Ibid., pp. 618-619. 2 страница

Elsewhere, despite all these many precise, almost physico-chemically exact characterizations of the affects, Freud goes on

⁶⁴ S. Freud, "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety," in SE, Vol. XX, p. 93.

es S. Freud, "Repression," in SE, Vol. XIV, p. 152.

⁶⁶ S. Freud, SE, Vol. XIV, pp. 152-153; An Outline of Psychoanalysis, edited by J. S. Teslaar, New York, 1924, p. 30, trans, by H. W. Chase; SE, Vol. IX, p. 49; SE, VoL Ц, p. 17; SE, Vol. VII, p. 287; SE, Vol. II, p. 280; CP, Vol. I, pp. 67-68.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 111

to make the following astonishing admission: "We do not, however, regard what we know of affects as at all final; it is a first attempt to take our bearings in this obscure region..."^e7

On occasion Freud goes to even greater lengths of self-criticism to express profound doubts about the reality of his conceptions of the affects in general. He then calls these mere "phrases." The separation of an "idea" from its "affect" and the connection of the "affect" with another "idea" are said to be

processes which occur outside consciousness—they may be pre­sumed but they cannot be proved by any clinical-psychological analysis. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: These processes are not of a psychical nature at all, but are physical processes the psychical consequences of which are so represented as if what is expressed by the words 'detachment of the idea from its affect and false connection of the latter' had really happened.⁶⁸

Obviously the situation of the concept of "affect" is similar to that of the "other component of the drive representation," the "ideas," die "mental images," or the "inner-psychic object-representations within the Consciousness or the Unconscious of a person," which have already been discussed. The phrase "to have affects" seems to be as obscure as the assertion that we have inside us representations of objects of the external world. In view of such perplexity on the part of non-analytic psychology and psychiatry and in the face of such deep-seated doubts which Freud himself raises against his speculations on the affects, we have everything to gain by calling to our aid the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man. To be sure, if we decide to take this step, fraught as it is with the gravest con­sequences, we shall have to abandon at the outset any idea of a mere correction of the previous psychological explanations of the affects, emotions, passions, and feelings; for if we dwell on the reality of human existence as revealing itself immediately, we shall be compelled first of all to discover that when confronting what are ordinarily called affects and emotions, we are not dealing with psychological matters at all, nor even with a psychology buttressed by physiology and biology. To be sure, the fact that affects and passions and emotions also include those things that physiology has claimed as its province—certain bodily states, the internal secre­tions, muscular tensions, neural processes—is not to be denied, and

*" S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 344.

*-^s S. Freud, "The Defence Neuro-Psychoses," in CP, Vol. I, p. 67.

112 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

should by no means be denied. However, the question must be raised whether all this corporality, and the body itself in its own vitality and humanity, are comprehended adequately and with sufficient thoroughness by physiology and biology that the science of man could without further ado draw on these sciences. The answer can only be in the negative.

If we seek to get at the so-called non-rational side of the psychic life on the basis of the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man, we need, first, a more careful distinction. One affect, for example, is anger. On the other hand, when we speak of "hate," we do not mean merely something different in degree from what we mean by "anger." Hate is not merely another affect; it is, strictly speaking, not an affect at all but a passion. Both, however, we call "emotions." We cannot decide and undertake to have a fit of anger. It assaults us, falls upon us, affects us, suddenly and tempestuously. Anger rouses us up, lifts us above ourselves, in such a way that we are no longer in control of ourselves. It is said, "He acted in a fit of emo­tional distraction." Colloquial language is very accurate when it says of a person acting in a state of excitement that "he is not really himself." In the fit of excitement, the state of being collected vanishes. We say, too, that a person is "beside himself" with joy or infatuation.

Nor can the great passions of hate or love be produced by a decision. Like the affects, they too seem to fall upon us suddenly. Nevertheless, the assault of passion is essentially different from a fit of anger, or other emotion. Hate can break out suddenly in a deed or in an utterance, but only because it has long been rising within us and has, as we say, been nourished within us. On the other hand, we do not say and never believe that anger, for example, is being nourished. While the passions, such as hate, bring into our being a primordial compactness, hold our whole being together, and are enduring states of our existence, a fit of anger, on the other hand, subsides again as fast as it came over us. It "blows over," as we say. Hatred does not blow over after its outbreak, but grows and hardens, eats into and devours our entire being. This collectedness of our being brought about by the passions of hate and love does not close us off, does not blind us, but makes us see more clearly, makes us deliberate. The angry man loses his senses. The hating man's senses are heightened. The great hatred of a paranoiac, for instance, makes him aware of the slightest traces of hostihty in his

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 113

fellow human beings. Their great love renders lovers acutely sensi­tive, visually and aurally, to even the faintest and remotest indica­tions of possibilities of beauty and goodness in the partner. Only anger is blind, and infatuation. They are affects, not passions. The latter embrace what is wide-sweeping, what opens itself up.

