Psychoanalysis

Working on my proposal and trying to figure out what to do with psychoanalysis - Kristeva - who is the closest account I can get to philosophy recently - and yet I resist psychoanalysis at many levels. The reason I am fascinated temporarily by psychoanalytic accounts is their daring; I don't even know that psychoanalysis even pretends to be reductive - depends on the person I guess but it seems to me that this is a preciously subversive language - subversive in the most useful sense of the term - although I think "exaggeration" is a mild term - "imaginative constructs" maybe? A new form of myth attempting to combine science, praxis, and writing myths like those of hte ancient Greeks? The value of psychoanalysis would be that it helps people - I do see its value (and not merely its instantaneous - but momentary appeal which I mentioned) with myself is that it enables me to get rid of fruitless thinking or unnecessary guilt-ridden ethical questions. If I find myself worrying too much about whether someone needs help or whether perhaps I have offended someone - in relationships, I find the ability to think of these things in terms of "neuroses" helps me to clarify my thinking - to the extent that I am neurotic, however. But this is not a statement that Amy is only so neurotic, this is a statement that any human being can only be so neurotic. Yes, ppl can be messed up - ask me I know from experience. And the vulnerbaility is never not-there - yes - this is why the wise of us do not have narratives nor "self-images" of indomitable strength and success - at least not on our own accounts.

But there is something fundamentally only so knowable about thisi - and the problem with psychoanalysis is not only that it can conflate myths with science with psychology - or if it does not, then they are far more clever than I shall ever be, but disentangling what is a very intelligent way of destabilizing to make other things possible - and what those possible things ARE I will not undersatnd, but I think its partially becuase it can't really be made into a science, or that if you ARE going to make a science of psychology, that it CANNOT be pathologically-based or mythologically based (well there is never NOT myth perhaps) but there has to be something more - not normative, perhaps teleological, no even before that - I don't like the word "natural" because it has SO many undesirable connotations - not only after Romantics but there are many more myths and images surrounding the word - not only in philosophy and neo-aristotelians or more likely neo-thomists but even to hippies and health-conscious folks - it would be really hard to trace all these meanings - but I would want to say a capacity-based approach to nature - what is something capable of doing (I am careful about saying what is something meant to do because to limit the end of the human being who is limited by "nature" but infinite intellectually (at least potentially, but even by the very ntaure of what intellectual activity is) - well - you get into trouble when you try to "pin it down"!! And yet not into worse trouble when you only focus on the elmenets for neuroses and not try to see where all these elements fit rationally - and then going from there to have another account of how they go astrayper accidens or for more obvious reasons....

But I think I will have psychoanalysis in there - because it is the thing which takes sorrow most seriously today - more seriously than religion does, I think - and I have already dealt with teh medicalization people. The people in between - the psychiatrists and thinkers who aren't in these ways are guided by a lot of sense and balance, but I need more extremes nad more big names to show up what is being done - I don't need a more sensible synthesis becuase you can only use so many words to get something right, but then you are not going into depth, and therefore though you may be right it may not be profound becuase it doesn't integrate enough or go high enough - either way, while it may be good enough for living it's not enough for a thesis.

So now after becoming aware, and thus making unnecessary other neuroses, now I think I am beginning to have dealt with my sense of the necessity of psychoanalysis but ambivalence and even intense dislike for it - it is important for dialogue - the descriptiveness is important, they have experience, being practictioners, and even if I don't subscribe to the myths or point to the lack of any "teleological" thing which makes other things quite impossible, there are descriptions there which are valuable and I can integrate a more sophisticated critique than the one here - becuase whether or not I am a big fan of psychoanalysis, it has made a permanent mark and there are still heavyweights around, and it would be nice even for my own interest to know more precisely its limits.

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Actually have been looking around -t here are many good critics of Kristeva who also note what is noteworthy. Here is an excellent example - well articulated as well.

Ecstatic subjects, utop and recogn. K, H, Irig.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Qqpqs6J8BYgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kristeva&lr=&ei=rh3fSrLxMp-UMYTO8cQK#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Agency affect and the postmodern subject

feminists leery of voluntaristic - positing irrational elements on marginalzied etc.

p. 78 - her critque of Heidegger effectuates a return to dialectics - feminist critics charget hat dialectical cocneptions of subjectivity - ranging from Hegel's spec. dialectics to Sartre's and Beauvoir's repsectpive existential philosophies - are haunted by a cartesian ghost in that they continue to posit a prelinguistic locus of intentionality. In order to dispel the concept of a "doer behind the deed" numerous poststructuralist feminists develop a notion fo agency as resignification. Here agency denotes a linguistic competency defined as th ecreative capacity to rewrite the script of our discursively constituted identities. In this chapter - want to accept a linguisticallly based notion of agency as creativity while addressing the difficulty that notiosn of creative resignification often failt o specify what makes one kidn of performance nonstoic and another stoic. (....) - wants to recuperate a view of dialectical praxis as th eability not simply to alter meaning but to critically mediate and intensify one's affective investment in particular meanings. In this endeavor, I turn to Kristeva and borrow from Allison Weir's interpretaiton of her work as notably occpying a middle position between traditional existential theories and poststructuralist thought. Although a borerline figure, at times valorizing transgression in itself, K points to a connection between overcoming stoic consciousness and a capacity for critique.

First aim - demonstrate that K strives, although not with complete success, to delineate a post-Beauvoirian theory of intentioality which is grounded in alngague rather than in a paradigm of consciousness. (..) what is significant about K's project (in her teory of intentionatliy) is that it recognizes the need to explicate teh relation between affective life and language. k relaizes that the existential intention to transform meaning denotes a particular kind of affect, namely, a prosocial desire to express oneself coherently in terms of shared meanings. Weir defines this prosocial desire as an EXISETNTIAL (ital) striving to deliberaltely harness the tension between identification with the social whole and the heterogeneous aspects of one's nonidentity with the social whole. Against the thinner view that agency arises from slippage in meaning, K demonstrates that affect froms the bridge between meaning and identity. The ability to invest linguistic meanings iwth affective force binds the work of altering meaning to psychosomatic or self transformation. Itfollows that there is some relation ebtween effectuating critical rather than naiveself change an da capacity for nonrepressive ethical relations.

My second, more critical aim, whoever, will be to reground K's theory of existential desire in a critical social ontology rathe rthan, as she does, in a Freudian drive theory. In 3.3I arguet hat K's reliance upon Freud's drive theory has, minimally, two seirously undesirable otucomes which undermine the contribution she makes to developing a linguistically grounded notion of intentionality. First, drive theory undercuts her effor tto treat affective life as genuinely social, rather than partialy antisocial. Second, the idea that intentionality is a transmutation of drive cathexes also encounters, if not difficulties supporting a notion of free agency, then a similar inability to treat intersubjective relations as sympathetically grounded rather than as desparate longings to compensate for repression of asocial pleasures. This compensatory view leads K to a dangerous valorization of an arguably patriarchal ieal of romantic love as hysterical collapse into another person. I am to corect these two deficiencies (using heidegger against hediegger!)

So can I!! but my project will be different than this author's.