Psychoanalysis, Buddhism and the person. (include sresponse)(comment on article by Jonathan Spencer, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 3, p. 693)
Alexandra Ourossoff
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol.4 No.4 Dec 1998 pp.795-798
COPYRIGHT @ Royal Anthropological Institute (UK)
¡@
There is as yet no commonly accepted theoretical understanding of
the specific social reality of unconscious experience. So it is a
matter of some interest when an article appears in this Journal that
sets out to compare the psychoanalytic concept of the person with an
apparently similar concept found within the Buddhist canon (Spencer,
J. Fatima and the enchanted toffees: an essay in contingency,
narrative and therapy. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 3, 693-710).
The ostensible aim of Spencer's article is to compare Buddhist and
Freudian ideas about the person and suggest that concepts that
emphasize contingency may be particularly useful in situations of
acute personal affliction. He may be right. The problem is that the
notion of a contingent self bears no relation to the Freudian
concept of the person. This misunderstanding, combined with a lack
of ethnographic evidence showing how the concept relates to social
practice in the Western context, would appear to leave little basis
for his comparison.
Spencer extracts the 'psychoanalytic' concept of the person from a
body of theory that is becoming increasingly influential. Its most
widely read representatives are Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty and Adam
Phillips. What unites these authors, despite their considerable
differences, is an indifference towards the highly variable
emotional relations through which each person's unconscious world is
realized. The motive implicit in their criteria of irrelevance
presumably unconscious - is to promote a collapse of the subtle and
complex process of unconscious formation into the present.
One consequence of abstracting from the body of psychoanalytic
theory which does acknowledge emotional variations between family
histories is an acute awareness of the extraordinary degree to which
the child's emotional struggle with the social world determines the
conscious life of the adult. This awareness, taken together with a
rich understanding of culture, leaves no room for human agency and
the illusion of a self-directed consciousness that the concept of
agency invariably assumes.
Spencer's principal objective seems to be to ward off the
consequences of this awareness. He suggests that the same person may
hold two concepts of the self. The first is the unstable or
contingent self, which in the Western context, he argues, is derived
from Freudian theory and is conceptualized as the product of a
'concatenation of random events'. The second is the stable self, 'a
robustly bounded individual' associated with the legal concept of
the person and which entails self-directed consciousness.
Spencer (p. 695) supports his version of the psychoanalytic concept
of the person with an extract from the last page of Freud's study of
Leonardo (which Freud never counted as one of his case histories):
If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it
is simply a relapse into the pious view of the universe which
Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the
sun does not move ... We are all too ready to forget that in fact
everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the
meeting of the spermatozoon and ovum onwards.
But the full quotation reveals a somewhat different meaning:
If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it
is simply a relapse into the pious view of the universe which
Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the
sun does not move. We naturally feel hurt that a just God and a
kindly providence do not protect us better from such influences
during the most defenceless period of our lives. At the same time we
are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our
life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of the
spermatozoon and ovum onwards - chance which nevertheless has a
share in the law and necessity of nature, and which merely lacks any
connection with our wishes and illusions. The apportioning of the
determining factors of our life between the 'necessities' of our
constitution and the 'chances' of our childhood may still be
uncertain in detail; but in general it is no longer possible to
doubt the importance precisely of the first years of our childhood.
We all still show too little respect for Nature which (in the
obscure words of Leonardo which recall Hamlet's lines) 'is full of
countless causes ['ragioni'] that never enter experience'.
Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless
experiments in which these ragioni of nature force their way into
experience (Freud 1963: 186).
It is clear Freud is arguing against a supernatural explanation of
the not uncommon feeling of being a slave to chance and in favour of
an explanation in terms of historical causes that do not enter
conscious experience.
Closing his eyes to the all-important sentences allows Spencer,
following Rorty, to equate events not the result of conscious
design, 'that merely lack any connection with our wishes and
illusions' with events that have no cause. The effect of this simple
equivocation is to erase both the content and intention of Freud's
work.