Sometimes affects and passions are called "emotions," if not actually "feelings." But when we attach the word "emotion" to a passion, this strikes us as an enfeeblement of the idea. A passion, we think, is "more" than an emotion. Yet if we refrain from calling passions emotions, this does not mean that we have a higher con­ception of the nature of passion; it could also be a sign that we employ too inadequate a conception of the nature of emotion. This is in fact the case when psychological science in general affirms that the psyche possesses the capacity to "have" emotions or that emotions are to be regarded as functions of our psyche, and when the psychoanalytic theory in particular adds that these emotions are drive representations or transformed instincts within us. In doing this, psychology from the very start squanders every pos­sibility of arriving at an insight into what the so-called emotions really are by their very nature.

This emerges from the fact that the artificial terminology of this science speaks of an emotion as a property of a psyche, of a subject, as something which a subject can have. Since it remains scien­tifically unclear of what nature such a "psyche" or such a "subject" is at bottom, it cannot even indicate how such an ability-to-have emotions should be possible. Our natural language, on the other hand, always says only that somebody is "beside himself," is "no longer really himself," because of rage or joy or infatuation. Just as naturally we also say that we, as passionately loving or hating per­sons, are with our whole being living only for the beloved one or the hated one, concentrated wholly on him and focused entirely on him. Thus we have an affect or a passion or an emotion neither somewhere within us, accompanying us, nor somewhere outside us, around us. Rather, we can only be wholly in ourselves what is called emotion or affect or passion. We are, in other words, always -'jr so-called emotional states themselves. They, these emotional states, are the melodies, the different ways in which we, in our respective relationships with what confronts us, find ourselves tuned it anv given time, directly and with our entire existence, whether the matter confronting us is what we ourselves are or what we our-

114 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

selves are not. As the state of being in tune, the state of attunement or resonance, of our existence as a whole, an affect, a passion, an emotion is at the same time the particular manner of world-open­ness as which we are existing fundamentally at any given moment. Every openness, however, is possible only from out of a closed-inness, just as, vice versa, there cannot be a closed-inness without a primal openness. Openness and closed-inness belong together necessarily and always. It is for this reason that we can become blind in an emotional fit, when, in becoming so, we "are beside our­selves," when, that is, we lose our being with its luminating char­acter in the object of our affect. However, only because our emo­tional states are fundamentally the ways of our existence's attune­ment and—as such—the possible ways of world-openness, can we also become, within the passions, clear-sighted and quick of hearing. Hate as well as love collects and concentrates us to an intense de­gree, within our very being, which is of the nature of a lumination and world-openness. It goes without saying that this collecting moves in a direction which depends upon the passion by which it is brought about.⁶⁹

If, however, we are serious about these new insights into the being of our so-called affectivity, they cannot remain without far-reaching effects on psychology, psychopathology, and psycho­therapy as we have known them. The new understanding, for in­stance, relieves us at once of the necessity of speaking about our affects in terms of physicalistic metaphors, such as an "irradiation of an affect." If the recipient of a libelous and insulting letter, let us say, in his anger at its contents strikes the innocent postman, an affect is by no means "irradiated" from the writer to the carrier of the letter. No one, after all, would be in a position to say really how such a thing as this is supposed to occur. In reality it is the blindness into which the violent anger has closed and obscured the existence of the striker of the blow that deprives him of the neces­sary power to make discriminations, of the ability to differentiate sufficiently between the writer of the letter and the carrier of the letter.

But what must finally happen to the still more significant psy­chological notions of an "affect repression," a "transference" of affects, a psychic "projection and introjection" of affects, when we

^e»See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, Pfullingen, 1961, pp. 55 #.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 115

once make the discovery that in reality things like affects and emotions, as repressible, transferable, and projectible psychic forma­tions do not exist any more than do "ideas," "mental images," or "inner-psychic object representations"?

