Form, Space, Body, and Emotions

6 Pages·0.066 MB·English

by  Hinshelwood R.D.

HINSHELWOOD / FORM, SPACE, BODY, AND EMOTIONS ■ 43
Form, Space, Body,
and Emotions
R. D. Hinshelwood
KEYWORDS: reason, spatial representation, symbolism, granted by psychoanalysts and hardly problema-
ego-boundary tized. It is therefore salutary, if somewhat diffi-
cult, to engage with Church’s unpicking of these
philosophical problems. It is unclear if psycho-
JENNIFER CHURCH IS ON THE HUNT for Pascal’s analysts are welcome to contribute to philosoph-
“unreasons.” Pascal’s intention was to argue ical problems, though traffic does occur in the
for intuition, for nonreasoned certainties. Cer- other direction; some philosophers have used
tainty has many forms; only one comes from psychoanalysis to make significant and influen-
reason; there are other forms of certainty: it can tial contributions (not least, Richard Wollheim
come from perception, or from intuition, or sim- and Marcia Cavell). For what it is worth, I would
ply from the exhortation to faith. For the analyt- like to consider the philosophical questions from
ic philosopher, however, only reason counts, a a psychoanalytic point of view, and the notion of
point of view going back to the ancient world. psychic space that Church offers as the solution
They are rationalists, and for rationalists irratio- to her questions.
nality is a problem.
Propositional Logic
To an extent, Freud’s discovery of the uncon-
scious came to the rescue of rationality by postu-
Cognitive reason has for long been the defin-
lating unconscious “reasons”; but the question
ing feature of homo sapiens, and our own view
that Church rightly asks is this: What sort of
of ourselves as individual persons. We are the
reasons are those unconscious ones? In the course
conscious reasons we give ourselves. Although
of her complex paper, she reaches a position
Pascal’s comment remains about the heart, we
where she can encompass another of the contem-
commonly think of our feelings as being reason-
porary problems for analytical philosophy, the
able, too. But what really is a “reasonable feel-
emotions. How can emotions be understood in a
ing”? What are the reasons that the heart knows
rationalist philosophy? Ingeniously, she found a
and that, with our obsession with cognitive rea-
single answer to both questions, “the spatialized
son, we find a mystery and a surprise? Church
nature of unconscious reasoning is the nature of
accepts that emotional reasons are not the same
emotional reasoning as well” (Church 2005, 39).
as conscious cognitive ones, and that they obey
For a psychoanalyst reading this paper, there
different rules.
is a curiously wanton quality to the questions
In modern analytical philosophy, as I under-
that analytic philosophy asks; the nature of non-
stand it, emotions are rational, and they conform
reason and of the emotions is rather taken for
to a propositional logic, which proceeds on the
© 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
44 ■ PPP / VOL. 12, NO. 1 / MARCH 2005
basis of the syllogism: (i) a desire; that is con- process thinking. However, she argues that the
joined with (ii) a belief about how to satisfy that rules of the unconscious put limits on what un-
desire; and the result (iii) is a reason for action. conscious reasoning can do. Those limits would
This speaks about emotions as desires and be- be found if unconscious reasoning were a spatial,
liefs. In classical philosophy from Aristotle on, rather than an abstract form of thinking. Church
there has been a puzzle about how people can be is very interested in the possible continuity be-
irrational and act against their own self-interest, tween unconscious reasoning of this spatial kind
akrasia, or how they can deceive themselves. and nonhuman “thinking,” which might be found
Freud also discovered breaches in the proposi- in the animals (to which I return in a moment).
tional logic in the sense that some desires and
beliefs are not conscious and so resultant actions The Process of
may appear to go against the syllogism. For ex- Representation
ample in Freud’s (1917/1957) paper on charac-
ters wrecked by success, he shows that certain Psychoanalytic discoveries suggest other non-
people cannot allow themselves to succeed—seem- Aristotelian forms of thinking besides the con-
ingly irrationally; but because they are dominat- densation and displacement of dreams. Those
ed by unconscious guilt and the need to punish nonrational dream distortions arise from repres-
themselves, the resultant lack of success is ratio- sion. As I have said, the products of repression
nal. Freud’s discovery of the motivating uncon- can be unconsciously rational, but another form
scious makes rationality a muddled concept if of distortion is important. There are problems
irrationality can have a logic of its own (see that interfere with the representing process itself.
