Jeffrey Bloechl
Lecture delivered at Third Annual Conference of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Federal University of Brazil – São Paolo, November 24, 2010.
I.
Philosophy seems bound to interpret the question of the status of psychoanalytic concepts as a question of determining what are the best resources and criteria for careful reflection (Jacques Lacan’s turn to new philosophies of language is only the most impressive example of this). What will the most rigorous form of investigation available enable us to determine about claims or notions that clinical work judges essential to the articulation of its experience and goals? This question begs another one: what truly is the most rigorous form of reflection available to us today?
To be sure, this question, which is precisely a question of method, can be interesting for philosophy itself when it is a matter specifically of clinical practice, including in the specific case of psychoanalysis that will occupy us here. After all, clinical practice is inhabited by a twofold complication that is virtually unique among the sciences (I use this term “sciences” loosely). On one hand, it remains irreducibly divided between commitments that are ultimately biological and commitments that are, in the German sense of the word, spiritual. It must therefore be the working hypothesis of the therapeutic practice that each symptom has components that are originally somatic, fundamentally psychic or some combination of the two. And this of course requires the therapy to address each such symptom as the manifestation of any number of processes along a line of development that is, in the final account, highly specific to the case at hand (and this specificity presents a considerable challenge to philosophy, which will insist on universal concepts). On the other hand, clinical practice thus also has good reason to remain on guard against systematic philosophy, whether it be metaphysical or epistemological, since systems tend to interpret each new case and each new manifestation within a predefined framework—or, to put the matter crudely, there is always the risk that a system will tend to find in each new instance further confirmation of what it is already intent on establishing. Considered together, these two features of clinical practice signal an effort to grasp human being in the full range of its positivity at a level, or in a concrete specificity, that resists easy capture by this or that reduction—reduction to the effects of anterior biological impulses, reduction to the effects of transcultural and transhistorical rule of language, law and order—so that, it seems to me, any and all concepts that may be invoked in the name of theoretical interpretation must be given a status that is only provisional. I think Antoine Vergote had something like this in view (though considerably more than this) when, already a long time ago, he spoke of psychoanalysis as an “internal limit of philosophy.”[1] If philosophy wishes to take seriously the insights emerging from psychoanalytic experience while respecting the conditions under which those insights do emerge, then philosophy opens itself to a source that cannot be tamed by the stable order of concepts, though of course concepts are needed in order to articulate the experience in question.
At a level of some abstraction, this suggests that the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalytic practice is dialectical (and indeed, Paul Bercherie has argued this at some length, both with regard to the emergence and use of specifically psychoanalytic concepts, and with regard to the development of those concepts within Freud’s own thinking).[2] At the point of contact between experience and concept, there is a pressing need for philosophical work toward a method capable of receiving the “things themselves” as they present themselves specifically in the practice. And as that way of putting it already implies, such a method has been proposed by the phenomenologists.
II.
We might preface any prolonged attention to phenomenology by reminding ourselves of a classic passage that highlights the particular interest of bringing it to bear on the attempt think rigorously about clinical experience. In a founding moment, Husserl writes:
No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: [namely] that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.[3]
Leaving aside the fact that transcendental phenomenology concerns itself mainly with supplying a proper foundation for the sciences, we might note here that Husserl’s “principle of all principles” has the effect of liberating subjective meaning-giving from the scientist’s premise that that meaning inheres essentially in external objects and their external relations. It was not long before the implications of Husserl’s move were felt in what became the fields of phenomenological psychology (Gurwitsch) and psychiatry (Binswanger, Minkowski, Straus). Meaning is given in events, and careful analysis recognizes in these events a dimension that is irreducibly subjective. However, “subjective” does not in this instance mean subjectivist, relative or idiosyncratic. To be sure, the objective, communicable content of meaning may not be immediately discernible, but if the phenomenologist takes a step back from the brute form of their expression, that content comes into view as the disclosure of something that qualifies as true—whether we mean `true´ in the usual sense of a relation to objective conditions that may be verified, or in the more complicated sense found in psychology and psychiatry, when a patient’s symptoms prove to signify a response to deep conditions that are in some important way quite real. It is this disclosure of something true that Husserl means by “evidence,” and it would not be overstating things greatly to propose that the whole of phenomenological method is intent on exploring and distinguishing different degrees of adequate and inadequate evidence, with a view to understanding the relationship between intuitions and the givenness of what is intuited (see Ideas, Bk. I, §138).