"Repression" and "Resistance"

Freud points out with justifiable pride that the concept of "re­pression"—now part of our everyday language—"could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies."⁷⁰ Repression soon achieved a rank in Freud's doctrine of instincts which almost equaled that of the unconscious into which some­thing is "being repressed." The condition for repression is "a sharp cleavage between conscious and unconscious mental activity"; its essence lies "in turning something away... and keeping it at a distance [for defensive purposes], from the conscious."⁷¹ The per­petrator of this disruption of relations is the ego. "The ego with­draws its (preconscious) cathexis from the instinctual representa­tive that is to be repressed and uses that cathexis for the purpose of releasing unpleasure (anxiety)."⁷² Such a withdrawal of the cathexis of energy is common to all the mechanisms of repression.⁷³ It occurs when an instinctual representative (i.e., an idea, mental image, or intrapsychic object-representation on the one hand, or an affect or emotion on the other) is not ego-syntonic. Ego-dystonic ideas or affects, then, are those which are incompatible with the ego's integrity or with its ethical standards. Freud summarizes the process of repression as follows:

Each single [mental] process belongs in the first place to the un­conscious psychical system; from this system it can under certain conditions proceed further into the conscious system...

The unconscious system may be... compared to a large ante­room, in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception-room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to

^я S. Freud, "Repression," p. 146.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 147.

"- S. Freud, "Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety," pp. 92-93.

**&. Freud, "Repression," pp. 154-155.

116

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

the reception-room when he disapproves of them.... It does not make much difference whether the doorkeeper turns one impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the reception-room...

The excitations in the unconscious, in the ante-chamber, are not visible to consciousness, which is of course in the other room, so to begin with they remain unconscious. When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the doorkeeper, they are 'incapable of becoming conscious'; we call them repressed.... Being repressed, when applied to any single impulse, means being unable to pass out of the unconscious system because of the doorkeeper's refusal of admittance into the preconscious.... I should like to assure you that these crude hypotheses, the two chambers, the doorkeeper on the threshold between the two, and consciousness as a spectator at the end of the second room, must indicate an extensive approximation to the actual reality.⁷⁴

Freud goes on to say that the picture he has drawn of conscious and unconscious localities, and the doorkeeper between them, also helps us to understand another important phenomenon constantly encountered in psychoanalytic treatment. "The doorkeeper is what we have learned to know as resistance in our attempts in analytic treatment to loosen the repressions."⁷⁵ Neurotic symptoms are "in­dications of a return of the repressed."⁷⁶ Whenever psychoanalytic treatment tries to undo the repression active in the symptom, and to make repressed strivings conscious, the doorkeeper offers distinct resistance to the return of the repressed. The forces behind this resistance "proceed from the ego, from character traits, recognizable or latent."⁷⁷

Freud candidly admitted that it sounded improbable to propose that the patient who seeks relief from his suffering in psychoanalysis would offer "vigorous and tenacious resistance throughout the entire course of the treatment."⁷⁸ And yet, he continued, it is so. Nor is such resistance without analogies. Such behavior is com­parable to that of "a man who has rushed off to a dentist with a frightful toothache [but who] may very well fend him off when he takes his forceps to the decayed tooth."⁷⁹ Nor must resistances of this land be narrowly condemned. They can "come to be of the

⁷⁴ S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 260.
™ibid. _t

⁷⁶ S. Freud, "Repression," p. 154.

⁷⁷ S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 262.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 253.
™Loc. at.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 117

greatest assistance to the analysis, if a skillful technique is em­ployed correctly to turn them to the best use."⁸⁰ Indeed, one may truthfully say that "the overcoming of these resistances is the es­sential work of the analysis, that part of the work which alone assures us that we have achieved something for the patient."⁸¹

Defense, non-admittance, and the central importance of resistance in psychotherapy are phenomena which can readily be acknowledged without at the same time accepting Freud's assumptions concerning them. We need not believe in "instinctual representatives" residing in a consciousness which is pictured as a reception room but which is yet capable of looking. Nor do we have to assume a psychic "doorkeeper" (the ego anthropomorphized) who locks up un­welcome ideas in the ante-room of the unconscious, nor accept speculations concerning "changes of state" and "alterations of cathexis" of unprovable "instinctual representatives."⁸² If we look without prejudice at defenses as well as that which is defended against, at resistance and the resisted, we begin to see that they have nothing whatever to do with Freud's hypotheses concerning the inner structure of the psyche or with any of the rest of his abstract speculations. Even the most simple example of a "repres­sion" will show this.

An Example of So-called Repression. A nineteen-year-old girl passed by a flower nursery on her way to work every day. A young, handsome gardener who worked there seemed obviously interested in her; each time she passed he would look at her for a long time. The girl became excited whenever she was near him, and would feel herself peculiarly attracted to him. This attraction bewildered ber. One day she stumbled and fell on the street directly in front of the entrance to the nursery. From then on both her legs were paralvzed.