Chapter 3 of Hinshelwood [1997b]).1 Sophisticated symbolic representation demands
Another factor that has eroded the Cartesian awareness that the symbol and the thing symbol-
pre-eminence of cognitive reason was Freud’s ized are different. The acoustic stimulus that
description of the transformations that occur in arrives with the sound of the word smile is not
dreams. He called this “primary process,” and it actually a smile, although it arouses a represen-
operated according to the processes of displace- tation inside the receiving person in which he
ment and condensation, and not according to the sees or thinks of a smile. The verbal symbol does
process of logic. The representations a person arouse a representation of a smile, as much as an
uses in his mind may be motivated to contrast actual smile does. This symbolic representation
with the object or image with which he is uncon- must be distinguished from the direct perceptual
sciously occupied. The meaning of one image is representation of the thing in reality, the visual
then displaced onto another. Or, meanings of perception of the smile on the face of a friend.
more than one image can coalesce or condense There is a realm of symbolic representations
into some complicated or confused single image. in which rational thought takes place, and which
Clear representation and thought are obviously allows thought to soar to very high levels of
hampered by such primary processes. In the abstraction. There are, however, pathological
course of personal development as an infant, forms of symbolization in which the distinction
secondary process thinking occurs, which ob- between symbol and thing breaks down. This is
serves the conscious rationality of the Aristote- common in schizophrenia.
lian syllogism.2 The infantile person becomes the
One [patient]—whom I will call A—was a schizo-
sapient person, and enters the world of homo phrenic in a mental hospital. He was once asked by
sapiens and rationality. Psychoanalytically, the his doctor why it was that since his illness he had
primary process thinking survives unconsciously, stopped playing the violin. He replied with some vio-
revealing itself in dreams and symptoms. lence: “Why? do you expect me to masturbate in
public?”
Church shows interestingly that the rules of
Another patient, B, dreamt one night that he and a
displacement and condensation are no less rea-
young girl were playing a violin duet. He had associa-
sonable than the Aristotelian rules of secondary
tions to fiddling, masturbating, etc., from which it
HINSHELWOOD / FORM, SPACE, BODY, AND EMOTIONS ■ 45
emerged clearly that the violin represented his genital theless operate a form of rigorous logic, although
and playing the violin represented a masturbation it might be thought of as pre-Aristotelian. It is
phantasy of a relation with the girl.
also known as “magical” thinking. When a witch
Here then are two patients who apparently use the
sticks a pin in a doll it is intended to do actual
same symbols in the same situation—a violin repre-
harm to the person that the doll represents. This
senting the male genital, and playing the violin repre-
could be akin to the violin that is the genital.
senting masturbation. The way in which the symbols
function, however, is very different. For A, the violin Some have argued therefore that the schizophrenic
had become so completely equated with his genital form of representation is akin to “primitive”
that to touch it in public became impossible. For B, magical thinking (Arieti 1974). It seems to me
playing the violin in his waking life was an important that there could be some doubt whether the witch
sublimation (Segal 1957, 391).
