Psychoanalysis,
Psychology, Discourse:
The Challenge of Symbolic Dimensions
ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE, PhD
[abstract]
An important factor in the constitution and procedures of
a discipline is its disposition regarding the symbolic dimensions of the
objects and events in experience. For some time, this factor was a source
of contention between behaviorist psychology, which restricted or even
rejected such dimensions, and psychoanalysis, which asserted their
priority. Today, cognitive psychology and discourse processing research
have admitted symbolic dimensions, but chiefly based on straightforward
correspondences to public, consensual meanings. A more concerted
interaction with psychoanalysis in exploring multiple symbolic dimensions,
especially of discourse, should clarify the aspects and indicators of
personal, idiosyncratic meanings and their role in fostering psychic
balances or imbalances. Above all, these dimensions must be explored with
focus on the activities of symbolizing and resymbolizing, not just on the
resulting symbols.
Psychology versus psychoanalysis
in the age of behaviorism
Although psychology and
psychoanalysis, as the etymological relatedness of their names suggests,
are ostensibly both concerned with the human "psyche," their
respective techniques and goals have traditionally been disparate. Whereas
psychology is essentially descriptive, seeking to expound the general
constants of human nature, psychoanalysis is essentially therapeutic,
seeking to bring about specific changes. Whereas psychology is concerned
with normal functions in a large experimental population of anonymous
subjects, psychoanalysis is concerned with dysfunctions in an individual
subject and personal case history.
In the age of behaviorism,
the two domains differed most starkly in their symbolic and explanatory
constructs. Behaviorist psychology worked with a parsimonious conceptual
apparatus in which two classes of closely controlled events, bearing the
orthodox designations of "stimulus" and "response,"
formed an unmediated sequence symbolizing "cause" and "effect."
The ambition to isolate single factors demonstrably responsible for
behavioral selections and variations fostered research designs assigning
theoretical valence only to the factors most readily subject to external
control. Naturally, manifest actions proffered the most congenial
substrata, whereas symbolic dimensions seemed intractable. It was thus
expedient to abridge such dimensions by gauging perceptible reactions to
specific environmental events, even fairly complex ones like messages
related to one's beliefs, according to presumably characteristic and
stable factors such as "self-esteem" and "defensiveness,"
for which standardized measuring tools had been devised (e.g. McGuire,
1962; Nisbett & Gordon, 1967). Such designs supported quantitative
generalizations and predictions about findings whose "significance"
can be exactly determined as long as the test population is sufficiently
large and the experimental conditions are sufficiently controlled.
Psychoanalysis sees a more
complex and diffuse picture. The personality is presumed to be subject to
conflicting influences which can induce systematic instability and
patterns of inappropriate or erratic response to environmental events,
including imaginary ones. This presumption allows, indeed requires,
alternative and powerfully symbolic causalities for behavior, including
"pathogenic" ones wherein the lack of a reasonable ratio between
"cause" and "effect" can be a crucial indicator of
dysfunction. In this sense, the breakdown of classical observable
causality is a focal point for psychoanalytic exploration, particularly
when apparently innocuous objects and events elicit powerfully negative
reactions in the subject. Moreover, determining the "significance"
of particular factors is by no means a straightforward quantitative
operation, but an intricate, often revisionary symbolic process applied to
elusive clues related in complicated or indirect ways to the subject's
behavior.
To be sure, Freud's early
reasoning was relatively mechanistic,[1] revolving around what we might
call the "biographical hypothesis." He envisioned a singulary
explanatory causality in which an inappropriate or erratic response had a
submerged or repressed, but all the more efficient, cause somewhere in the
person's actual biographical development. Ideally, the conscious
recognition of the suppressed cause by the subject could dissolve the
dysfunction, as in fact occurred in the cases of hysteria treated by Freud
in his early career.
The assumption that such a
cause would be situated in early childhood must have been attractive for
several reasons. Children tend to respond with intensities that would
appear exaggerated or over-emotional in an adult. Childhood memories are
frequently difficult to access and should also be difficult to control or
revise. And children are frequently admonished in ways that elicit
powerful guilt feelings. In particular, the uncompromising repression of
childhood sexuality in the latter nineteenth century, coupled with
draconic views about toilet training, seemed to generate a paradigm
mechanism whereby the child's experiences and confrontations with adult
society could seem threatening or even devastating to psychic stability
and adjustment.
Such a causal line of
reasoning might seem congenial to behaviorist psychology. However, to
isolate the putatively decisive cause within the mass of infantile
recollections and to appreciate how it could have such far-reaching
effects, Freud was obliged to situate the cause not in the event, but in
the person's symbolization of the event. Since Freud's fundamental
assumption was that the person was not free to symbolize the event in any
straightforward or explicit way, his therapy relied on displaced
symbolizations which could elude the person's "repressions" and
"defenses."
Psychoanalysis has
accordingly attributed far greater importance to displaced symbolic
evidence than psychology has. The major problem has been how to find
channels for accessing such evidence despite the person's presumed
inclination to hide it. Hypnosis was taken as one practical channel of
access to blocked memories and thus as a route for retracing the
biographical cause of the behavioral disturbance. Hypnosis should, through
"regression," reveal the efficient underlying symbolizations
attached to actual past events (cf. Cheek & LeCron, 1968). Such an
outlook implies what we might call the "eidetic hypothesis":
that the memory stores complete and accurate memories, which hypnosis
merely unlocks (McConnell, 1977). However, the eidetic hypothesis has been
undercut by extensive empirical evidence that human memory symbolizes as
well as records (e.g. Orne, 1951; survey in Loftus, 1980).
A second channel was sought
in unintentional observed behavior. Freud reasoned that the repressed
element(s) within a system in conflict would be watching and waiting for
occasions to circumvent defenses and become manifest against the person's
will. Such occasions, ranging from the innocuous, e.g. slips of the tongue,
over to the acute, e.g. hysterical paralysis, could be observed and
assigned an additional symbolic dimension. However, since many intended
actions or utterances might be mere meaningless mistakes after all, the
analyst is already more involved in symbolizing the evidence than was the
case for hypnosis. The policeman who was giving me directions in East
Berlin and told me to proceed "three hundred kilometers" rather
than three hundred meters may have been subconsciously wishing me beyond
the frontiers of
A third channel was the
richest and most elaborated: the interpretation of dreams, which Freud
(1900) came to consider the key to the "unconscious." The "dream-content"
("Trauminhalt") would be the product of psychically significant
events being symbolized and re-enacted through subtle but systematic
processes of "dream-work" ("Traumarbeit") when
conscious control and surveillance were not operating. The analyst's
"interpretation" would be an explicit resymbolization, in
biographical, psychic, or clinical terms, of the dream content symbolizing
unconscious images, desires, drives, and so on that are denied admission
to consciousness during waking hours.
Far more than hypnosis or
unintentional behavior, dreams confront the analyst with overabundant
symbolic material. Freud foresaw, but was ultimately unable to avert, the
reductive compensatory tactic of couching explanatory causalities in terms
of a transcendent (universal, archetypal, etc.) "vocabulary" of
"dream symbols." He repeatedly emphasized that, on the contrary,
what a particular symbolic representation might "mean" depended
crucially on the individual person's own symbolizing activities and on the
specific context of both the dysfunction and the therapy. Yet these
admonitions were largely lost on the purportedly "orthodox"
Freudian offshoots who followed prevailing attitudes of "scientific"
explanation in believing that symbolic dimensions should be restricted in
range and sanctioned by generality. The "handbooks of dream symbols"
still on the market today reflect the popularization of this reductive
attitude.
Even a purportedly
"general vocabulary" of fixed psychoanalytic symbols was
unacceptable to positivistic behaviorist psychology, which rejected
symbolic dimensions in the name of a resolutely anti-mentalistic "unified
science." The favored path to this "unity" was to demand,
in the "softer" human sciences like psychology and sociology,
the rigor and generality claimed in the "harder" natural
sciences like physics and biology. At the time, the necessity of
purchasing this generality with a reduction or loss of human content was
deemed more an advantage than a drawback (cf. Beaugrande, 1987). The
drastic abbreviation of symbolic dimensions seemed both legitimate and
desirable.