Now it is certainly not lost on Husserl that the event of disclosure, or the evidencing of evidence, cannot be simply or only passive, as if it is only a matter of receiving the thing that shows itself to us . Indeed, for virtually all of phenomenology, the meaning-giving subject is not only dative but also nominative, not just mihi but ego, and in that restricted sense active
(debate over this has tended to be a question of emphasis or accent, in most phenomenology). But none of this can conceal a problem, or at least the possibility of a question touching the very heart of the theory: what will be the evidence for the ego necessarily implicated in all other evidencing? How, under what conditions, might we approach the truth of the ego withjn the limits of what can be seen of it? Let us appreciate the difficulty: on one hand, when Husserl proposes that the ego designates, in part, the power to constitute meaning, he also commits himself to secure the evidence of the ego in order to verify the truth that is disclosed in any expression of meaning (again: what may we conclude about the ego itself, and not only as it appears in these observable relations?); on the other hand, it seems clear enough that the ego will always have withdrawn or receded from the horizon of meaning opened up in its evidencing of, for example, this or that relation to the things of the world (do we have access to more than the ego within limits of its observable relations?). In any given instance, the ego reveals itself in the specific mode of relation with this or that object, and necessarily suspends and conceals the measure of itself that is not engaged in that specific instance. And, if we follow Husserl this far, that same evanescence of the ego must also be a condition of the ego’s experience of itself. For Ricoeur, this implies that the ego’s relation to itself is always mediated, passing by way of constant detours. One experiences oneself only in or through one’s experience of objects, other people, an ethos, and so forth. In response to this apparent difficulty in Husserl, Ricoeur thus lays the basis for a hermeneutics of the subject. According to that view, meaning is generated in an endless movement of relating to the things of the world, and indeed relating them to oneself, but without the original egoity of the ego ever becoming fully accessible.
When in the mid-1960s Ricoeur turned at length to psychoanalysis, it was of course with particular interest in the point where the Freudian unconscious might touch on this selfwithdrawal of the ego. His “essay on Freud” is in fact an attempt to place psychoanalysis and phenomenology in a relation of mutual critique. From the side of psychoanalysis, after all, one must expect claims for the existence and meaning of impulses that are anterior to the interpretive field through which the ego is detoured in its relation to itself. The early Freud, and in particular the Freud of force and energetics, is thus of greatest interest to Ricoeur. Yet in the end he insists on the necessary mediation of those impulses, or if one prefers of that energy, by psychical representations—or again if one prefers, signifiers, by which the hermeneutical subject is always already interpreting itself just as it always already interpreting its world. We may say, then, that on Ricoeur’s reading of both Husserl and (it must be said, a somewhat Lacanian) Freud, the subject, as the ego in mediated relation with itself, is nothing but the relation of these primal signifiers and the many and varied others that accumulate in the endless process of self-interpretation that makes up a life. If I may borrow an image from modern literature, one thinks for example of Slothrop’s desk, in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:[4] things have fallen roughly into layers, with every manner of detritus, cast-off objects and parts of objects, stains and decay, filtering down toward a bottom that no one here today has ever seen, and whose very existence, in the absence of any real evidence, one can only assume. On Ricoeur’s estimation, the subject would appear only as a heap of signs and their relations with one another; the subject would appear, in short, only as the excrescence of an ego whose itinerant relation to itself unfolds over time. And whatever might be operative beneath all of this simply does not appear.
Needless to say, this hardly leaves phenomenology in a position to offer useful clarification of the unconscious. To the contrary, and from the perspective of Ricoeur’s wager for a hermeneutical appropriation of both phenomenology and psychoanalysis, philosophy simply cannot speak about what clinical experience feels compelled to think of as a rich and complex domain of meaning that has evident impact on conscious life, but without revealing itself as such.