has lost the distinction between the doll and the
For Segal’s patient A, there was a concrete identi- hated person, in the way the schizophrenic loses
fication, and the distinction between the symbol the essential quality of a symbol. Instead, the
(the violin) and the thing symbolized (the geni- essentially separate identities of the doll and of
tal) had broken down. The implication is a pro- the hated person seem to remain. The witch does
found interference with symbols, and therefore not collapse the symbolic distinction as the schizo-
of reason which is based in symbolic function- phrenic does; rather, she observes a belief in
ing. When the violin is the genital, it goes against influence at a distance. She bases her actions on
the socially necessary view of the nature of a that belief. She acts in conformity with the prop-
symbol. It can be regarded as irrational, in a ositional syllogism: (i) a desire to hurt someone
different sense from other nonrational distor- hated, (ii) a belief that hurting an effigy of the
tions. hated person will hurt that person, and therefore
Thus, the representation within the mind can (iii) the act of sticking pins into the effigy. Link-
be evoked both when the thing itself is perceived, ing the act of the witch with the thinking of a
and also symbolically when its symbol is per- schizophrenic comes from Western preconcep-
ceived. Freud (1915/1957) categorized these two tions of other cultures. There is a simplistic link
forms of representation as a “thing-presentation” between “primitive” cultures and the supposed
and a “word-presentation.” The mind, in health, “primitive” concrete thinking of the schizophren-
retains a distinction between the two, though in ic. In fact, the equation of a symbol with the
health both thing- and word-presentations come thing symbolized (schizophrenic thinking) is rath-
together in such a way that they are both “the er a different mental state from the belief that
same” and “not the same.” It is then an object of there is some connection between the symbol
thought. and the thing symbolized (witchcraft). The latter
is a socially accepted belief and can form a part
Social Communication of a sophisticated propositional syllogism like
any other. The conflation of a social belief with
Representations are a kind of self-communi-
an individual form of thinking is not correct.3
cation. They do have something to do with actu-
Psychological factors do not cause social phe-
al semiotic or interpersonal communication. The
nomena. Indeed, it may be more the other way
latter, however, is social, and symbols (social
round—that cultural forms of thinking strongly
representations) are given from outside the indi-
influence the psychological forms. This is be-
vidual. But they are given in such a way that they
cause, from early on, the infant represents imag-
can integrate with the personal means of repre-
es and thoughts to himself, which are mediated
sentation. There are other abnormalities that
through increasingly social and interpersonal
come from the social aspect of this symbol-repre-
communication, particularly language, when of
sentation system.
an age to use it. This is different from the social
As Werner (1940) suggested, cultures that are
influences in other mammals, which are not sym-
not captive to the ideal of rationality do never-
bolic, probably biologically determined; social
46 ■ PPP / VOL. 12, NO. 1 / MARCH 2005
influences reflexively stimulated through body she falls back on a hunch, namely, that animal
posture, movement, facial expression, and so on. thinking and unconscious thinking are both based
This phenomenon of symbol formation is pure- on spatial representations. She examines her
ly human and almost nonexistent in animals, hunch philosophically. But we can examine it
although other apes do display a rudimentary psychoanalytically, too.
form of symbol use. It is in this world that hu- The gap in Church’s argument, filled with a
man culture has flourished so extraordinarily, hunch, I think, could be filled in with empirical
and that culture is based on the recognition of evidence from psychoanalysis. I would like to try
when a representation is evoked by a perception, to sketch this missing step very briefly now.
or evoked by a symbol, that has currency in the Church’s intuition, that something about the
social world. This digression into the social world unconscious form of thinking resembles spatial
is not an idle sport; it is relevant to Church’s thinking, does in fact accord with empirical, psy-
connection with non-human spatial representa- choanalytic findings. Psychoanalysis suggests that
tion, which I now consider. the initial form of sensation in infants is a spatial
kind of experiencing. The earliest experiences
Spatial Representation are sensations and located dimly in the body,
which is conceived as a space in which things
When turning to nonhuman, that is, animal,
exist (see Schilder and Wechsler [1935] for what
reasoning, Church invokes an inherent biologi-
children think their bodies contain).
cal mode of thinking. Supposedly, animal repre-
In the very early development of the human
sentation is a concrete, spatial kind of reasoning.
infant, a spatial metaphor represents experience,
A human being develops on from this, achieving
which is inherent in having a body. The infant’s
symbolic representations as well as perceptual
spatial metaphor starts with bodily sensations.