In consequence,
psychoanalysis could be integrated with behaviorist psychology only to the
extent that general constructs like "drive" and "defense"
were formulated within mechanistic schemes of causality, e.g., in terms of
relative "response dispositions" or "attitudes," which
the "drives" should intensify and the "defenses"
should impede. Psychologists undertook to develop quantitative measures
for a given disposition, e.g. the familiar "rating scales" from
+10 ("strongly positive") to 0 ("neutral") to -10
("strongly negative"), and then to correlate them with the
ratios of actually observed responses within sets of tests. The assumption
that the scalar measures are genuinely reliable and consistent entails the
more problematic assumption that test subjects are uniformly able and
willing to provide scalar information on demand, even when complex
symbolic dimensions are involved, e.g. when "visualizing an emotion
situation" and answering questions like "how pleasant are your
thoughts?" (cf. Izard, 1977, p. 218).
Psychologists recognized
this informational problem but could not resolve it without incorporating
full-fledged models of the activities of symbolizing. Instead, they
preferred to adjust the experimental design. They would, for instance,
follow their experiment with a post-interview in which subjects were
probed whether they had some "suspicion" about what was going on
or what it was intended to show; often, they were simply asked outright
and may have felt pressured to humor the experimenter by saying
"no" lest their results be discarded. To be really certain,
additional experimental designs would need to create situations in which
the presence or absence of suspicion would be signaled by the subjects'
spontaneous behavior.
Or, the real experiment
would be disguised behind a false experiment in order to circumvent
contamination by giving the subjects a decoy to reason about. In one such
experiment, subjects were carefully observed turning pegs in holes for
half and hour and were then were paid varying amounts to encourage other
subjects to participate; the real object of study was not peg-turning, but
the impact of monetary rewards on subjects' disposition to make statements
they didn't believe -- that a boring task was an interesting one (Festinger
& Carlsmith, 1959).
In sum, the orientation of
behaviorist psychology in the direction of hard sciences has engendered a
systematic double-tracking in which a small amount of "hard"
evidence is gathered and quantified, but shored up by a large amount of
"soft" evidence taken more or less at face value without an
account of the activities of symbolizing involved either in the subject's
performance or the investigator's evaluation. Discourse was deployed as a
means both for providing a stimulus (e.g. a persuasive argument) and for
identifying a response (e.g. the "attitude change" elicited by
the argument) (cf. survey in Himmelfarb & Eagley eds., 1974).
Deploying discourse in such ways implies what we might call the "transparency
hypothesis" — that it is a reasonably straightforward relay of
intention and content without further symbolic dimensions that would
complicate the data.
Despite its own episodic
ambitions to be a "science" (already in Freud 1895),
psychoanalysis has not followed the same route. Instead, it has retained a
fairly open and flexible outlook on the possible reliability of evidence
provided by the subject, whether deliberately or accidentally, consciously
or unconsciously, observed or symbolized. Discourse is prominently
deployed here, but without the transparency hypothesis. Instead, the range
of symbolic dimensions is assumed to open and multiplex, and activities of
symbolizing are given explicit consideration in their own right.
Thus, an engagement between psychology and psychoanalysis with their diverging epistemologies might attenuate some of the "inner conflicts" within the sciences, to expropriate Horney's (1945, 1950) terms. So far, the "perfectionist" and "detached" traits of the scientific personality do not balance well with the "narcissistic" and “aggressive" desire to suppress alternative epistemologies. Indeed, scientific orthodoxy can eventually foster a denial of the multiplex symbolic dimensions whereby the human species created science upon realizing that things often do not "mean" what commonsense leads us to believe.
Symbolic representations in
cognitive science and discourse processing
The scientific climate has
changed in recent years under pressure from evidence, some of it fairly
"hard," that a "symbolic" component is involved in all
human actions within the environment. Even the "perception of form"
depends on a "process of symbolization" (Langer, 1951, p. 59).
The skepticism of positivist "unified science," viewing the
human as a relatively neutral and transparent relay system for "stimuli
events," now seems anachronistic, but the expediency of this view
continues to influence hidden assumptions in more recent paradigms. The
"cognitive" domain appearing in psychological and linguistic
research since the 1960s was at first an expanded and more complex relay
system between events and the subject's responses, e.g., in the "cognitive
response analysis model" proposed by Greenwald (1968) for acceptance
or rejection of persuasion. Such models do not foresee elaborate, context
sensitive symbolizing heuristics whereby subjects determine what things
mean before deciding which response to select.
Such recidivism is not
surprising, because experimental method in general entails assumptions
about cause and effect and favors inclinations toward "neo-behaviorism"
(cf. Suppes, 1975). As usually construed, the symbolic significance of the
experiment itself depends on a reliable correlation between the staged
events and the test subjects' responses, independently of the internal
symbolizations. At the very least, the staged events must be presumed to
affect the subjects' disposition to choose one kind of action over another
within a situation constructed to offer an orderly set of contrasting
choices; yet this same order may be stringent enough to endanger "ecological
validity" (Neisser 1976) -- the relevance of the findings for
everyday human activity.
The "revolutionary"
aspect of "cognitive science" and "discourse processing"
vis-à-vis the behaviorist tradition lies mainly in accrediting the notion
that "mental content" can be symbolized in a "representation"
or "model" and correlated with observed behavior or response
disposition. We can now operate not merely by deploying discourse, but by
designing explicit models of what a discourse might symbolize. To
constrain this new perspective, researchers need to consider how to
control and regulate the construction of such models. Again, the most
expedient assumption and the least disturbing one for behaviorist
paradigms would be a new version of the transparency hypothesis: that the
model is a straightforward representation of discourse content as
uniformly understood by both discourse participants or test subjects and
by analysts or experimenters. However, this hypothesis would retain the
idea of perception as a neutral relay, which cognitive research has
already discarded as an oversimplification even in relatively unmediated
domains like the visual perception of shapes (e.g. Kosslyn, 1975).
A more pragmatic and
accepted recourse is what we might call the "consensual hypothesis."
The recourse here lies in reliable, intersubjective ways of designing a
representation or model for a given discourse and postponing the issues of
its "psychological reality" or "correctness" in a
classical empirical sense, i.e., of its status as a symbolic entity in
people's minds. If a group of trained researchers independently construct
reasonably consensual symbolic representations for the same discourse,
then the reliability of the representation can be provisionally assumed
for purposes of assessing the results. For example, the methods for
representing a discourse as a ranked list-like configuration of "propositions"
(Kintsch van Dijk 1978; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) can operate with
consensual techniques for preparing such a list for a given sample of
discourse (Turner & Greene, 1977). The discourse can then be put to a
certain experimental use, e.g. having people read it and reproduce it in a
"free recall" design, to see what systematic tendencies emerge,
e.g., whether the "higher-level" or more general propositions
are recalled more often than the "lower-level" or more specific
ones. The researcher's own symbolizing activities in constructing such a
list or representation need not be modeled as long as they are found to be
intersubjectively stable and consistent. As evidence accrues, e.g. that
the "higher level propositions" are indeed recalled more often,
we obtain better-delineated grounds for making suppositions about mental
organization and structure, and hence for making stronger assumptions
about "psychological reality" and "ecological validity."
Such progress could not
have been made had psychology maintained its barriers against symbolic
dimensions and activities. But designing models that are expedient to
implement entails a "loan" we need to "repay" by a
closer scrutiny of their construction and status. In particular, we need
to model the symbolizing activities entailed in producing and interpreting
such a representation and inquire how far they are indeed consensual. My
own inquiries (e.g. Beaugrande, 1980-81, 1982) have yielded some grounds
to question this consensus.
One lack of consensus I
have noticed arises from the attitudes of respective disciplines about
what a representation should mean and achieve. I had worked out a
heuristic for converting a text to a network wherein content words were
used as concept labels, and the conceptual relations were classified by
link markers drawn from a stated repertory (Beaugrande, 1980). When I
presented the representation to linguists, they typically insisted that it
should be derived from the linguistic material of the discourse by
abstract formalized procedures. When I presented it to psychologists, they
typically supposed the representation to embody a theory of mental
processes and objected that such a theory was not formulated tightly
enough to enable experimental validation or refutation. When I presented
it to humanists, e.g. literature or composition teachers, they typically
floundered or rejected the representation as incomprehensible. When
presented to computer scientists, the representations were immediately
read as programs, and some were actually rewritten into Horn clauses using
successor arithmetic and run on natural language simulation systems (Simmons
& Chester, 1979).