The doctor diagnosed a typical hysterical paralysis. It took about twelve weeks of psychoanalytic treatment before the patient was able to walk again.

The girl's parents were hostile even to the slightest signs of sensuality, and had educated their children in an extremely prudish manner. All the same, when our patient's hysterical attack occurred in front of the gardener, no "sensual" strivings returned from an

» Ibid., p. 256. «Ibid., p. 257. ⁸² S. Freud, "The Unconscious," p. 180.

118 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

unconscious," nor could there be any question of previously "re­pressed psychic or instinctual representations or thoughts _whi_cl eturned from the "unconscious" under the cover of paresis of Ле legs. Fxrst of al, it was the gardener himself out there m hTnurse^

lY^l^reVea,^{ed ЫпЮвК immediatel}7 ^ an attractive man ZZ
hght of the girl s existence. He, in the immediacy of his own reX
had presented himself in the elucidated "there" of ьГ Zsl
directly; nobody would ever be capable of actually detectinTa
mediating "conscious" or "unconscious" "psychic reprLntataГ or
psychic image" in her "mind" or brain. Secondly^ee y^ars о
careful psychoanalysis furnished no proof of the exMeZJT
mstinctual strivings for, or thoughts about, L&lTlZLZ
girl had first been aware of and then rejected, re pressed, Ir forgot­
ten. Even after the paresis of her legs had occurred she ieltft
tracted to this man in exactly the same way as before N^J"
Леп,,us zfies the mental construction of such^conceptual тоЗ-'
ities as unconscious strivings," "unconscious emotions " Tnd "Z
conscious thoughts." "uuons, and _un-

Instead of trying to "explain" the occurrence of the girl's paresis by means of unprovable assumptions, it is better to let &e oC abb phenomenon itself tell us its actual meaning and content

First of all, there is no doubt that а пагаЫк tmb ^ntent", a being who is essentially able Гто^апwho ^*°*™*У ^to somewhere. A chair, for Lance, can™ £*«? о Ы раЙЛ Paraly^s means that the fulfillment of the movement in wE suet MoTair ^abS°^rbed ^ ^{ЬееП St}°^{PPed and made} possibleХ'Гте

Our girl had been moving toward the P-ard*.™,. „,-л i. i,
being. She had confessed that she feft ^Sedb7lZ ^

way which she had never experienced before 9hJ ♦• ^a Peculiar
this way even after she ЪвЛес^^ HerTnt '° ^Ш

had become involved in this relation of.1,, ^{1Ге existence}
gardener Actually, this ^221^;^^° *"
nothing else than this being drawn toward the gardete But Vh
was also the rigorously prohibiting attitude oftheTr
against all kinds of sensuality. The paralyseof the L? ' ^Г*⁸
that she had surrendered herself t! her Zt«J? j® ^T*
she still existed under its spell compktelv rf t ""* ^

able to engage herself in tЈ ЛЙЯ' ** T in the way of warding off her moving clo^ 0%3

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions U9

blocking this movement of hers. Still, even her blocked relation to him continued to be a human relationship. Neither this gardener himself nor his "image" had been repressed into an unconscious On the contrary, this man was and had remained most oppressively present for her. Without his oppressive presence, her blocked re­lationship toward him would not have taken such complete pos­session of her existence as her paresis shows it did.

Her being possessed by this relationship, however, does not mean that the girl had ever become fully aware of this fact in the sense of intellectually reflecting upon it. Being possessed mates it gen­erally impossible to think for oneself. Actually, the girl had fallen prey to her parents' attitude against any sensual love relationship to such an extent that she could not even become aware of the oppressive presence of the gardener as oppression in an intellectually reflected and articulated manner. Such a reflecting way of dealing with the gardener would have presupposed a high degree of free­dom toward her own possibilities of sensual relationships which the patient was far from having reached. The girl could not even think "It is not permitted to love the man erotically, because even a prohibition points to the thing which one is not allowed to do

The paresis of this girl's legs thus shows that she was so little her own and independent self as yet that she was not even able to think reflectingly about the gardener, so that the blocked relation­ship in which her existence was so completely absorbed could occur only within the bodily sphere of her existence—in the form of the paralysis of her legs. In other words, this paresis itself was the immediate occurrence of her blocked relationship toward the gar­dener Again no sexual drive had first been locked up in an un­conscious locality within a psyche of the patient and then ex­ternalized and "expressed" itself in the form of a hysterical symptom. The assumption that such a hysterical attack is only an "expres­sion" of something else, of an assumed "unconscious thought for instance amounts to an unwarranted degradation of the paralytic phenomenon as such. To the contrary, this patient had existed from the start "outside," i.e., within this particular relationship toward the gardener unauthentic and veiled as this relationship was so lone as it sho'wed itself as the paralysis of her legs. How else could she have been attracted to the gardener if her being had not al­ready been fastened out there in his world? Only much later, in the course of her psychoanalysis, did this girl mature into a human