representations. Even in early infancy, mother
When Freud wrote the following passage, he was
presents the infant’s emotions back to it in a
trying to understand the very first kinds of judg-
form that is decoupled from the perceptual rep-
ment the infant mind makes:
resentation (Gergely and Watson 1996). From a
psychoanalytical point of view, these early forms Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—
instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to
of representation in humans remain as uncon-
eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more
scious forms of “thinking,” subject to the rules
generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to
of primary process (condensation and displace-
keep that out.’ That is to say: ‘It shall be inside me’ or
ment). ‘it shall be outside me’. As I have shown elsewhere,
Church interestingly links two things: uncon- the original pleasure ego wants to introject into itself
scious representation and an animal’s concrete, everything that is good and to eject from itself every-
spatial representations. But, is it valid to step thing that is bad (Freud 1925/1961, 237).
from a biological form, animal behavior, to hu- Freud’s account suggests a sense of inner space
man symbolization with its implied social repre- and outer space between which contents can be
sentations? In other words, can a supposed spa- exchanged. An internal world is in this sense a
tial reasoning inferred in animals, really have primary endowment of the infant. It exists in
similarities with the unconscious reasoning of him from the moment he starts feeding. It be-
the symbolic mind of the human? On the face of comes populated by objects and entities that are
it, equating animal “thinking,” derived from bi- approved of, and is contrasted with some outer
ology, with the unconscious representation of space populated by unpleasant or fearful phan-
the symbolizing human animal, could be a con- tasms. The rules for the representation of inter-
flation of quite different frameworks, just as nal bodily space and for the representations of
when schizophrenia and “magical” thinking are entities in that internal space, are not the rules of
conflated. Church needs an argument that can logical syllogisms. They are other rules: the self
claim a correspondence between human reason- has a boundary between inner and outer; objects
ing and animal biology. Instead of an argument,
HINSHELWOOD / FORM, SPACE, BODY, AND EMOTIONS ■ 47
can be either good or bad; objects can be moved Church points out that the debate over wheth-
across the self boundary according to whether er emotions have a referent in bodily sensations
they are good or bad.4 or a content of belief (sensation theories or belief
If animals do employ a spatial form of think- theories: part [i] or part [ii] of the propositional
ing then there is a direct continuity with the syllogism) can be resolved by attributing both
human infant, before socialization has proceed- bodily sensation and belief to emotions. What
ed too far in supplementing the bodily perceptu- the psychoanalytic theory of object relations in
al representations by symbolic ones. So, Church’s psychic space can offer is to suggest detailed
implicit hypothesis suggesting that the form of ways in which that resolution may be brought
reasoning of the unconscious accords with a spa- about. For instance, the emotion of anxiety may
tial sense, can gain considerable evidence from be connected with the sense of a dangerous enti-
psychoanalysis. It is supported by Freud and by ty having been incorporated into the inner world,
object relations psychoanalysis. The implication and needing to be evacuated into outer space.
is that spatial “logic” is not acquired socially, but Such a belief would be implicit in the experience
is some inherent property of having a body that of inner bodily space. The question that needs
feeds. Such a primitive logic can then be acted further research is to investigate the details by
upon and “steered” by social forces, guided by which this kind of thinking, which we are born
the reality testing of sophisticated secondary pro- with, relates to the thinking characteristic of
cess, and transformed from bodily judgments to animals.
social categories and then abstractions and ulti- These psychoanalytical contributions may not
mately human rationality (and even in some cir- be welcome to philosophers, or to psychiatrists,
cumstances guiding him or her to study analyti- perhaps, because they take the focus of interest
cal philosophy!). So, psychoanalysis can in effect away from the image of the single, stand-alone
fill in the gap in Church’s thesis with a develop- rational being that is the field of interest of ana-
mental argument. lytical philosophy. It will be unwelcome because
Under the influence of these sophisticating it implies limitations and some inadequacy in the
and symbolizing processes, bodily space becomes focus that such a philosophy restricts itself to.
psychic space populated by representations that Nevertheless, it is worth considering limitations.
combine both thing and symbol. Space eventual- The study of representations cannot go ahead
ly emerges as the personal experience of having a sensibly without attention to the nature and func-
mind in time and space. This diverges from the tion of symbolization, and symbols and symbolic
nonhuman, animal development for “reasoning” systems cannot be studied except by recognizing
about geographical space. However much both the animal as well as the social nature of man.