It was perplexing that the
"same" symbolic representation "meant" totally
different things to different groups (or nothing to the humanists). I felt
I had built a chair and each of the three bears had passed a totally
different judgment upon it. For the linguists, the network was not formal
or abstract enough (too soft); for the humanists, it was far too formal or
abstract (too hard); and the computer people saw it on a level of
formality comparable to the one used in daily work (just right). The
psychologists (the fourth bear), however, made the most taxing and
ecologically relevant demand: that the representation should generate
testable predictions, e.g., that two proximate points in the network
should be more often associated in recall than two distant points.[2]
Such multiple reactions
offer helpful occasions to reflect on the complex problematics of
representing symbolic dimensions. The goal of such reflection should not
be to legitimate just one mode of reaction and reject the others. Instead,
the goal should be to view a given representation as a meeting-grounds for
multiple perspectives and an incitement to contemplate the epistemological
interests and symbolizing activities of various disciplines. This view can
be particularly productive when the phenomenon to be represented is as
multiplex as discourse. Since discourse itself is a representation related
in multiplex ways to one or more situations, a single representation for a
discourse cannot be adequate for all aspects and purposes. Instead, we
need to resymbolize the content or purport of the discourse from several
complementary perspectives.
The new interest in
representational models has in turn encouraged a new interest in the
influence of prior knowledge and expectations on what is perceived,
comprehended, or recalled in discourse. But again, problems of control
arise. Experimenters have widely favored a double-edged strategy: you
appeal to the prior knowledge represented in the model to account for
observed effects, while the observed effects justify the postulating of
this prior knowledge in the model. The circularity cannot be fully
eliminated, because prior knowledge can only be "observed"
through its effects, and not as a substantive construct with a concrete
selfhood. However, since knowledge of ordinary experience is itself
circular in the same manner and to a much higher degree, ecological
validity is not seriously imperiled.
"Protocol analysis"
has recently been hailed as a technique for getting further information
about symbolic representations and activities by analysing the
self-reflective discourse of subjects performing a task, such as solving a
problem (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1980). Predictably, behaviorist
psychologists (e.g. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) disparage this technique,
ostensibly because it encourages subjects to "tell more than they can
know." But, as I remarked, the behaviorists' own earlier work (e.g.
Nisbett & Gordon, 1967) also relied on evidence extracted from
discourse; and no theory so far has defined the borderline at which
discourse passes from reliable to unreliable, from what people can know or
tell to what they cannot.
The outlook of
psychoanalysis an this issue offers an intriguing counterpoint. On the one
hand, a decisive role is allotted to the subject's discourse about past
and present ideas, feelings, and so on. Indeed, the prominence of
discourse in psychoanalytic procedures and therapies (cf. Hartley &
Strupp, 1980) signals the urgency of applying discourse analysis to
psychoanalytic discourse itself (e.g. Labov & Fanshel, 1971; Wodak,
1981). On the other hand, the psychoanalyst assumes in principle that the
decisive information and content for a given dysfunction is what the
subject cannot or will not provide because of psychic imbalances or
inhibitions. Thus, a major strategy is precisely to get subjects to "tell
more than they can know," to provide displaced symbolic material
despite the blocks set against it. At the analyst's end, "listening
with the third ear" is intended to detect concealed content
indirectly symbolized through more manifest content. Hence, the actual
discourse is assumed to symbolize, through some recoverable relationship,
a blocked "other" discourse, and the symbolizing strategies of
the psychoanalyst should reconstruct this relationship.
Yet the "resymbolization"
of that relationship must be fitted to the individual case. Just as
popular dictionaries of dream symbols overlook the personal component,
public dictionary definitions of words and phrases by no means exhaust the
symbolic dimensions of an actual discourse. The transparency hypothesis
that discourse is a relay of content about a pre-given reality must yield
to the hypothesis that discourse is an occasion for constructing personal
and social reality, including one's own "self" (Potter &
Wetherell, 1987). This notion should also be applied to the discourse of
scientists, who symptomatically maintain a double tracking scenario: my
views and statements represent things as nature made them (discourse as
relay of content), whereas my opponent's reflect personal preconceptions
and selfish interests (discourse as personal and social construct) (Gilbert
& Mulkay, 1984). Psychoanalysis is helpful here in reminding us that
all views and statements reflect personal preconceptions and interests
that may be unconscious or even consciously denied; recognizing this
reflection is the first step toward more open (or "aliocentric")
insights, whether in science or everyday life.[3]
In this way, psychoanalysis
seems to have cut through a customary Gordian knot plaguing the more
self-conscious interpretive or scientific approaches. Humanists, linguists,
and psychologists have periodically postulated some determinate "meaningful
intention" that they could "objectively" reconstruct with
their respective methods. The presumed "authors" or "speakers"
must have "known what they meant" as distinct from what they did
not "mean." Especially in methods influenced by formal logic,
this intended meaning was estimated in reductive terms, e.g. of what was
"true or false in the world." All these objectifying and
reductive approaches encounter generic difficulties in dealing with the
full symbolic dimensions of spontaneous discourse. Although failure to be
"logical" or "grammatical" was not usually taken as a
signal of mental dysfunction, it was counted a deviant case all the same,
an issue to be set aside while we study "literal" meanings and
"verifiable" statements.
Psychoanalysis, however,
sees no problem in assuming that people often say what they don't mean,
mean what they don't say, or mean conflicting, even opposite things at the
same time, and have more overriding concerns than "logic" or
"truth." Analysis focuses on cases of noticeably insincere,
illogical, inconsistent, or untruthful meanings as primary signals of
dysfunctional or pathogenic tendencies. The recognition of such cases has
depended partly on clinical experience and partly on the analyst's own
standards of sincerity and symbolization, rather than on a formal system
of logical postulates and proofs.
Although the recent
interaction of disciplines under the aegis of "cognitive science"
and "discourse processing" is extremely encouraging (surveys in
Beaugrande, 1980, 1984a, 1997), the benefits and insights will be limited
as long as psychoanalytic method has not yet been properly integrated (Beaugrande,
1984b). If, as I have argued, psychoanalysis maintains its own
characteristic approach to symbolic dimensions of meaning and discourse,
such an integration offers a fresh opportunity to expand our notions of
what discourse can symbolize. I shall therefore examine some dimensions of
discourse which psychoanalytic methods can uncover and then demonstrate
them with a sample from scientific discourse.
Psychoanalysis
and discourse
The symbolizing activities
of discourse in psychoanalysis are insightfully illustrated by Emmanuel
Peterfreund's (1975) "models and strategies in the psychoanalytic
process." His studies focus on therapeutic progress attained through
negotiative discourse relevant to a particular case in multiplex ways. He
assumes that the "psychoanalytic process" relies on "a
general working model of people and things in our culture and times, and
normal expectable cognitive and emotional relationships" (1975, p.
78). In addition, the "process" requires a "working model,
actually a group of metamodels, based on clinical theories" as well
as on "informational, hormonal, chemical," and "genetic
models" (1975, pp.
The term "working
model" has serendipitous associations for a method which emphasizes
"working through" as both an everyday and a specialized activity
(1975, pp. 62ff):
What psychoanalysis has long referred to as "working through" can be viewed, in large part, as a learning process, an updating, a readapting, a checking for consistency of working models […] normal adaptive learning often requires that a model not be merely updated but discarded, and a radically new one substituted -- an idea familiar enough from the history of science […] we use working models to rearrange the world we know, to imagine new combinations and possibilities […]
From child to adult we understand the world though our
ever-changing working models. Each of us interprets existing information
more or less differently. We select and process it to arrive at our
individual views of the world, our individual "reality." And
through such interpretations information attains meaning, generally
accepted denotative and connotative meanings plus the unique personal
meanings of special interest to psychoanalysis.
Whereas the first quotation would
apply in parallel to cognitive science and discourse analysis just as well
as to psychoanalysis, the second suggests a reciprocity or a
complementarity between the "generally accepted meanings"
emphasized in cognitive science and discourse analysis and the "unique
personal meanings" emphasized in psychoanalysis.
At this point, a strategic
definition of "psychoanalytic discourse" might be formulated: a
negotiation for uncovering and attenuating dysfunctional discrepancies and
conflicts between general social meaning and personal idiosyncratic
meaning. According to Peterfreund (1975, p. 68), "highly personal
connotative meaning" is the essence of "what psychoanalysts
usually understand as unconscious meaning." And some unconscious
meaning is not merely personal, but stands in dysfunctional disaccord with
social meaning in ways that characteristically elude the person's
awareness.
This definition might help
explain the crucial role of childhood experience, which has often been
simply accepted as a basic axiom in the wake of orthodox Freudianism.