As a matter of fact, the silence of hermeneutical phenomenology on the deep unconscious only matches a similar silence on the egoity that withdraws from its own appearance as ego, such as we have found in Husserl’s texts. In both cases, the judgment in favor of mediation by signs is also a judgment against the possibility of inquiring more deeply after a mode of being that would be unmediated and pre-linguistic. It is at precisely this point that Michel Henry intervenes, insisting upon a rigorous account of what he terms, remaining within the language of phenomenology, the phenomenality proper to the life of the ego as such, as distinct from the ego as it appears in intentional relations. Without yet understanding what this could mean, we may take note of the following implications of Henry’s aim:
- Whatever might be the eventual conclusions concerning the relationship of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, phenomenology stands in need of an internal correction that will take the form of outlining a new path to completion— specifically, in more adequate treatment of the appearing of the ego.
- Likewise, and though he does not often say so, it will be equally necessary to resist or overcome a theory of psychoanalysis that too easily supposes that every mode of our being is necessarily mediated by language.
- Only upon completion of these parallel exercises can it be asked what philosophy might be able to contribute to the clarification or perhaps improvement of our use of concepts in psychoanalytic practice.
III.
There is no use here in proposing more than a cursory review of the highly original (or idiosyncratic) perspective from which Henry comes to a concern with what I have just called— loosely adapting his own terms —the phenomenality of the ego as such. I will limit myself to underlining two central claims that bear directly on his approach specifically to Freudian psychoanalysis. On one hand, and very early in his work, Henry insists on a distinction between two ways of appearing, or again two forms of phenomenality, that the philosophical tradition has largely overlooked. There is the exterior manifestation of the visible world, and the interior manifestation of invisible life. Thus for example when I turn my head or move my lips to speak, my movements are available to be seen among other visible objects and movements in the world. But this visibility, the appearance of my body, cannot account for the inner life by which my body is given to me and available to those who encounter it. Moreover, for Henry the importance of this distinction becomes clearer when we admit that I myself am among those who can see my own body. What I can never see, and what is all the more beyond the vision of other people, is the life by which I inhabit, or perhaps animate my body. The defining innovation of Henry’s philosophical enterprise is to be found here: in his view, this does not mean that life does not or cannot appear, but instead puts us on track of the possibility that it appears otherwise than according to exteriority, which is to say that it appears without becoming visible (and unless one recognizes that for Henry visibility is not coextensive with appearing, a great deal of his thinking is quite unintelligible). There is a clue for what all of this may mean already in the example of life and the body. For Henry—and this is not entirely foreign to psychoanalysis—life is defined by force. With regard specifically to the body, we may therefore speak roughly of life-force, so long as we do not identify life-force with the effects— the gestures and movements—which appear in the domain of the visible. Force as force never becomes visible, and this may be said, or at any rate Henry is willing to say it, whether we attend to a physical force or a mental force. Yet it also seems true that we have access to force, as it were, from within. It affects us and we feel it. Life then appears without becoming visible specifically in the form of affection, or if one wishes to speak very loosely, in feeling. And it is a phenomenological commonplace to say that inner access to what appears in one’s own feeling has an authenticity that one does not find when it is a matter of something that comes to me by way of observation or interpretation, so to speak, ´from the outside.´
Henry is prepared to draw the full consequence of this distinction.[5] What he calls “life” must be understood to remain strictly inaccessible from the exterior, since by necessity it never appears in the exteriority of the world. But again, this only attunes us to the fact that life does feel itself and experience itself in its radical interiority. By this Henry has in mind a sense in which life is most fundamentally undergone, before and beyond any question of either choosing it or refusing it. In short, life is something we bear, whether we like it or not, and without end until life itself is no more. Life, as force, erupts, fulgurates from within, like a well that seeps upward from unimagined depths. And indeed as force, wanting release, it is also cause of suffering since so long as there is life and so long as we are finite that release will always be limited, which is to say frustrated (it will be necessary to return to this claim later). But at the same time—for Henry, literally at the same time—there is also in living an enjoyment of the living itself; not a higher level happiness that might respond to a reflective awareness that it is better to be than not to be, but a more immediate contentment that would be the tonality of being at one with oneself in the flux of time and space. I think, by the way, that it may be a mistake to move quickly toward associating this with simple purgation. Whereas in purgation, or the discharge of a quantity, the pleasure is proportional to a tension that is also painful, Henry seems to suggest an enjoyment consubstantial with life as such, regardless of intensity; for Henry enjoyment, like suffering, is an “ontological structure,” not a particular attitude or possibility. What he calls “suffering” (la souffrance) designates the singularity of life in a finite living being; what he calls “enjoyment” (la joie) designates the mode in which that singularity receives or coincides with itself, but without opening any distance or interval within itself. This two-fold pathos would be anterior to ego, intention and engagement with objects. The pathos itself represents Henry’s proposal for how to understand an appearing that does not enter visibility, and thus furnishes him with what he judges to be a more adequate approach to the phenomenality of the ego than we find in Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach. Where Ricoeur seems content to accept, as a sort of phenomenological limit, the withdrawal of the ego from its own appearance in correlation with objects, Henry proposes to have instead defined the ulterior condition of the ego in terms of force and pathos—or what his later works increasingly call ´affect´.