One does not have to be a convinced Freudian to recognize that Freud
was attempting to unveil the underlying principles of neurosis
(which for him was a relative concept) without denying the diversity
of its forms of expression, the uniqueness that is, of the
individual. Reducing the complex principles of unconscious processes
to a series of random (unintelligible) events effectively mystifies
these processes by placing them beyond our theoretical grasp. (For a
far more elaborated version of this same reductive abstraction see
Phillips 1993.)
But it also - and this I believe is the point of the exercise -
protects the idea of a self-directed consciousness by positing
instability as its only alternative and thereby eliminating the
possibility of a relatively stable, rational consciousness
determined by unconscious necessity.
The real drawback of the current wave of pseudo-synthesizing of
Freudian theory is that it contributes to the foreclosing of
important questions of history and culture. The comparative study of
the child's emotional struggle with the social world has, for
example, increased our understanding of the highly variable capacity
of individuals for creativity and has led to a number of penetrating
descriptions of the relation between creativity and the process of
unconscious formation (see, for example, Milner 1987.) The value of
this body of knowledge is its potential to allow for the progressive
shift from seeing the ethnographic subject as a passive conduit of
inherited cultural consciousness to seeing him/her as an independent
and imaginative person, capable of the creative reworking of
inherited consciousness without resorting to the illusion of
intentionality (an illusion which is in serious danger of becoming
permanently incorporated into the 'experience' of the ethnographic
subject.)
Whether or not one agrees with this particular perspective, the
issue Spencer's article raises is the state of an intellectual
culture willing to take seriously such a fundamental misreading of
one of this century's most influential thinkers.
ALEXANDRA OUTOUSSOFF London School of Economics & Political Science
Freud, S. 1963. Leonardo. Harmondsworth; Penguin.
Milner, M. 1987. The suppressed madness of sane men. London, New
York: Routledge.
Phillips, A. 1993, Contingency for beginners. Raritan 13, 54-72,
Ricoeur, P. 1970. Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation
(trans.) D. Savage. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press.
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Univ.
Press.
In an excellent article a few years ago Alexandra Ouroussoff(1993)
rightly castigated anthropologists for confusing the pieties of
liberal political philosophy with the real idioms and actions of
'modem' people living in the 'West'. Using her own ethnography from
a study of a major transnational corporation in Britain she
addressed the question of the circumstances in which people 'define
themselves as individuals': 'how precisely the lines of choice and
constraint are drawn in a social context where people imagine
themselves to be determining agents' (Ouroussoff 1993: 287). In my
article I posed the question: 'in what contexts ... do
"individualistic" ideas of personhood predominate and in what
contexts are they downplayed or denied? When is the self most easily
viewed as stable and enduring, and when is it better understood as a
temporary product of an idiosyncratic history?' (1997: 694). All
would seem set, then, for an interesting intellectual conversation,
based on our provisional answers to these questions: in Ouroussoff's
case, managers imagine themselves to be agents, workers are more
candid about the constraints of structure; in my case from Sri
Lanka, people normally talk as if they possess stable selves, but
appeal to much more decentred, evanescent notions of subjectivity in
moments of intense affliction.
Already it is clear that our projects at once overlap (in the desire
to problematize 'the concept of the person' through an ethnography
of 'person-talk'), but also differ. Ouroussoff is concerned to
expose the 'illusion of intentionality' and the impossible dichotomy
between freedom and constraint on which, she says, the Western myth
of the Western individual is based. I was surprised to learn that
'protecting this illusion does appear to be the principal task of
Spencer's article', as I had thought that my aims were a little
different. I was struck by the apparent formal similarities between
Rorty's reading of Freud and the accounts I had read of the Buddhist
doctrine of anatta or denial of the self. At this level of
abstraction - and explicitly avoiding all appeal to what Freud (or
the Buddha) 'really' meant - I found I could make some sense of my
own ethnographic data from a case of spirit possession in Sri Lanka
and also begin to make more sense of the strengths and weaknesses of
a book that has haunted me from the time I first read it in 1981,
Obeyesekere's (1981) Medusa's hair. In all this I had very little to
say about agency and intention: in the Abstract I refer to spirit
possession as an 'idiom of displaced agency', and later in the
article I refer to the relationship between passivity and
authenticity in local understandings of possession - 'any suggestion
of agency or authenticity on her part would render the whole
diagnosis suspect' (1997: 704). That is all I say on these topics.