Childhood is the period in life when encounters with unfamiliar
experiences and their expressions in discourse are most predominant in
proportion to familiar ones and most emotionally and effectively valorized,
and, at the same, the least controllable by explicit negotiation. The
potential for developing personal idiosyncratic meanings is therefore much
higher than at later stages of socialization through discourse. An obvious
case is the encounter with a "new word" under special
circumstances which can become permanently associated with the word as its
"connotations" (cf. Dieckmann, 1981). But meanings need not ride
on language alone, and, as Peterfreund (1975, p. 64) remarks, "working
models with many of the capabilities mentioned are apparently present by
what Piaget calls the sixth stage of the sensorimotor period, before there
is any adequate language system." Discourse might thus emerge at a
stage where a system of personal meanings is already in place, and the
possibility for conflicts with social meanings might be imminent.
The need for a functional
complementarity between personal and social meanings yields a particularly
powerful motive for concerted interaction between psychoanalytic and
cognitive-discoursal models. So far, cognitive-discoursal approaches have
not fully explored the process whereby meanings are established in early
life and gradually pass from personal or episodic toward general and
stable. Conversely, psychoanalytic approaches have not adequately mapped
out the relation between personal therapy and general social discourse,
especially with respect to the putative borderline where discourse ceases
to be "normal" and becomes "pathogenic." At both ends,
the general-social and specific-personal, the models are usually built for
the achieved state, functional or dysfunctional respectively, without
sufficient elaboration of developmental or transitional states. Any such
model gives only a partial picture and abridges the evolutionary processes
that led to the current state. The development of means for favorably
controlling or intervening in intermediary stages is therefore impeded.
Discrepancies between
personal and social meanings are particularly likely to arise in respect
to the emotions, whose importance for discourse is only recently being
acknowledged (survey in Fiehler, 1990; demonstration in Beaugrande 1991c).
The long-standing disinterest is of course to be expected if "beginning
in adolescence, social pressure tends to lead the individual to inhibit or
conceal the veridical expression of the emotions" (Izard, 1977, p.
103). Research was in turn influenced by "the attitude that emotions
cannot be studied objectively or systematically" through "the
usual methodologies and procedures of science" (1977, p. 100). Hence,
"the psychology of emotion and its methods emerged against a
background of opposing forces ranging from inertia in psychological
theorizing to outright rejection of emotion concepts" among "leading
theorists and model builders" (1977, p. 99). And even "in
emotions research and linguistics, the topic of 'emotion and communicative
phenomena' has never risen above the status of a marginal concern" (Fiehler,
1990, p. 134, my translation).
Psychoanalytic approaches,
in contrast, have recognized the centrality of emotions from the outset,
though various rationales for this centrality have been proposed.
Peterfreund and Schwartz (1971, p. 181), for instance, suggest that
phylogenetically older systems, clinically those involved
in drives and emotions, are able to play especially crucial roles in
motivation […] Though they may be relatively less complex
information-processing systems in themselves, they may nevertheless enter
into the overall information processing of the organism at crucial points;
they may enter deeply into the logical organization of programming; they
may have high-priority positions. They can therefore exert an extremely
powerful influence, appear to "demand attention," and even, at
times, make the organism appear to be "out of control" in the
clinical sense.
This phylogenetic rationale
has recently been joined by a neurological one. Joseph Ledoux of
The above-cited reluctance
of societies to accredit emotions and their symbolisation both in daily
life and institutional practices has been a major crux of psychoanalytic
theorizing since Freud. Psychoanalysis should therefore welcome the
project of emotional psychology to "rehabilitate" the emotions.
Hobart Mowrer (1960, p. 307) for example has argued that "the
emotions are of quite extraordinary importance in the total economy of
living organisms and do not at all deserve to be put into opposition with
'intelligence'"; rather, they are themselves a high order of
intelligence." Izard (1977, p. 142) has argued that "some
emotion is always present in ordinary states of consciousness,"
although it is "not always cognized or symbolized." Izard's
comprehensive survey proposes to show that "emotions are the most
fundamental organizer of sensation that has significance or meaning"
and a principal "coder" of cognition" (1977, p. 155; cf.
Spencer 1855; Tomkins, 1962-63- Spitz, 1965; Kilty, 1969; Scott, 1969;
Gray, 1973). "Indeed, it is the individual's capacity to integrate in
the cortex the vast possible array of affective, cognitive, and motor
elements that guarantees the basic freedom of the human being" (Izard
1977, p. 149).
We should thus predict than
the denial or repression of emotions could lead to a far-reaching
disorientation in cognition and communication, and to severe restrictions
on freedom of thought and action. And Izard (1977, p. 97) in fact reports
that "chronic suppression of overt expression" can "increase
physiological arousal" and "lead to psychosomatic symptoms."
It might not be unduly far-fetched to see the antagonism against
psychoanalysis within both popular opinion and scientific institutions as
one facet of a large-scale suppression of emotions which mistakes its own
negative consequences as inherent attributes of the emotions themselves.
Emotions are not accredited for public discourse because they are believe
to symbolize the dark side of human nature; this non-accreditation then
forces the emotions into just such a role when defenses and repressions
break down and expressions burst forth. Thus, problems which arise from
denying one's emotions are misunderstood as problems caused merely by
having emotions at all. The lack of accredited strategies for expressing
emotions encourages the displacements whereby discourse symbolizes
emotional dimensions through erratic associations or ominous disguises.
How psychoanalysis attempts
to trace such symbolizations through discourse can be seen in case
histories, e.g. in this description of one of Peterfreund's (1975, pp.
the patient […] spoke of the enormous pressure
he felt he reported feeling explosive, torn apart; there were
"demands, demands, demands" from all sides. […] He rasped at
me, angrily demanding that I do something. […] I asked him why he
could not go on and talk further. […] he responded […] that he
was afraid he might get out of control, go wild, maybe even break up my
office. I pointed out to him that such fears were in no way commensurate
with the actualities and that it is almost always helpful to talk
about them
Here, the analyst used
discourse as a means both for symbolizing emotional displacements and for
alleviating them. As in many such cases, the patient revealed accrued
anxiety not merely about his emotions, but about expressing them in
discourse. In fact, he suggested that "talk" would make the
feelings even worse, "wild," "out of control." The
systematic suppression of emotional discourse in society had probably
contributed to the patient's disturbance by inhibiting communications that
could have brought alleviation before the crisis stage. As long as society
demands such suppression, psychoanalysis will remain trapped in a
therapeutic rather than a preventative role and must struggle against
social odds to resymbolize emotional content after the damage is already
done.
Given such an ambience, the
discourse of psychotherapy occurs in a transitional or transactional
situation in which the dysfunctional personal aspects of meaning must
first be made sufficiently explicit and conscious to be amenable to a more
functional and social resymbolization. To circumvent the patient's
resistance to producing the needed discourse, the analyst can produce
surrogate discourse for the patient, who may become able to reassume
participation as therapy proceeds:
since he seemed paralysed and could hardly verbalize,
I plunged into an identification with my mental images of him and how he
might be experiencing the world […] As I spoke I was almost
free-associating myself while I identified with my working model of this
patient […] I worked with a model of everyday human experience as well
as the experiences he was reporting, [which were] unusual and
maladaptive. […] in the second session the patient was able to return to
the previous day's material and continue the analytic work on his own,
bringing in a more exact description of his inner state. The
ability to do this is an excellent indication of a good working analytic
situation [and] "therapeutic alliance." The connections that I
made between past and present were [not] fitted together an the basis of
generally accepted psychoanalytic formulations, [but] based on the patient's
experiences, on specific shared emotional and cognitive experiential
attributes. (Peterfreund, 1975, pp. 69, 72ff, my emphases)
Precisely because of the decisive
role of personal meanings, even the relatively specialized symbolizing
techniques of psychoanalysis can be fully useful only when the patient
actively participates in the activities of symbolization and
resymbolization. Peterfreund's "criteria for good analysis"
entail "new awarenesses about current life and situation,"
including "links" "between present and past" "confirmed
by emergent memories," and "active participation by the patient,"
especially in providing "error correcting feedback" (1975, p.
76). The dilemma that the patient is a patient in the first place because
he or she does not understand or admit such "links" or
awarenesses," requires that therapy provide the means, usually
discourse, to "unblock" symbolic knowledge of the self and its
problems and to enact a more constructive resymbolization. The goal is
attained when the balance between social and personal meaning has been
productively shifted away from conflictual discrepancies.