These, then, are the key insights of what is proposed as a radicalized and therefore complete phenomenology capable of reflecting on psychoanalytic experience and concepts with proper methodological rigor. According to Henry, phenomenology has not been developed through to the end until it has accounted for the evidence of the ego by which there is evidencing in our relations with objects. This is achieved when at last life is grasped as force, and when affect is understood as the appearing of force. And indeed, since the plausibility of the phenomenological method rests in the final account on its capacity to grasp its own conditions—as it were, ‘all the way down’—it should be clear that for Michel Henry, unless the radical phenomenology of life has something to propose concerning, for example, the reality of the unconscious or the meaning of sexuality, there is no particular reason to seek clarification from phenomenology at all.
IV.
It is an important, and after all interesting, feature of Henry’s approach to psychoanalytic theory that he considers it in historical context, asking whether it might have arisen or defined itself otherwise than has in fact been the case. Is Freud’s conception of the unconscious the necessary result of linear and progressive inquiry? Or has that inquiry been shaped by conditions that might have been avoided?
Henry’s approach to Freud, and indeed the whole of his philosophical perspective, is inspired by the results of a highly original interpretation of Descartes. The truth of the cogito, he says, lies not in the self-certainty of thinking but in the indubitability of feeling, and the realization of this indubitability is at the same time the discovery of a form of appearing anterior to visibility. Among the passages he cites in favor of this interpretation is one that moves him recognizably close to the concerns of psychoanalysis. I paraphrase part of article 26 of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul:
We should note that it sometimes occurs that a representation is so like the thing it represents, that we may be mistaken about the apprehensions we attribute to the objects outside of us, or to those referring to any parts of our body, but not to those that concern our passions, for they are so near, and so interior to our soul, that it is impossible for us to feel them except in their true form. And we know that when we are asleep, or even when we are awake, we can be imagine so powerfully that something truly is before us, when in fact it is not, that we may believe in its existence. It is otherwise with passion; we cannot feel sadness or joy without there in fact being sadness or joy truly in the soul (emphasis added).[6]
Consider the critical perspective that this implies. To begin with, his somewhat unfamiliar Descartes challenges phenomenology to admit within itself what we have already encountered as an irreducible distinction within the field of appearing. Henceforth, if we follow Henry, alongside the appearing of objects to a subject there is also the appearing of force as what Descartes has called passion and what Henry for his part calls affect. Whereas in the former sort of appearing, an object still transcends the ego in whose consciousness it appears, in the latter the appearing is one with the ego itself. This way of even making the distinction is important: by definition, in the appearing that is affect, what appears does not transcend us; the appearing that is affect is essentially immanent. Life affects itself and thus in a certain sense knows itself, but before any question of consciousness, let alone cognition. Conversely, in all other cases, when it is not a matter of the appearing that is affection, Henry would have us consider objects appearing to a subject. But this dative subject, the subject grasped in its correlation with objects, can no longer impede our view of the deeper phenomenality of life which, however, is neither correlated with an object nor in the strict sense visible.[7] This supplies us with two sets of concepts by which to approach, for example, clinical experience: there will be a dimension in which objects appear to subjects, and there will be a dimension in which force appears as affect—a dimension of consciousness and light, and the anterior dimension of life. Whether this distinction will prove capable of recognizing the full range of phenomena encountered in psychoanalytic experience remains to be seen, but the distinction itself plainly determines Henry’s approach to the Freudian unconscious. And enough has already been said for one to anticipate an attempt to associate the unconscious with what Henry calls “life.”
