not clear according to what rules (other than grammatical rules) paleosymbols could be connected with language. It is precisely the lack of grammatical relations which makes them prelinguistic. Further, I wonder if it is appropriate to cite developmental studies by Werner and Kaplan as evidence for an organization that ‘can only be disclosed on the basis of the data of speech pathology and by means of dream analysis’ (1970, 212). I think that Habermas would be better advised to question the central role he gives to grammar rather than append the paleosymbol to his system.
- Winch (1958) charged that Weber's use of social concepts involved an equivocation. Are they meant to be based upon and subject to correction by frequency of occurrence of an instance of x, or are they meant to be categorical, hence prior to its classification as an x? Habermas presents a parallel, but more complicated version of this dilemma. Is socialization (whether deviant or no) to be understood as a statistical accounting of actual practices, as these are defined in common sense terms, or does Habermas have in mind some relations discernible between the meaning of a symptom and internal representations of childhood experience? Although Freud did not deny that practices had effects, his remarks on the lack of a correlation show that general failure of psychologists to successfully base caretaking pattern-adult personality predictions on psychoanalaysis was to be expected. Habermas's position appears unclear.
- It may be that these early ‘dependent communications’ in the child tongue on the part of infants that psychoanalysis would say are incompletely individuated are the phenomena Habermas has in mind when he suggests that paleosymbols belong to ‘an earlier level of communication’ (1970, 214). If so, then I would respond that (1) my questions in the text still stand because he wants to introduce these units into psychoanalytic explanation rather than use them as a supplement to it (as I do) and (2) his emphasis on language as a system requires him to treat information that can be more correctly located in the intersubjective field of the child as somehow coded into the paleosymbolic unit itself.
- I should note that Freud's challenge applies to the phenomenological argument I make against Habermas on pages 15 and 16 to the effect that intentionality inevitably exceeds expression in language, but is in accord with my general point that the linguistic model is too narrow.
WORKS CITED
- Adorno, T. ‘Sociology and Psychology.’ New Left Review, 47 (1968), 79–97.
- Casey, E. ‘The Image/Sign Relation in Husserl and Freud.’ Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XXX No. 2 (1976), 207–225.
- Habermas, J. Knowledge and Human Interests, trans, by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
- Habermas, J. ‘On Systematically Distorted Communication.’ Inquiry, 13 (1970), 205–218.
- Halliday, M.A.K. ‘One Child's Protolanguage’ in Before Speech, ed. by M. Bullewa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- Hamey, M. ‘Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics.’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 9 No. 2, 71–81.
- Kovel, J.: ‘Things and Words: Metapsychology and the Historical Point of View.’ Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Vol. 1 No. 1 (1978), 21–88.
- Nelson, K. ‘The Role of Language in Infant Development’ in Psychological Development from Infancy, ed. by M. Bornstein & W. Kessen. Hillsdale New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979.
- Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans, by Denis Savage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970.
- Ricoeur, P. ‘Ethics and Culture.’ Philosophy Today, Vol. 17 No. 2/4 (1973), 150–165.
- Ricoeur, P. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
- Winch, P. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.