At the start of the meeting
reported by Peterfreund, the patient's meanings were not communicable even
to him. The analyst pointed out that his responses and emotions did not
fit an appropriate symbolization of the situation and, suggested some
general reasons for the discrepancy. The analyst undertook to resymbolize
in ways he hoped would serve as a model for the patient:
My remarks were not thought out in advance, and I
even used some Yiddish expressions which were part of his emotional
language. The patient agreed, in general, with my description
of how he seemed to be experiencing the world. I was apparently
approximately on target. (Peterfreund, 1975, p. 69, my emphases)
The highlighted terms signal the
explicit deployment of discourse for balancing social meaning with
personal meaning to gain access to otherwise private symbolics. The
analyst was, as it were, "speaking with the second mouth" while
he "listened with the third ear." The discourse helped to
unblock the hidden symbolics of the patient's state enough that he could
contribute to the discursive analysis "in the second session."
Peterfreund's evaluation of
being "on target" should not be understood merely in the
traditional sense of straightforward truth or correspondence with reality.
The discourse was helpful even though, as he later remarked,
My initial comments were only partly accurate. I was
roughly correct in the first hour, but far from exactly so. (1975, p. 73)
Evidently, whether the content of
a discourse is "accurate" or "correct" in an everyday
manner need not decide how effective it may be in therapeutic discourse
seeking to resymbolize an emotional imbalance. The chief task of the
therapist is not so much to generate final truth as work through symbolic
dimensions in such a fashion that the patient can join in process.
The therapy eventually led
back to fear and anxiety elicited by the patient's memories of a prolapsed
bowel in childhood. Peterfreund apparently instated these memories as the
privileged symbolics of the whole disturbance in some more or less causal
sense, and the patient accepted this reasoning. However, once symbolic
dimensions have been expanded it may not be wise to bottle them up again
inside a single privileged symbolization in the manner of the "biographical
hypothesis". We might prefer to see the episode with the prolapsed
bowel as an accredited target-construct for psychotherapeutic symbolizing
and thus a vehicle for both therapist and patient to release emotional
overaccumulation by finding a fairly "literal" reason. The
therapist is powerfully motivated to seek content whose expression would
be particularly prone to be refused accreditation in ordinary discourse.
Yet the patient's syndrome might well have been due to a much more general
refusal to accredit his fears and anxieties; improvement was attained
because a symbolic vehicle was found, whether or not the latter played a
genuinely causal or originary role in his biography.
Here, we might envision a
reason why psychotherapy is often complex, circuitous, and time-consuming
(cf. Hartley & Strupp, 1980). The discovery of traumatic moments in
early childhood might be an initially liberating but ultimately
constricting activity whereby the symbolic dimensions expanded by
psychoanalysis are narrowed again in the name of an explanatory construct
simultaneously expected to function as a cure. Many such constructs have
been generated in clinical case histories with merely transitory
therapeutic benefits. These benefits could thus be due not to the
revelation of an efficient cause, but to the shared symbolizing activities
of analyst and patient. A relapse may occur not because the cause was
incorrectly diagnosed, but because the patient has remained incapable of
integrating such activities into his or her strategies of everyday conduct
and discourse. The causal account may become constrictive after the
activities in therapy have ceased, especially when it is added to the
patient's alibis for not symbolizing in daily experience. A more effective
and permanent improvement would require the patient to become genuinely
able and willing to symbolize and resymbolize both past and current
experiences instead closing them off with (or enclosing them inside) rigid
meanings, including therapeutically predicated causes.
These prospects intuitively
accord with the plausible thesis that discrepancies between personal and
social meanings are most likely to become pathogenic when the two sides
are rigidly fixated. Traditionally, the fixated private meaning has
received the major focus of psychoanalysis, and the fixated social meaning
has been taken for granted as an orientation for identifying the norms.
Yet if "the psychopathology of everyday life" is as pervasive as
Freud's famous formulation suggests, it is not the discrepancies
themselves that are pathogenic, but the inability to resymbolize both
sides of meaning in less conflictual ways. And this inability in turn
reflects long-standing preconceptions about which symbolic dimensions are
proper and admissible and which are not. If emotions are routinely fixated
as negative and disturbing, then opportunities to resymbolize them as
positive and orienting will be systematically overlooked or reversed.
Quite general disaffections such as apathy and existential angst might
arise from a traitlike disability to symbolize and resymbolize, leading to
the global impression that life at large is meaningless.
To reassess the issues
involved, we need to carefully reexamine accustomed conceptions of "knowing,"
"thinking," "believing," and so on, and the reductive
and fixating tendencies they favor. Simplistic, impoverishing dichotomies
abound, forcing a grid onto the human mind: things should be either "true"
or "false," "correct" or "incorrect,"
"real" or "unreal," "good" or "bad,"
approved or disapproved, liked or disliked, and so on. To practice and
enforce these dichotomies, our symbolic processes hasten to fixate
meanings and truncate symbolic dimensions. Discourse is in turn
constrained to operate with the fixated and truncated results, which it
reinforces wherever they seem sanctioned by social consensus, and converts
into conflicts wherever they do not. This stark division between
reinforcement and conflict fosters a fragmentation of one's view of the
world and weakens the authorization and freedom of the self to be an agent
of symbolization in that world.
The term "symbolic
dimensions" can thus be apt in suggesting that meanings, both
personal and social, are not composed of fixed contents (like the feature
matrices proposed in formal semantics), but of parametric adjustments to
be continually performed during discourse. Much of this adjusting is done
so skillfully and rapidly that the discourse participants may have the
impression that the meanings are always already definite and ready-made,
more like static dictionary entries than dynamic psychic constructs. But
such a static substrate would make it impracticable to symbolize new
contexts, or familiar contexts in new ways. Even so, the mere impression
that the substrate is static is already an impediment against the freedom
to symbolize and resymbolize. The curtailments of freedom which lead to
pathogenic constrictions and attract the notice of psychoanalysts can only
be the tip of the iceberg. More pervasive is doubtless a general
alienation stemming from a feeling that the world has been preempted by
arbitrary symbolizations one must accept at face value. Herein, I surmise,
lies the main source of the "psychopathic" qualities of "everyday
life". Its "everydayness" is the product of constrictive
presymbolizations whose incessant rehearsal and repetition increasingly
alienate the subject and foster conflicts when one's own symbolizations
are made to appear unauthorized and non-accredited. The accrual of
conflictual moments can escalate to the intensity where the subject
rebelliously breaks out of functional constraints and generates the
unreasonable and dysfunctional symbolizations that form the substance and
content of a neurosis.
We can now reconsider the
familiar complaint that psychoanalysis propounds an unduly negative and
neurotic vision of human life. On the one hand, the dysfunctions addressed
by both theory and practice of psychoanalysis are indeed intimately
related to general restrictions on symbolization throughout conformist
societies. On the other hand, psychoanalysis has provided some of the most
complex and intricate strategies for resymbolizing human experiences and
thus raised new prospects for counteracting the negative effects of such
restrictions. However, the imposition of orthodoxy upon psychoanalysis and
its symbolic constructs can rescind this gain by replacing society's
constrictions with its own, e.g., through an authoritarian pre-emption of
therapeutic discourse by a reductive terminology of "phallic,"
"oral," or "anal" types.
Psychoanalysis therefore
cannot attain major progress as a discipline by merely shifting from one
orthodoxy to another, but only by opening up to genuinely free activities
of symbolization. The increasing diversity of modern psychoanalytic
methods, including humanistic and existential ones, signals not confusion
or diffusion, but the most logical continuation of the original impetus to
resymbolize. The intensifying and diversifying focus on language as both
material and resource for psychoanalytic insight (e.g. Holland, 1968;
Lacan, 1970-71; Irigaray, 1974, 1977; Paris, 1974) is part and parcel of
this continuity, but its significance has been partially obstructed by the
resistance which some of this discourse (e.g. Lacan and Irigaray)
programmatically maintains against being construed as simple referential
symbolizations of real clinical or societal states (cf. Beaugrande, 1988a,
1988b).
The aspirations of
psychoanalysis to arrive at the "real cause" of psychopathic
behaviors, though readily understandable, are congenitally problematic if
the most important object of concern is neither behaviors nor causes, but
symbolizations and their personal and social conditions. When
psychotherapy generates explanations that supply causes for behaviors, the
patient is relieved, at least temporarily, of the accrued frustration
produced by his or her own failure to behave appropriately and to explain
why this happens. But in the long run, the cause will be overtaxed as an
explanation, and new frustrations will arise from the patient's reluctance
or inability to resymbolize both past and present experience in
self-reliant and productive ways. At this stage, the psychoanalytic
explanation can join the obstructions it was intended to dismantle.