Secondly, the guiding insight is now affixed to a particular historical moment. The fact that Henry appeals specifically to a Cartesian inspiration for his philosophy of life suggests the possibility of interrogating all post-Cartesian thought with a view to understanding whether it has or has not recognized the radical self-affection of life. By this measure, the status of psychoanalysis is judged to be uncertain. Freudian thought, we are told, has had the merit of
recognizing that “the essence of the psyche is not found in the becoming of the visible world,”[8] but it has proven unable, perhaps even resistant, to thinking that the truth of the psyche, the unconscious, could ever and in any form appear as such. From Henry’s perspective, a great deal of Freud’s own terminology seems invested with this equivocation: psychoanalysis attends to “psychical acts which lack consciousness”; it encounters representations that are repressed from consciousness; and when it recognizes that something like force—drives, of course–would be prior to the difference between conscious and unconscious, it nonetheless considers them meaningful for the therapy only insofar as they have been determined by representations that again, are precisely not conscious.[9]
Now most readers of Freud understand that his motive for this way of expressing himself in his texts is essentially didactic. Of course, his negative formulations could also define a preliminary skepticism sometimes present in the mind of the therapist (´sometimes things are not entirely as they appear, and sometimes not at all as they appear´). The fact that Henry does not pause over these possibilities makes one thing quite clear: he wishes to address Freud primarily at the level of theory and with only a secondary interest in the possibility that the theory is itself an expression of experiences framed in a particular therapeutic context and with particular therapeutic goals in mind.[10] His lengthy genealogy of psychoanalysis is thus in an important sense not at all about psychoanalysis as a practice, but instead about its place, as a discourse, in the legacy of a Cartesian philosophy that includes has made possible both what becomes a radical phenomenology of life and the various forms of thought that have failed to grasp its essential insight (and incidentally, the decline sets in quite early: Henry refers to a “fatal fall” already in some of Descartes’s other works that seem to impede our view of his own best insights[11]). We already know how what has been lost can be regained within phenomenology, and what phenomenology then becomes. What becomes of psychoanalysis— how will we address the claims invested in its concepts–if, on the level of theory alone it is submitted to the principles of that phenomenology?
V.
The same basic feature of Henry’s position that is likely to provoke the greatest hesitation may in fact give us the most to think about. The effort to affirm life as unmediated and uninterrupted self-affection seems to imply a secondary status for consciousness, representation and cognition, all of which are constituted at least in part by our engagement with the exterior world. Of course, Freud himself seems to say very much the same thing when thinking along a developmental line (consciousness, the engagement with reality, our cognitive capacities, and sorth, come later). But in fact what becomes the psychoanalytic perspective in therapy tends to balance this with the thought that in talking with each patient, as he presents himself, there is no getting fully back behind everything that has become established along the course of his development. Henry’s perspective on subjectivity is strictly phenomenological, and he gives no sign of any serious interest in development, but he too is far from supposing that one person might have unqualified access to what lies deepest in another person. Yet he does contend—we have heard it already—that this occurs at the heart of one’s relation with oneself. Self-affection does not antedate human desire or thought, but animates them as they constitute the processes and actvities that are visible in the world. When, for example, Henry proposes that the certainty of the Cartesian cogito lies in the experience “I feel that I am,”[12] his aim is only to highlight the fact that thinking does feel itself even while it is directed outward. Nonetheless, this does have the effect of suspending any original role for judgment. This is first of all, but not only, a matter simply of how to read Descartes: Henry accepts the formula “I feel that I am” but has no real need of what Descartes actually seems to have in mind: something like “It is certain that I feel that I am.” This puts us on the track of an interesting problem. If, as Henry proposes, affection truly is of another order than consciousness, judgment and the visibility in which consciousness, judgment and self-understanding operate, then what passes as rational judgment would always falsify and conceal what we truly are as living beings; if, contrarily, we find reason to think that judgment and self-understanding can be to some degree authentic, it will be necessary to suppose that what Henry wishes to call ´affection´ can in fact become intelligible to conscious inspection. But this would first require us to suppose that there is a certain materiality in all that can become intelligible—or better: materiality as a necessary condition for intelligibility. In the most general sense, this is in fact Descartes´s position, when he proposes that what can be ´known´ must exist in bodies (res extensa). It is also Freud´s position, though in a very different and much more specific register. Something like an underlying notion of materiality is present wherever Freud conceives of quantities and pathways, cathexis and de-cathexis, experiences as wounding or leaving traces, and finally—of course—the relationship of affect and representation.
