What is homo psychoanalyticus?¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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• The conception of homo psychoanalyticus is my own, and a Vision in Schumpeter’s term, and hence is not necessarily one that all those with psychoanalytic sympathies would in toto subscribe to or agree with, although I would hope they would agree to the majority of it. It was cobbled together and regurgitated from the various thinkers, as well as my own experience in analysis. It throws up many philosophical problems probably the most pressing of which is the notion that homo psychoanalyticus has no direct contact with reality outside of transference. I find the notion psychoanalytically very convincing, but philosophically very troubling – prima facie it seems to damn us to some kind of relativism or antirealism, undoing all the good work of my honours thesis (to add insult to injury). I think this is where Bion comes in given that my impression is that he had a more philosophical bent that most psychoanalysts, but I can’t swear on that yet.  

1. A house divided
   1. By very definition divided – an amalgam or concatenation.
      1. Is in conflict between its various constituent parts.
   2. Sue’s physics metaphor – a collection of unseen metaphors (drives, objects, neuroses, etc.) – a myriad of strange hypothetical postulates that ‘live below the surface’ as it were.
   3. Opaque not transparent – Freud’s iceberg metaphor.
   4. Is difficult to understand not only because he is complex and abstract, but rather he is difficult to comprehend because he is also COUNTER-INTUITIVE – often the comprehension of him runs against our common sense understanding of people, and the world writ large.
   5. Is in conflict between SELF-DECEPTION vs SELF-KNOWLEDGE.
      1. This conflict has a moral component (cf. MIDGLEY) and hence the study of homo psychoanalyticus is not entirely amoral or value-free one (in the way physics and biology are, for example), but by the same token it is not PRIMARILY concerned with moral questions.
         1. He is not something studied by a science, but rather both psychoanalysis and Marxism are both ‘not primarily scientific theories but ideologies, comprehensive attitudes to life, with a strong moral component as well as their factual claims, and that they needed to be judged seriously by the standards appropriate to such general attitudes (Midgley 2006, p. 208).’
            1. Again contra reductionism
      2. As Horney points out, homo psychoanalyticus is essentially a new twist on an old idea (old Manischewitz in new bottles if you will) in so far as self-knowledge is an ancient idea, but homo psychoanalyticus is a (relatively) new creation – a new means – to enable us to explore and achieve this end.
   6. Crazy Gerry (Matte) point – he is caught between two worlds if you will, having both an inner world and an outer world, and again they are often in CONFLICT.
2. Motivation
   1. Is not solely driven by sexual drives even though that is a large aspect of his motivation.
   2. He may or may not be a philosophically determined subject – curiously this actually makes far, far less of a difference than one might think (at this stage at least – that well could change).
   3. Wollheim's metapsychological account of Freud.
3. Philosophically speaking, homo psychoanalyticus is a hermeneutic subject capable of self-interpretation, and this self-interpretation can also necessarily therefore be and mis-interpretation (cf. Taylor + Ricouer).
   1. He transforms his inner world by bringing clarity to confused or inchoate thoughts and feelings by articulating them – often with metaphors + similes, which is contrasted to merely describing them – the difference being that the former changes it while conversely the latter is completely independent of what it describes and hence does not modify it in any way.
      1. Psychoanalysis cannot be done without similes and metaphors
         1. Another reason psychoanalysis is NOT a science!
4. The problem of RATIONALITY
   1. He is far, far, far less ‘rational’ than it likes to think it is – we can imagine Martian visitors readily and easily pointing this out to it!
   2. Mises?
   3. Weber?
   4. Hartmann?
   5. Given his lack ‘rationality’ homo psychoanalyticus is, paradoxically, both a product of the Enlightenment and a critique of the limits of the Enlightenment.
   6. Hirschman?
   7. A rabbit hole, though.
5. The fragility of human flourishing
   1. He exists on a scale between health and pathology with no exact line in the sand between the 2.
   2. The psychoanalytic hour
      1. He is (theoretically) capable of flourishing in the psychoanalytic sense, but this depends largely on the willingness of each particular specimen (if you will), or example, of homo psychoanalyticus to do the hard work in analysis.