Future progress in
psychoanalysis would depend on a more perspicuous and direct focus on the
processes of symbolization which have always been inherent in discourse
practice, both in everyday life and in psychotherapy. One resource would
be to examine multiple symbolic dimensions of discourse simultaneously
from a psychoanalytic perspective and a discoursal-cognitive perspective.
I shall conclude with a demonstration for a discourse which, though not
pathogenic, indicates that its author is "working through"
substantially more psychic content than we could recognize from the public
meanings of the words or sentences.
A
case study
One intriguing case can be
found in a scientific best-seller, namely the three appendices placed
without explanation after the main text in Stephen W. Hawking’s A
Brief History of Time (1988, pp. 179-182). The texts are as follows.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Einstein's connection with
the politics of the nuclear bomb is well known: he signed the famous
letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that persuaded the
Einstein's earliest
political activity came during the First World War, when he was a
professor in
Einstein's second great
cause was Zionism. Although he was Jewish by descent, Einstein rejected
the biblical idea of God. However, a growing awareness of anti-Semitism,
both before and during the First World War, led him to gradually identify
with the Jewish community, and later to become an outspoken supporter of
Zionism. Once more unpopularity did not stop him from speaking his mind.
His theories came under attack; an anti-Einstein organization was even set
up. One man was convicted of inciting others to murder Einstein (and fined
a mere six dollars). But Einstein was phlegmatic; when a book was
published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he retorted,
"If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!"
In 1933, Hitler came to
power. Einstein was in
Throughout his life,
Einstein's efforts toward peace probably achieved little that would last
-- and certainly won him few friends. His vocal support of the Zionist
cause, however, was duly recognized in 1952, when he was offered the
presidency of
GALILEO GALILEI
Galileo, perhaps more than
any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.
His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his
philosophy, for Galileo was not one of the first to argue that man could
hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could this
by observing the real world.
Galileo had believed
Copernican theory (that the planets orbited the sun) since early on, but
it was only when he found the evidence needed to support the idea that he
started to publicly support it. He wrote about Copernicus's theory in
Italian (not the usual academic Latin), and soon his views became widely
supported outside the universities. This annoyed the Aristotelian
professors, who united against him seeking to persuade the Catholic Church
to ban Copernicanism.
Galileo, worried by this,
traveled to
In
The book, Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was completed and published in
1632, with the full backing of the censors -- and was immediately greeted
throughout Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. Soon the
pope, realizing that the people were seeing the book as a convincing
argument in favor of Copernicanism, regretted having allowed its
publication. The pope argued that although the book had the official
blessing of the censors, Galileo had nevertheless contravened the 1616
decree. He brought Galileo before the Inquisition, who sentenced him to
house arrest for life and commanded him to publicly renounce Copernicanism.
For a second, time, Galileo acquiesced.
Galileo remained a faithful
Catholic, but his belief in the independence of science had not been
crushed. Four years before his death in 1642, while he still under house
arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a
publisher in
ISAAC NEWTON
Isaac Newton was not a
pleasant man. His relations with other academics were notorious, most of
his later life spent embroiled in heated disputes. Following publication
of Principia Mathematica -- surely the most influential book ever
written in physics --
A more serious dispute
arose with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Both Leibniz and
During the period of these
two disputes,
In
a simple dimension, these sketches might be taken as reports of historical
facts. But the selection of themes and the placement of perspectives could
not be accounted for by so naive a reading. We need to examine further
symbolic dimensions, including psychoanalytic ones, to appreciate why
these three scientists were chosen for such treatment and why their lives
and careers were symbolized in these ways.
The book's index refers to
the three appendices as "biographies" (pp. 191, 194), but they
are odd representatives of that genre. Only the one on Galileo revolves
around his contributions to "modern science." The one on Newton
informs us that his work was "the most influential every written in
physics" and "underlies most of modern physics," but these
judgments are sandwiched into subordinated sentence structures -- one free
insertion with dashes and one relative clause -- and do not constitute the
main theme of the sketch. The one on Einstein doesn't mention his work in
physics other than his preoccupation with "equations."
One explanation for the
displacement of focus away from physics might be that the contributions of
the three scientists to physics have been covered in the body of the book,
especially for Einstein. But in that case, why have these appendices at
all? What do they add to Hawking's "History of Time," and why
did he feel that such an addition was needed? The harder it is to see a
public cognitive motivation, e.g. to supply significant missing "facts,"
the more urgent it is to consider personal psychic motivations.
The dust-jacket blurb
provides some clues. There, we are told that Hawking "explains
Galileo's and
The final paragraph of the
blurb, presented as a capsule biography of Hawking, lists an almost
numinous triad of coincidences linking him to the three predecessors by
date of birth versus death, professional position, and academic reputation:
Stephen W. Hawking is forty six years old. He was born on
the anniversary of Galileo's death, holds
The main text could hardly
have proposed the relation to Einstein in terms of "brilliance,"
but does mention the other two relations:
a theory was proposed by Paul Dirac, who was later
elected to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at
My interest in questions about the origin of the universe
was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the
Jesuits at the
The first passage treats the
coincidence rather parenthetically, giving topic status to Dirac's work;
still, it might lead us to expect a mention of Dirac in the blurb, which,
as I remarked, was not the case.
The second passage is more
interesting, since it mentions the "coincidence" in the context
of a much more elaborated parallel, namely of Galileo and Hawking both
holding views contradicting Church doctrine. The prospect of "sharing
the fate of Galileo" must be a personal symbolic fantasy -- as if the
Inquisition were still in power today, or the Church had any authority
left to unseat or even arrest an eminent scientist, and one in a
non-Catholic country at that. Hawking is evidently resymbolizing his
professional success as a high-risk situation, and possibly working though
some feelings of guilt and paranoia.[4]
A conjecture commonly aired
in the press when the book appeared, was that Hawking inserted the
biographies because he wants to be seen as the peer and successor of these
three scientists and no others (e.g. Adler & Lubenow, 1988, p. 40).
But if so, Hawking should have written three uniformly laudatory pieces
showing determined scientists valorously triumphing over doubt and dissent
to bring forth "modern physics." Yet the tenor and thematics of
the pieces are conspicuously ambivalent and diffuse. The major unifying
theme is neither scientific achievement nor modern physics, but
interpersonal conflict between each scientist and his own peculiar
antagonists. In the first two biographies, the antagonists have no names (unless
we include "Hitler"). For Einstein, they were "colleagues,"
"an anti-Einstein organization," "one man," and "Nazi
militia"; for Galileo, they were "the Catholic Church,"
"Aristotelian professors," "ecclesiastical authorities,"
"the pope," and "the Inquisition." Notice that both
galleries of antagonists unite repressive political groups with
academicians, presumably including other physicists of the times: "colleagues"
and "professors" are displayed in agreement with "Nazis"
and "the Inquisition."
In Galileo's case, the
antagonists were responding to his scientific work, and their motives were
at least understandable: the defense of religious and scientific orthodoxy
in an unsettled age. In Einstein's case, in contrast, the antagonists were
responding to his political sentiments, pacifism and zionism, which are
presented as the real (and irrelevant) targets behind the "attack"
on "his theories." These motives classify the antagonists as
overemotional agents of warmongering and Anti-Semitism and thereby
minimize or exonerate Einstein's own inconsistency, which dominates the
biography both despite and because of the energy exerted to resolve it:
opposing war, then advocating "the nuclear bomb" at the decisive
moment, and then again "warning of the dangers of nuclear war"
after his fateful appeal had been "taken seriously." Einstein is
symbolized as essentially innocent and humane, but driven back and forth
by pressure from others whose motives were decidedly less respectable than
his own.
As we see, it is hard to
extract from the three biographies the edifying moral that great
scientists tend to be innocently persecuted for their revolutionary
discoveries. That moral applies only to Galileo, while Einstein's
conflicts were scarcely relevant to his work in physics, and
There may well be a
symbolic value in having the three sketches placed out of the logical and
chronological order, which would be first Galileo, then Newton, then
Einstein, each coming after and building on the work of the predecessor.
Instead, the most negative sketch comes as the last word, leaving the
whole book to end with the ominous phrase "death on the gallows,"
which might link back to Hawking's fantasy of being condemned by the
Inquisition. This placement disdains the opportunity to conclude the book
on a much brighter note with one of the end phrases of the other two
sketches: "something for eternity" or "the genesis of
modern physics."