Henry´s opposition to this last feature of Freudian thought picks up on a simple line feature of the metapsychology: representation results from investment of libido in a memorytrace, and in that case representation is derivative of prior experience—whereupon it is susceptible to repression or becoming conscious. Needless to say, a philosophy intent on preserving the originality of affection will therefore oppose itself to any suggestion that the fate of affects would be entangled with the fate of representations. After all, they have nothing in common. What could bind them together? Or, adopting another approach to the same conclusion, insofar as the meaning of each representation, as a signifier, is defined in part by its relation with other signifiers, the entire process involves some minimal degree of differentiation and thus mediation such as Henry considers absent in affection. This is not the occasion for serious consideration of the possibility that affect, seen in its specificity, must itself be a representation of some anterior impulse, but we might at least recognize that by pressing the difference between affect and representation this far, Henry contributes to a sense that the difference between the two is considerably more difficult than is often supposed.
I should not fail to observe that one can—and Henry does—press the thought of original affection much further than a debate with phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The notion of affect without determination moves in the direction of absolute life. It is not for nothing that in Henry´s final works he develops a philosophy of religion; in fact, the possibility has been there from the beginning: affect without original relation with representation would be affect as meaningful without reference to other meaning, or–how to avoid it?—pure meaning. Life appears in affection that for its part must be understood as discharge. Discharge is rendered finite, and pure meaning becomes intelligible as enjoyment and as suffering only because for a mortal and embodied being it is never possible for the discharge to be total.
And this, in the final account, is how to understand Henry´s claim that life is undergone specifically as suffering: one suffers insofar as one is always under the pressure of a force which one can never finally discharge. The inner meaning of suffering is frustration, which can mount up to anxiety, but this is in no case what Freud understands by repression. Having identified life-force with affection and not with consciousness, representation or thought, and having sharply distinguished affection from these others, Henry has neither a reason nor the means to take seriously either repression or the notion of a complex dynamic unconscious. For him, the true unconscious is simply life, insofar as it cannot come to light, or perhaps more specifically force, insofar as it spills over into affection but again, without offering itself to visibility.
Well, if anything resembling psychoanalysis is to survive these drastic revisions, it will have to center on an interpretation of the vicissitudes of affection, and without recourse either to a more primordial principle or to an essential relation with one that is equiprimordial. Affection, in short, would be the horizon within which one is to interpret and address the full range of phenomena that make up mental pathology—but then a horizon that is itself inaccessible to direct inspection, if by inspection would be meant the work of interpretation and thus seeing. Most urgently, this would therefore be an approach that abandons (an enthusiast might say frees us from) any necessary reference to drives, especially if by this is meant a biological component of mental processes. What Henry calls “affection,” remember, would be pure appearing, without reference to any adjacent or subjacent quantity. It is true that in his phenomenology of life, he does parse force from its appearing as affect, but it is also clear that this distinction is not meant to actually ground affect in force, and thus also not meant to trace affect back even to the vanishing point that Jean Laplanche has sometimes called “biological factor-x.” In short, Henry’s distinction between force and affect is eidetic and not explanatory. And on this most fundamental point, it turns out that his radical phenomenology is not essentially different than the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl or the existential phenomenology of Heidegger, neither of which can admit a positive account of drive into their interpretations of human being and movement.[13] What phenomenology seems incapable of doing, and what it would have psychoanalysis cease attempting to do, is get behind an appearance to an ulterior principle by which the meaning of the appearance becomes more evident. And unless psychoanalytic therapy can do without at least temporary explanations for what befalls a patient, this must be a serious shortcoming.
VI.