120 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theon

freedom which, for the first time in her life, opened up her existence to the possibility of thinking and feeling a loving attraction toward a man. It also enabled her to ponder reflectingly and independently upon the prohibiting attitude of her parents, in which she had been caught unreflectingly up to that time.

Once this girl was able to engage herself in her relationship toward the gardener in the open and free way of independently, reflectingly, and responsibly thinking of him and feeling eroticallv for him, there was no longer any need of this relationship's occur­rence as a hysterical bodily symptom.

This girl, then, teaches us that what has been called a "repres­sion" of thoughts and emotions into an "unconscious" can be under­stood much more adequately as the inability of an existence to become engaged in an open, free, authentic, and responsible kind of relationship to that which is disclosed in the relationship. Being engaged in an open, independent, and free relationship toward something or somebody always consists also, among other things, of perceiving the encountered fully, thinking of it, reflecting upon it, feeling it with all the richness of one's own selfhood, and of taking action accordingly.

The So-called Ego as Resisting Agent. This being so, we can no longer call that which was thought of as the repressing agent a function of the ego or an intrapsychic doorkeeper. The very concept of such an ego implies a negative conception of the human subject. The ego is thought to be a psychic entity in opposition to the realm of objects. When human beings are conversing with each other in a natural fashion and without theorizing about themselves, it does not occur to them to say that the ego in them perceives this or that, does this or that. Rather, what they experience actually and immediately is always merely this: I do something, or / am aware of something or somebody. Therefore, whenever we say "I," we never refer to a psychic entity, an authority inside the original real­ity of human structure, but always to a present, past, or future way of man's perceiving what he encounters and of coping with it. The little word "I" is, rightly understood, always a human being's refer­ence to certain relationships with the world, to the way in which the world addresses him and the way in which he belongs to the world in which he finds himself at any precisely given time, has found himself, or will find himself.

I refer to myself by saying "I," however, only when I am reflect-

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 121

ing explicitly on that world-relationship as which my existence is occurring at the given moment. In the light of this Daseinsanalytic insight, the conception of the psychoanalytic "ego"—and, similarly, of all the other psychoanalytic intrapsychic "authorities" such as the "id" or the "super-ego"—reveal themselves as only artificial intel­lectual reifications and hypostases of one or another of the world-relationships which always engage the whole, indivisible human existence. When psychology attributes different kinds of "functions" to this mental construction of an ego, it does not promote our understanding of man in the least. Functions (as derived from the Latin functio) are performances executed by somebody, or by some engine. As such performances of an ego, the ego-functions are necessarily not identical with the ego itself. The latter, as the per­former, however, is still an unknown X. As long as this is the case, the performances or functions of such an unknown X must remain is enigmatic in nature as the performer himself. Again, man's ability to say "I do or perceive this or that" also -ngs to light the fact that each Dasein is capable of taking over - world-disclosing relationships as its own, can appropriate them I assemble them to being a genuine self. To be sure, Dasein can jo refuse to accept and appropriate its given life-possibilities; it Tied not respond to the appeal of the realms of reality which come л±о its light. That it is possible for Dasein to decide to match the «hortations of the particular beings it encounters or to refuse to ^ten may well be the very core of human freedom (see pp. 47 ff.). There is, however, a being-closed to specific possibilities of exist-- Z which does not arise from a free decision. Many people who -ve not yet gained the freedom of fully being themselves (because леу have not freed themselves from the manner of behaving and - mentality of their surroundings) are also closed off. Such people _L:t offer resistance to responsible acquisition of hitherto un-initted possibilities of relating and, because of fear, try to keep -лп actually realizing that which demands to be admitted into: Dasein; but this is not the result of a transformation of the гэетау" which originally "cathected" an "instinctual representa-- ve" which was repulsed. The open admission of realms of partic­ular beings, which are present only insofar as they are defended ^rainst, is feared by a still-dependent Dasein, first of all because Tvervthing that is unknown and unfamiliar is by that very token uncanny. The second reason why Dasein fears the freedom of stand-

Дата добавления: 2015-06-04