There is a simple reason for this reticence. Buddhist teaching on
the self at once denies the reality of the self as a 'permanent,
everlasting and unchanging entity' (Rahula 1967: 51), yet insists on
the importance of 'intention' or 'volition' (cetana) as the motive
force in its ethicized doctrine of karma (cf. Collins 1982: 201;
Gombrich 1971: 244-68). The karmic force of an action depends not on
the outcome of the act, but on the intention of the actor, while
intention itself can never occur in a vacuum but is always
'conditioned' by its own karmic precursors. In other words, the
doctrinal teaching on the person links together apparently familiar
(or at least translatable) notions which might correspond to words
like 'self' or 'person', 'intention' or 'agency', but does so in a
quite different configuration from the one described by Ouroussoff:
the self is an illusion, but intention is real. What makes the self
real or illusory, in this view, is not especially an issue of
intention or agency; it is rather an issue of stability or
permanence. This question of stability or permanence was at the
heart of my article and Rorty's reading of Freud alerted me to a
possible parallel on this dimension. In particular, it allowed me to
isolate one implication of Freud's work - what Rorty (1989: 30)
calls his 'de-divinization' of the self - without involving my
argument in the whole elaborate superstructure of Freudian
metapsychology. This seemed ambitious enough for one article.
Much of the confusion is a result of the different emphases in
Ouroussoff's use of 'contingent' (causeless, non-necessary) and mine
(changing, non-stable, it could be otherwise). My argument should be
clear enough in the following passage:
The Buddhist position shares a number of features with the reading
of Freud put forward by Ricoeur and Rorty. Both are based on the
idea of a pervasive causality, although the law of cause and effect
in Buddhism (karma) is moral - good begets good and bad begets bad -
whereas Freud's is disturbingly amoral. Both are based on some idea
which we can gloss as 'desire' ... as a kind of final cause in the
whole system. And both explicitly undermine our reassuring
assumptions about our selves as stable, enduring essences, replacing
them with histories of infinite potential complexity (1997: 696).
Here, as elsewhere in my article, my use of the word 'history'
should indicate my interest in Ouroussoff's 'important questions'.
And, if one is interested in the idea of creativity without
intentionality which she raises in the penultimate paragraph of her
letter, I would refer her again to Obeyesekere's exemplary analysis
of just these issues in Medusa's hair.
Rereading Ouroussoff's comments, I have a growing sense that I have
stumbled into someone else's argument. Ouroussoff's real beef would
seem to be with Rorty (although a careful reading of his original
words would reveal more agreement with Ouroussoff than she
acknowledges), or more likely Phillips. I wish her well in these
controversies, even as I would beg to be excused from my temporary
role as surrogate victim, even for such luminaries as these. (Oddly
enough, I disagree with them too.) What I admired in Ouroussoff's
article on the illusions of the liberal tradition was the creative
interplay between broad intellectual history and insightful
ethnographic data. Her larger project is a serious and important
one. As there are enough people out there who really do hold the
views she is attacking - a small but increasingly insistent outbreak
of anthropological neoliberalism has recently been spotted to the
north of my office - it hardly seems necessary to impute them to
someone who doesn't.
JONATHAN SPENCER University of Edinburgh
Collins, S. 1982. Selfless persons: imager and thought in Theravada
Buddhism. Cambridge: Univ. Press.
Gombrich, R. 1971. Precept and practice: traditional Buddhism in the
rural highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Obeyesekere, G. 1981. Medusa's hair: an essay on personal symbols
and religious experience. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Ouroussoff, A. 1993. Illusions of rationality: false premisses of
the liberal tradition. Man (N.S.) 28, 281-98.
Rahula, W. 1967. What the Buddha taught (2nd edn). London: Gordon
Fraser.
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency. irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Univ.
Press.