developments diverge, it is argued that they arise Thus “certainty” cannot be allowed to reside
from a common root, the sense of having a body only in the house of reason; it has many mistresses.
with an inside and an outside.5
Notes
Emotions and Relations
1. Gardner (1993) has elaborated this to include the
idea of “second-order” desires—that is, the desire to
Finally, the rules concerning the ego boundary
have a desire. Or, more significantly, the converse, the
and the movement of emotionally toned objects desire not to have a desire, describes the action of
(good or bad) across the boundary allows us to repression and the contents of the unconscious.
say something psychoanalytical about the nature 2. Secondary process rational thought is suspended
of emotions. The rules about personal psychic at night time and in states of intoxication, or for the
purposes of imaginative creative production, as well as
space, which have just been indicated, are equal-
with certain pathology.
ly rules about the relations with the objects that
3. In fact, belief systems of a society are a field of
are moved around bodily space and outer space,
study of their own; the representational process in the
and they underlie in a developmental sense the unconscious is another. The psychological process does
cognitive, logical and analytical powers of reason. not cause the social form, although a confusion along
48 ■ PPP / VOL. 12, NO. 1 / MARCH 2005
those lines does sometimes exist amongst psychoana- Freud, volume 14, ed. and trans. J. Stachey, 159–
lytic enthusiasts. This is a kind of psychoanalytic impe- 215. London, UK: Hogarth Press.
rialism that attempts to colonize others’ disciplines; ———. 1917/1957. Some character-types met with in
maybe that is what makes philosophers wary of the psychoanalytic work. In The standard edition of
contributions of psychoanalysts. Western paternalism the complete works of Sigmund Freud, volume 14,
toward other societies is not any longer seemly. How- ed. and trans. J. Stachey, 310–333. London, UK:
ever, there are also good theoretical reasons for reject- Hogarth Press.
ing this kind of correlation. Quite different conceptual ———. 1925/1961. Negation. In The standard edi-
frameworks are in play. Levi-Strauss (1969) made the tion of the complete works of Sigmund Freud,
point strongly that the thinking in other cultures has a volume 19, ed. and trans. J. Stachey, 234–239.
complex semantic and representational structure, which London, UK: Hogarth Press.
is not necessarily inferior to Western rationality; it is Gardner, S. 1993. Irrationality and the philosophy of
simply other. On one hand, we have a sophisticated psychoanalysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
cultural phenomenon (witchcraft) that employs com- versity Press.
plex processes of symbolic representation, and on the Gergely, G., and J. S. Watson. 1996. The social bio-
other hand a pathological psychological process. Un- feedback theory of parental affect-mirroring. In-
fortunately, often the rules for comparing social func- ternational Journal of Psychoanalysis 77:1181–
tioning with psychological pathology are ignored— 1212.
perhaps indeed such rules have never been worked out. Hinshelwood, R. D. 1993. Clinical Klein. London,
4. See my Clinical Klein (Hinshelwood 1993) for an UK: Karnac.
account of a psychoanalytic school which has particu- Hinshelwood, R. D. 1995. The social relocation of
larly elaborated the idea of bodily space as a sine qua personal identity as shown by psychoanalytic ob-
non for representation (see also Hinshelwood 1995, servations of splitting, projection and introjection.
1997a). The notion of “transitional space” developed Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 3:185–
by Winnicott (1953) would also be worth attending to 204.
as another psychoanalytic contribution to Church’s ———. 1997a. Primitive mental processes: Psycho-
thesis. See also Young (1994). analysis and the ethics of integration. Philosophy,
5. One account of how the capacity to learn and Psychiatry, & Psychology 4, no. 2:121–143.
think develops from these primitive bodily origins, is ———. 1997b. Therapy or coercion. London, UK:
given in the works of W.R. Bion (see for instance Bion Karnac.
[1962] and Bleandonu [1994]). Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. Totemism. London, UK: Pen-
guin.
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