If we survey the valorized
expressions we find another curious trend. In the first biography,
thematic dominance, at least in terms of the frequency of mention, is
assigned to the negative emotions of other people regarding Einstein. Here
too, Hawking is conspicuously insistent. We are told that Einstein's
actions "did little to endear him," "did not make him
popular," "made it difficult for him," made him "once
more unpopular," and "won him few friends." In a more
violent vein, he "came under attack," had his "house raided"
and "his bank account confiscated," and had people "incited
to murder him." The retrospective judgment is again bleak: that
"Einstein's efforts toward peace probably achieved little that would
last." The quote at the end -- that "politics is for the present,
but an equation is something for eternity" -- could be read as a
belated restitution for the dark portrayal and the lack of "lasting
achievement," but is heavily outweighed, both in length and in
emotional impact; even the innocuous phrase "a life divided"
begins to seem disquieting. Or, more deviously, one could see some strange
poetic justice in Einstein's persecution as retribution for his uneven
role in "the politics of the nuclear bomb," a phrase which is
placed in the subject position of the opening sentence and thus tends to
function as a dominant theme.
If Einstein's portrait
begins with a hint of death, Galileo's begins with an explicit mention of
"birth" in the opening sentence, whereas the "renowned
conflict" is pushed into the second sentence. Moreover, Galileo is
portrayed as generally consistent ("believed [... ] since early on,"
"remained a faithful Catholic," "his belief in the
independence of science had not been crushed"). The two "acquiescences"
were extorted, one gathers, under threat of death as a heretic. We should
note the express statement that he had "believed Copernican theory"
"since early on" but "publicly supported him only after
"finding evidence," which further sets him apart from his
contemporaries, for whom evidence was irrelevant to belief.
In marked contrast to
Einstein, whose popularity and professional successes had been passed over
in the preceding biography in order to foreground his "unpopularity,"
Galileo is said to have enjoyed "wide support outside the
universities," and his "book was immediately greeted throughout
Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece." In addition, we
hear of no damaging effects of Galileo's inconsistencies under Church
pressure; even the term "acquiesced" seems tranquil, a minimal
gesture of concession to "commands," without dangerous
consequences comparable to the spectre of world extinction by "the
nuclear bomb." Whereas Galileo took the bright view that "man
could hope to understand how the world works," his antagonists are
associated with emotionally negative states: "annoyed," "afraid,"
"regretted."
But if the second biography
seems brighter than the first, the third seems irretrievably darker. The
protagonist's "unpleasant" nature is placed in thematic first
position, followed by valorized, often painful expressions like "notorious,"
embroiled," "heated disputes," "clashed,"
"mortal enemy," "incensed," "revenge,"
"serious dispute," and "major row." His victims were
the objects of such actions as "force," "seized,"
"stolen," "officially accused," and "breaking of
the heart," and, as a fitting climactic finale, "sent to their
death on the gallows." The sub-theme of isolation returns with
renewed force in the repeated assertions that
We therefore must reject
the simple suggestion of the press that the appended biographies were
inserted to create a gallery of scientific excellence for Hawking to join,
just as we must reject the idea that he was merely providing cognitive
content about science. Instead, we get three visions of science in some of
its more dubious and emotion-arousing aspects: being drawn into warfare
technology, publicly caving into pressure from intolerant authorities, and
serving the self-aggrandizing cravings of the scientist himself.
Yet three coincidences in
the dust-jacket blurb and the mention of two of them in the main text
suggest that Hawking does see himself intimately associated with his three
predecessors. The ambivalent and uneasy qualities of the biographies might
then be read as displaced resymbolizations of himself, plus a castigation
of his own aspirations to claim such an association. Borrowing on his
extended parallel to Galileo, we might conclude that the three biographies
represent Hawking's symbolic inquisition on himself through three
surrogate figures. Just as the Inquisition relied on torture, the sketches
show their respective protagonists in various forms of torment, some from
the domain of popular ressentiment (for Einstein), but mostly from
official orthodoxies both inside and outside the scientific academies. The
lack of an official Inquisition today -- whence the fantasy quality of
Hawking's account of his audience with the pope -- may have spurred him to
conduct his own displaced one.
Consider in this connection
the final passage of the main text, which offers a euphoric vision of
"a complete theory" whereby
we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary
people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it
is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would
be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind
of God. (p. 175)
In Galileo's day, such a
declaration would have gotten Hawking hustled off to the stake or the
gallows, and might well have shocked or irritated his three predecessors,
two of whom he portrays as deeply religious in the sketches. In the main
text, Hawking mentions Einstein's deference to "God" as a main
motive for rejecting quantum theory (p. 56), and notes the "official"
approval of "the big bang model" by "the Catholic Church"
(p. 47).
Indeed, the final passage
implies a resymbolized enactment of the usurpation of divine knowledge,
readily associated with the original sin and the fall of man, and the fall
of Lucifer-Satan as well. (Compare the remark that
That Hawking is keenly
conscious of his work's implications for religious doctrine is revealed by
frequent references to "God" or the "creator" in the
main text. In most of these, Hawking stops short of admitting any genuine
conflict, e.g. (emphases added):
one could still imagine
that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even
afterward in such a way as to make it look as though there were a big bang
(p. 9)
An expanding universe does not preclude a creator,
but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job! (p. 9)
Some people […] regard the question of the initial
situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God,
being omnipotent, could have started the universe off any way he wanted. That
may be so, but it appears that he chose to make it evolve in a
very regular way according to certain laws. (p. 11)
Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that
tell us how the universe will develop with time […] These laws may
have been originally decreed by God, but it appears that
he has since left the universe to evolve according to them but does not
intervene. (p. 122)
The whole history of science has been the gradual
realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that
they reflect an underlying order which may or may not be divinely
inspired. (p. 123)
One can take this either as evidence
of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science or
as support for a strong anthropic principle [i.e. that "there are
many different universes, each with its own laws of science"] (p.
Suppose that God
decided that the universe should finish in a state of high order but that
it didn't matter what state it started in. (p. 146)
if one likes. one could ascribe
this randomness to the intervention of God, but it would be a very strange
intervention: there is no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose.
(p. 166)
The cumulative import of
these passages with the hedges and conditionals I highlighted would be
that Hawking is obsessively anxious to leave open a reconciliation between
scientific and religious accounts of the creation by resymbolizing both of
them as instantiations of a higher or even universal order. The
blasphemous corollary that science could enable us to "know the mind
of God" is portrayed as a key point in the pope's admonition of
Galileo (p. 180), but Hawking keeps it in the background of his own book
until the very final stages. Then, he appears to have been, to borrow
Another explanation could
be that the biographies symbolize not just a conflict of faith, but a
conflict in science between Hawking and his own contemporaries. On several
occasions (far fewer than the references to God), the main text does refer
to some skepticism he encountered:
There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from
the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism,
and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was
repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory. However, one cannot
really argue with a mathematical theorem. So in the end our work became
generally accepted (p 50).
The […] idea aroused a lot of opposition initially
because it upset the existing viewpoint […] When I first announced the
results of my calculations […] was greeted with general incredulity. At
the end of my talk, the chairman of the session, John G. Taylor of
I must admit that in writing this paper I was motivated
partly by irritation with Bekenstein, who I felt, had misused my discovery
[ ... ] However it turned out in the end that he was basically correct,
though in a manner he had not expected. (p.104)
Like the references to God,
these passages maintain a generally conciliatory tone, especially in the
happy endings when everyone else comes round to Hawking's view, or,
failing that, when a new and "not expected" conception proves
"correct." Narrated this way, these setbacks bear scant
resemblance to the bitter persecution inflicted on Einstein and Galileo,
or that inflicted by
A third explanation might
be that the biographies symbolize a psychological splitting of Hawking's
own personality into several sides. One scheme might be a lighter side of
equal persistence in both scientific and religious faith (Galileo), a
middle side of well-intentioned but ineffectual "outspokenness"
and of forced involvement in nuclear warfare (Einstein), and a darker side
of excessive and deliberate conflict for personal glory and gain (
A different split, namely
between the cognitive and the emotive content of scientific discourse, is
possibly reconciled here. The three biographies foreground the emotional
experiences of the three scientists and their contemporaries well beyond
the degree of conventional scientific discourse. The resymbolizations
might thus function as a restitution, conscious or unconscious, of this
usually neglected aspect and as a tribute to Hawking's own search for a
human balance. Einstein followed his emotions most truly and energetically,
while Galileo repressed his emotions and "acquiesced," and
A Horneyan interpretation
in terms of the various versions of the "self" postulated in
third force psychology was suggested to me by Dr. Bernard J. Paris. The
three portraits might correspond to the "idealized self" one
wishes to be, the "actual self" one presumes to be, and the
"despised self" one is afraid of being.