         1. His progress in analysis is not solely a matter of self-knowledge, but also a matter of object relating – not just in terms of repressed conflicts but also in terms of aborted development and attachments to old object relations (Ibid., p. 243)."
      2. He can subjected to sofa chair (ZING!) theorising in the abstract, but each individual specimen (as it were) is unique and needs to be taken on its own terms and investigated in and by the psychoanalytic hour.
      3. His progress generally comes from the intense artificial hothouse confines of the psychoanalytic hour – “highly artificial, extreme, bizarre, stressful, in some ways awful situation” (and such progress is the point, obviously), although – theoretically at least – transformation can occur at any time.
   3. He is a concept that has a lot to say about human flourishing, although not the only form of knowledge with a claim on human flourishing by any stretch – again contra reductionism.
6. Subjectivity
   1. He is a SUBJECT that is, he is indissolubly subjective in the Midgleyan (+ Rothbardian) sense
      1. By his very nature he contradicts reductionism.
   2. He has a first-person perspective that cannot be dismissed, downplayed or diminished in any way without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
   3. This means psychoanalysis is NOT a science!
      1. Or a 'science of subjectivity' as my first analyst put it.
      2. Is not a scientific object of study like an atom or a planet.
         1. To take our current problem we can never construct a scientific study to determine whether Tony is deceiving himself or not.
   4. He is a neurological subject – that is, its biology is a relevant aspect of inquiry of homo psychoanalyticus qua homo psychoanalyticus, but is not exhausted by this aspect of inquiry – again contra reductionism (cf. Doidge).
   5. Homo psychoanalyticus is not in any way the ultimate or final account of the human subject – that is, IT IS NOT REDUCTIONIST.
      1. Does not per se attempt to 'colonise' or invalidate homo economicus or homo sociologicus, for example.
         1. This is in sharp contrast to homo psychoanalayticus encroaching on philosophy.
7. Transference
   1. His thoughts, beliefs, feelings and even physiology – in short, his entire WELTANSCHAUUNG, is indelibly influenced by his earliest relationships, and although it is not set in the stone and it may challenge the effects of its earliest relationships it cannot erase them completely (cf. Midgley’s ‘atomism’ + Schwartz’s ‘the Myth of the Man Alone’).
   2. Transference is best seen as a kind of puppet show that it assigns outside objects and plays out in both in his head, and reproduces in the outside world.
   3. HE CAN NEVER KNOW REALITY AS IT IS as he is a being that ‘perceive[s] reality through a veil of unconscious infantile fantasy.’
      1. PSYCHOANALYTICALLY, THIS MAKES SENSE, BUT PHILOSOPHICALLY IT IS VERY TROUBLING!
         1. Sue's point - this might be more of a problem for ANALYTIC philosophers than CONTINENTAL philosophers?
            1. Do we need an embodied, phenomenological account of truth that is quite different to how I tend to think of it?
               1. Another personal Copernican shift?
                  1. Is there where Bion comes in?
8. He is a puzzling enigma – as perhaps is often the case with the social sciences – is often a mix of the foreign and the familiar.
9. Philosophy
   1. Is there a CONFLICT or at least TENSION between philosophy and psychoanalysis?
   2. He exists under the umbrella of philosophy with philosophy being the over-arching metatheory and final arbiter, as do all other non-philosophical subjects.
      1. I think this is the case, but as I've long said I'm not sure if I'm a psychoanalyst doing philosophy or a philosopher doing psychoanalysis!
         1. This one of the most fascinating questions of my thesis and I don't think I will be able to answer it anytime soon!
      2. This provides for the possibility of philosophy bringing CLARITY to PA.
   3. My WORKING MODEL (NOT set in stone) is that philosophy attends to the epistemological aspects, while psychoanalysis deals with the motivations and inner workings of the self-deceiving subject.
      1. Most contentiously in this view homo psychoanalyticus may have encroached and taken over some ground that previously belonged to philosophy as I believe self-deception is NOW a psychoanalytic issue even if it wasn't always.
         1. How might pre-PA thinkers have dealt with 'Tony's Problem'?!?