Outline for a Work on Psychology and Psychoanalytic History

I haven’t had many chances to work lately, so I’m posting what I consider to be an unfinished study of the topographical relation(s) between capitalist production, the modern subject, and contemporary psychology. As things stand, this is the product of another mandatory Intro to Psychology assignment. I think there are some gems here for further inquiry but this piece, in itself, lacks a rigorously cohering line of thought. The strands aren’t so unraveled, however, that the different theses fail to stand out; with a little imagination it should be apparent how they speak to one another.

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I want to take the opportunity afforded by this assignment to link three seemingly dispersed conceptual fields and practices: 1) the clinical apparatus of American psychology, with regard to its production and its economy of clinical (dis)orders, represented and itinerized in the DSM-III and DSM-IV (the implicit focus of Myers’ text is to outline the possible ways in which we can “read” these “manuals”); 2) the rapid production and proliferation of subjects and their affects to be tallied, described, and pathologized (or not): in short, nothing less than the Modern practice of constituting subjects as objects of possible knowledge (and management); and 3), the machinery and pathos of global(izing) liberal capitalism which, like an invisible horizon (and hence ultimately not another numerary item to be slotted amongst other countable phenomena) poetically calls the former two into being.

Hence this triad is to be given some topological consideration: there are historically material forces that condition the possibility of naming and disseminating as psychology a series of competing theories, ideas and perspectives apropos human behavior, as so beautifully exemplified by Myers’ text. My desire is to bring those historically material forces to bear on Myers’ chosen method. This will not be done through the impossible task of naming a million other social-historical-economic-anthropological contexts that would some how in their totality would explain the existence of the discipline of psychology. Rather, I will speak briefly about that enigmatic sparkling system – Capitalism – and its relation to a certain segment of society that we call the mad. Such a rough and quick outline would ideally have the advantage of revealing the diagnostic and theoretical practices of contemporary American psychology as powerful iterations of a certain epistemic technology that increasingly characterizes Western thought since the 17th and 18th centuries.

(Specifically, what is characteristic of Western thought of the past several hundred years is not simply that we have acquired increasingly vast and intimate knowledge(s) of ourselves (our “normal” and “abnormal” functioning, our dreams, desires, aspirations and capabilities), knowledge that marches hand-in-hand with rapidly advancing technological sophistication; on the contrary, what I am referencing is the fact that knowledge itself, along with its many apparatuses and procedures – e.g. what counts as knowledge, mechanisms and rituals for arriving at knowledge, what objects are worthy of knowledge: in short, all that indexes the legitimacy and the veracity of knowledge in relation to those pursuing it, pursuits that themselves take on a pre-prescribed arc – came to be situated around a new object: the subject, or the self. Especially the self that is mad).

I have of course been channeling Michel Foucault. Rather than use Foucault’s name as a prefabricated marker which signals some link between knowledge, power, and the subject, I want to give a concentrated focus to a short lecture he delivered in 1970, titled “Madness and Society.” It is a remarkably straightforward text, very schematic in its presentation and conclusions. First, he begins by noting that while the typical method in Western discursive history is to focus on positive, observable phenomena, he, following Levi-Strauss, considers that it is “a matter not of knowing what is affirmed and valorized in a society or a system of thought but what is rejected and excluded (Foucault, “Madness and Society” in Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, 335).” The possibility of such a method and vision based on exclusion, when deployed by the preeminent philosopher of the twentieth century, should cast a minimum of suspicion on Myers’ facile remarks where he states that “Freud’s view of the unconscious–a reservoir of repressed and mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories–has not survived empirical scrutiny” (Myers, 469). As if we could just shutter the blinds of Father Freud’s “view” like that!

(The fact of this method of Foucault’s reveals – if only this! – Myers’ assertion to be political in its nature: its utterance is an attempt to circumscribe the scope and legitimacy of psychology as always excluding any fidelity to a Freudian discourse of the unconscious. There are two objections to be raised here (against me): first, that Foucault is not specifically referring to the unconscious in the above passage; and second, that the invocation of one thinker’s name and method is not proof enough that Myers is attempting to pass off highly partisan thought as truth (truth its “accepted doxa” form, anyway). The first objection is dismissed easily enough, since the unconscious is precisely that which one never sees, measures or quantifies in its own terms: whenever we catch a glimpse of it or a sound of it, it is already not there anymore, in its place of origin, but rather a spectral and haunting organ without a body whose presence is only detectable as a force acting from afar –within, above, behind – bending the phenomenal around its empty arc. Therefore, the unconscious cannot be understood in any naïve sense as the reservoir of “repressed” and “traumatic” content: in important ways, its negative yet determinative space, this very empty container of space (absent any explicit content) is itself the “trauma” to be avoided! In short, we can take Foucault’s interest in the excluded in all its kinetic weight: it takes some effort to keep something out, some knowledge, utterance, practice or morality, and, for those with a penetrating vision, this effort leaves its trace. As for the second objection, it contains my “point”: I am quite content to throw my weight in with Foucault, and to risk being a “partisan” of that truth).

But what I am immediately concerned with is Foucault’s point of departure that takes off around a single instructive fact: “The mad have always been excluded.”