It will not have escaped notice that when Henry´s radical phenomenology is given the job of clarifying and perhaps correcting some basic principles of psychoanalysis, it ends up suggesting that the two fields actually converge.[14] This proposed revision is evidently unsettling to psychoanalysis, especially when the resulting theory is brought back to the level of practice (though of course, what has happened on the level of theory is also not encouraging). But this outcome is not without some useful lessons, and not least of these is a better appreciation of precisely which phenomena, which modes of givenness or appearing, seem to be the particular business of psychoanalytic concepts—the phenomena most difficult to conceptualize from outside of the practice itself. It seems to me that this is above all a matter of symptoms, which Henry´s philosophy of life—whatever the interest of his approach to affection may be—cannot address with any serious plausibility. In fact, it is very tempting to argue that the approach to affection suffers from the fact it did not address the reality of symptoms very early on. As it is, when he arrives at the place where an analysis of symptoms would have been necessary, he has already given up the means to take them seriously: neither representation nor drive has a positive place in his philosophy of life. And yet symptoms, and complexes of symptoms, are an irreducible composite of much more than affect, and each component of a symptom has both undergone its own vicissitudes and emerged along its own pathway. It the therapist does not willingly reduce the symptom only to a question of invisible and visible dimensions, this is because no such reduction can be made without impoverishment of an essential meaning. The phenomenality of symptoms has a richness that cannot be decomposed without loss. Where is the phenomenology capable of letting-appear the rich phenomenon—the phenomenon that overflows and disrupts its own presence, refuses to give its meaning in full, and under precisely those conditions still does mean something, and often enough more than one thing?
It seems to me that something very much like this in fact defines what analysts practice in therapy. Not that the whole of therapy could be defined by a phenomenological attitude, but I do propose that we consider psychoanalytic listening as indeed a distinct attitude that is adequate to the specific phenomenality present there, in the therapeutic setting—that is, in what I have just called ´rich phenomena.´
Of course this would suggest—and I do suggest—that in the end it is phenomenology that must learn from psychoanalysis, and above all psychoanalytic practice. I began by repeating Antoine Vergote´s viewe of psychoanalysis as marking an inner limit of philosophy. Perhaps here, in the symptom, as rich phenomenon, we have found one feature of that limit. If on even this one point phenomenological method must give way to the findings of a therapeutic method developed by psychoanalysis, then indeed it must either deny the reality of what it is that therapists engage in the symptom (the unconscious, which Henry eventually called an ´empty representation´), or else concede that phenomenology itself is not enough to attend the full range of what appears. But in that case, what phenomenology would be able to offer reflection on the concepts in use by analysts might not go any further than clarifying precisely what those concepts can not mean.
[1] A. Vergote, “La psychanalyse, limite interne de la philosophie,” in Savoir, faire, espérer: les limites de la raison (Bruxelles: Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1976), pp. 479-504. Vergote in fact goes much further. Accepting the anthropological turn of contemporary philosophy, all the way to its willingness to implícate the philosopher himself in the philosophizing (cf. Merleau-Ponty), he observes that clinical findings thus have a direct bearing on how we may understand the movement of reflection and proposition.
[2] P. Bercherie, Les Fondements de la Clinique, vol. 1, Histoire de structure du savoir psychiatrique; vol. 2, Genèse des concepts freudiens (Paris: Navarin, 1980 and 1983).
[3] E. Husserl, Ideas, Bk. I, §24 (italics E.H.).
[4] See T. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 18.
[5] The following paragraph is grosso modo a summary of what Henry has argued in his L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: P.U.F, 1993 [2nd edition]), §70, pp. 823-862.
[6] See R. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, article 26, trans. S. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).
[7] These distinctions are stated as a matter of general phenomenological principle in M. Henry, “Quatre principes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1991/1): 3-26.
[8] M. Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Paris: P.U.F. / Épiméthée, 1985), p. 348 / Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 285-286.
[9] Freud makes all of these proposals within the first third of his essay on “The Unconscious.” SE XIV / GW X.
[10] In his Généalogie Henry begins with interest in the fact that Freudian theory has always been unstable, and his reading of Freud refers with few exceptions to Freud’s metapsychology.
[11] Henry, Généalogie, 21/14.
[12] For evident reasons, Henry is more than willing to cast this in terms of seeing, which is to say knowing or perhaps intuiting. Cf. Ibid., 24 /17: “…the cogito finds its most basic formulation in the proposition videre videor: it seems to me that I see.”
[13] Phenomenological access to drive (Trieb) is barred at E. Husserl ,Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918-1926. Husserliana, vol. XI (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1966), Appendix 21, p. 418; M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 193.
[14] Henry makes this observation himself. See M. Henry, De la subjectivité (Paris: PUF, 2009), p. 183.