If we do see the
biographies as a splitting, these interpretations and resymbolizations
might allow us to appreciate why the main psychic drift created by the
sequential placement moves away from positive values toward negative ones.
The alternative account, a zero-hypothesis stating that the sequence is
accidental and non-significant, seems at least psychoanalytically naive or
evasive when a sequencing in terms of chronological order and scientific
influence would have been so obvious. In the actually selected order, time
is out of joint, and in a "history of time," such a discrepancy
is hard to consider insignificant.
Indeed, it is hard to
imagine a mind like Hawking's doing anything at random. Having spent
decades sifting though the most abstract materials for implications and
contradictions, he is hardly likely to compose his own exposition in a
thoughtless fashion. However, we also do not see him exalting the
cognitive aspect by restricting his symbolizations to a non-evaluative
recitation of facts and ideas. We can therefore assume that additional
symbolic dimensions, of precisely the kind usually discounted in
scientific discourse, are being exploited here.
A psychoanalytic approach
can suggest some of these dimensions and some possible motives for
strategies of symbolization, such as a need to work through and balance
personal idiosyncratic meanings and public scientific meanings. To be
consistent with my own arguments, I cannot claim biographical correctness
or truth for the suggestions advanced here. Instead, the "case study"
has been intended as a demonstration of the activities of resymbolizing as
an occasion for negotiating symbolic dimensions in ways that can bring
private and public meanings into an active and productive complementarity.
NOTES
*An earlier
version of this paper was circulated and presented at a September 1989
meeting of the Group for Applied Psychology at the
[1] In
retrospect, Freud's early mechanistic metaphorics of psychic causalities
in terms of hydraulic engineering ("forces," "pressures,"
etc.) seem reasonably compatible with the psychological metaphors of the
time, such as Charles Spearman's vision of the mind as an engine. But
since the whole scene was so mechanistic then, such similarities between
metaphorical conceptions might not have attracted much notice.
[2] Suggested
by John Black of
[3] Pilot
studies of this issue in the field of literary theory and linguistics can
be found in Beaugrande (1988a) and (1991a), respectively.
[4] Indirect
evidence might be seen in the ominous undertones of author's fictionalized
illustrations. To portray the effects of black holes -- his most famous
area of study -- Hawking repeatedly imagines scenarios in which human
"astronauts" are "torn apart" (pp. 87ff, 112). The
possibility of "traveling into the past" "close to naked
singularities" is imagined as a threat to "life": "someone
might go into the past and kill your father or mother before you were
conceived!" (p. 89). The fate of "rays of light" in the
"event horizon" is compared to "running away from the
police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get
clear away" (p. 99). The event horizon" itself is likened to
"the shadow of impending doom" (p. 100).
[5]
Newsweek rescued
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, J.,
& Lubenow, G. (1988), Reading God's mind. Newsweek June 13,
40-43.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1980), Text, Discourse. and Process.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1980-81), Design criteria for process models of reading.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1982), The story of grammars and the grammar of stories. Journal of
Pragmatics, 6: 383-422.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1984a), Text Production.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1984b) Freudian psychoanalysis and information processing: Notes on a
future synthesis. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 7/2,
147-194.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1987), Determinacy distribution in complex systems: Science, language,
linguistics, life. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und
Kommunikationsforschung, 40: 145-188.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1988a), Critical Discourse.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1988b), Achieving Feminist discourse: The difficult case of Luce
Irigaray. College English
50/3, 1-20.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1991), Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works.
Beaugrande, R.
de (1992), Topic and emotion in the economy of discourse. .
Linguistics 30/1, 1992, 243-264.
Beaugrande,
R. de (1997), New Foundations for a Science of Text and
Discourse.
Cheek, D.B.
& Lecron, L.M. (1968), Clinical Hypnotherapy.
Dieckmann,
W. (1981), K.O. Erdmann und die Gebrauchsweisen des Ausdrucks "Konnotation"
in der linguistischen Literatur. In: Politische Sprache, politische
Kommunikation, ed. W. Dieckmann.
Dijk, T. A. van,
and W. Kintsch (1983), Strategies of Discourse Comprehension.
Ericsson, K.
A., & Simon, H. (1980), Verbal reports as data. Psychological
Review, 87: 215-251.
Festinger, L.,
& Carlsmith, J.M. (1959) Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58: 203-210.
Fiehler, R.
(1990), Kommunikation und Emotion.
Freud, S.
(1895), Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition, 1:
283-387.
Freud, S. (
(1900), The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, 4 & 5.
Gilbert, G.N.,
& Mulkay, M. (1984), Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis
of Scientists' Discourse.
Goleman, D.
(1989), Brain's design emerges as a key to emotions. New York Times,
Aug. 15: 15-19.
Gray, J.A.
(1973) Emotional-cognitive structuring: A new theory of mind. FORUM for
Correspondence and Contact, 5: 1-6.
Greenwald, A.
(1968), Cognitive learning, cognitive response to persuasion, and attitude
change. In: Psychological Foundations of Attitudes, ed. A.G.
Greenwald, T.C. Brock, & T.M.Ostrom.
Hartley, D.,
& Strupp, H.H. (1980), Verbal psychotherapies. In: New Perspectives
in Abnormal Psychology, ed. M. Kazdin, A. Bellack, & M. Hersen.
Hawking, S.W.
(1988), A Brief History of Time.
Himmelfarb,
& Eagley, A. (eds.) (1974),
Horney, K.
(1945), Our Inner Conflicts.
Horney, K.
(1950), Neurosis and Human Growth.
Irigaray, L.
(1974), Le Speculum de 1'autre femme.
Irigaray, L.
(1977), Ce Sexe que n'est pas un.
Izard, C.E.
(1977), Human Emotions.
Kilty, K.M.
(1969), On the relationship between affect and cognition. Psychological
Reports, 25: 215-219.
Kintsch, W.,
van Dijk, T. (1978), Toward a model of discourse production and
comprehension. Psychological Review, 85: 363-394.
Kosslyn, S.
(1975), Information representing visual images. Cognitive Psychology,
7: 341-370.
Labov, W.,
& Fanshel, D. (1977), Therapeutic Discourse.
Lacan, J.
(1970-71), Écrits.
Langer, S.K.
(1951), Philosophy in a New Key.
Loftus, E.
(1980), Memory.
McConnell, J.V.
(1979), Understanding Human Behavior.
McGuire, W.J.
(1962), Resistance to persuasion induced by various types of prior
defenses. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 64: 241-248.
McHoul, A.W.
(1982), Telling How Texts Talk.
Mowrer, O. H.
(1960), Learning Theory and Behavior.
Neisser, U.
(1967), Cognitive Psychology.
Nisbett, R.E.
& Gordon, A. (1967), Self-esteem and suscepitibility to social
influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5:
268-276.
Nisbett, R.E.
& Wilson, T. (1977), Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on
mental processes. Psychological Review, 84: 231-59.
Orne, M.T.
(1951), The mechanisms of hypnotic age regression: An experimental study. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46: 213-225.
Paris, B.
(1994), A Psychological Approach to Fiction.
Peterfreund, E.
(1975), How does the analyst listen? In: Psycho-Analysis and
Contemporary Science 4, ed. D. Spence.
Peterfreund, E.
(1980), On information and systems models for psychoanalysis. International
Review of Psycho-Analysis, 7: 327-345. 09
Peterfreund, E.
& Schwartz, J.T. (1971), Information, systems, and psychoanalysis. Psychological
Issues Monograph 25/26.
Potter, J.
& Wetherell, M. (1987), Discourse and Social Psychology.
Scott, W.A.
(1969), The structure of nature cognitions. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 12/4: 261-278.
Simmons, R.F.,
&t
Spencer,
Herbert (1855), The Principles of Human Psychology.
Spritz, R.A.
(1965), The First Year of Life.
Suppes, P.
(1975), From behaviorism to neobehaviorism. Theory and Decision,
56: 269-289.
Tomkins, S.S.
(1962-63), Affect, Imagery, Consciousness.
Turner, A.,
& Greene, E. (1977), The Construction and Use of a Propositional Text
Base.
Wodak, R.
(1981), Das Wort in der Gruppe: Studien zur therapeutischen
Kommunikation.