I am not concerned with the mad. I am interested in the mechanisms of exclusion that bring the mad into being as an interrogated subject. Still, what is the madman (in an ontological, not clinical sense)? “Freud said correctly that the madman (he was talking mainly about neurotics) was a person who could neither work nor love” (Foucault, 337). These incapacities (these ghastly figures without love- or labor-power) provoked no systemic reaction for centuries, in Europe or elsewhere. The mad may be forbidden from entering various socio-cultural spheres of activity, but this exclusion is not of a pathologic or medical nature:

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance madmen were permitted to exist in the midst of society. What is called the ‘village idiot’ did not get married, did not participate in games, and he was fed and supported by others. He would roam from town to town… (ibid, 341)

However, “in the seventeenth century European society became intolerant toward them. The cause of this,” Foucault bluntly states, “is that industrial society began to form.” “Capitalist industrial society could not tolerate the existence of groups of vagabonds” (ibid, 341).

The next movement is the crucial one:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, [when] the speed of industrial development accelerated, and, in accordance with the first principle of capitalism, the hordes of unemployed proletarians were regarded as a reserve army of labor power. For that reason, those who did not work but were able to work were let out of the establishments (my italics, ibid, 341).

Thus what began as the formation of institutions essentially of containment at the beginning of industrio-agricultural capitalism, whose primary function was to police subjects inhabiting territorial margins (i.e. vagabonds), suddenly morphed into institutions of a medical or, more specifically, psychiatric nature. And these institutions exercised control no longer over the lazy or unwilling (those types being released back into society to form the critical structural role in capitalism of the reserve army of labor power), but over the unable.

What had previously been a confinement institution became a psychiatric hospital, a treatment organization. In the years that followed, hospitals were set in place: (1) to confine those who were unable to work for physical reasons; (2) to confine those who could not work for nonphysical reasons. In this way, mental disorders had become the object of medicine and a social category called ‘psychiatry’ was born (ibid, 342).

This presents a history of psychology’s origins from the “perspectives” of economy, power and labor (questions that of course interlap with an ethics and an aesthetics, of which there is here not the space to say anything). In light of the textbook’s history, it is absolutely critical to underscore such conditions of possibility of a psychic science (including the unconscious) to begin with.

Here the point is relatively simple: the endless presentation of updated (or out-of-fashion, as it were) perspectives on any number of theories with reference to any number of behaviors or phenomena outlined in Myers’ text all share a fundamental hermeneutic orientation and strategy. Each ranks, organizes, divides (and sub-divides) a little territory of the subject (it’s principle object of knowledge); each makes an appeal to Truth, usually along the lines of empirical verability and predictive capacity; and each accords certain features to its findings, usually of a moral flavor, by proclaiming the relative “sociability” or “effectiveness” of a behavior, trait, region of the brain, social climate, etc. The result is a calculus along the lines of what Michel Foucault has called the “technologies of domination and the self,” in which a scientific knowledge operates on and manages bodies precisely by taking them as objects to be known. In so doing, a potential space of surveillance, modification, restriction, amelioration and discipline arises on the movements, bodies and brains of the subject.

A first emphasis of mine is that a historical component – other than the series of ideas and theories outlined by Myers – is at stake here. Were one to only read Myers’ text, the discipline of psychology would appear to be the history of a vacuous debate, consisting of sediments of ideas successively contesting discredited predecessors. This mode of engagement, completely without rigor or integrity, is what allows a chapter’s concluding note to consist of a simple scorecard: “In science, Charles Darwin’s legacy lives while Freud’s is waning (Bornstein, 2001). In the popular culture, Freud’s legacy lives on” (Myers, 468). Little wonder, then, that the labor of the academic is so often reduced to a keeping track of the latest theoretical consensus, of organizing the intellectual checking accounts, of knowing who is or is not in “currency within academia,” as an author approvingly quoted by Myers says.

Where are my allegiances, then? (If nothing else in this paper, I hope to have shown in some way that the very effort to instantiate a neutral, working-towards-consensus frame in a scientific or theoretical field is always-already ideology at its purest: it de facto marginalizes rigorous inquiry that does not cowtail to its demarcated frame. Moreover, the extent to which such a “frame” is invisible is the extent to which its constitutive ideology is strongest). I am a Lacanian.

It should be noted that the discipline and practice of psychoanalysis is highly sectarian. However, a verifiable empirical claim is also worth noting here: Lacanians constitute the largest international group of psychoanalysts. Their practice is based on the rigorous return to Freud as it manifests in the writing of Jacques Lacan. While the writing of Lacan (and often “Lacanians”) is incredibly challenging, I would like to conclude with a brief note pertinent to the Myers textbook. What would a Lacanian diagnostic approach even look like?

Instead of the infinite amount of smallest-possible-remainder diagnoses, characters, behaviors, and disorders, a Lacanian defines in individual in terms of three possible categories: neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. Each of these terms is a capturing of how a subject relates to (and, more complicatedly, is “ejected from” reality).

Such structural diagnostics

“allow the practitioner to go beyond weighing the relative importance of certain clinical characteristics, comparing them with lists of features in manuals such as the DSM-IV, and to focus instead on a defining mechanism—that is, a single determinant characteristic. For, as Freud was wont to say, repression is the cause of neurosis. In other words, repression is not simply associated with neurosis; it is constitutive of neurosis” (Fink, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, 77).

I would only end with a final, ontological note, since what is dearest to me is a theory of the subject which transcends weak, merely “descriptive” (reactionary) thought. “People referred to in common parlance as ‘normal’ do not have some special structure of their own; they are generally neurotic, clinically speaking” (ibid, 77). Such an ontological theory of the subject—taking full account of its psychic histories and structures, while always working to understand what that taking account of means—would perhaps be one tentative step towards not another “human, all too human” discourse and practice.

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