Hi, Richard Armstrong, Norm, and  Psyart listers.

In the first place , Richard , sorry for this belated response (I had a short
vacation), and  thank you for your extensive and instructive response (30/6
15.02) to my message. Here is a collection of responses and considerations in
relation to both Richard's and Norm's perceptions of Freud, reality science and
literature.

Richard wrote<<It is true that his view of "reality" reflects the "conditional
realism" (Gellner) of the hegemonic natural sciences, but this was wholly
compatible with the attitude of the Geisteswissenschaften of the day>>.

The concept of  'reality' is crucial as our discussion was about the relation
(dichotomous, or not) between scientific and literary thinking in Freud's work,
and my point is that in his days those types of thinking were viewed in terms of
a dichotomy- with scientific thinking as the dominant member : supposed nearer
to the culturally shared notion of 'true' knowledge.

I doubt if the notion of scientific reality underpinning Freud's work was WHOLLY
compatible with that in the natural sciences, or the Geisteswissenschaften. I
shall focus on a few points of difference and their implications for research
field and methodology:

SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY: Contrary to the sciences (medical psychiatry,
experimental (Wundtian) psychology)- Freud recognizes two, conflicting realities
: scientific  reality (of the natural sciences) and the psychological reality of
the internal world of subjective experience which is prioritized in psas.
Subjective experience fell, at least as an object of scientific research,
outside the scope of experimental psychology. Experimental ((Wundtian,
laboratory) psychology was concerned with facts of observation and the results
of psychological laboratorium experiments. Their approach aimed at bringing back
the mental phenomena to empirically observable facts from which to discover
basic laws. Their research was on the level of processes, not on the level of
individual persons. To them, the subjective nature of psychological data was a
fundamental problem for the pursuit of objective, experimental research.

MEDICAL PSYCHIATRY - Freud's original discipline - also considered the internal
world of subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness) outside the research
field of medical science. The latter  perception is mirrored in  the influential
Logical Positivist view of consciousness, or, the subjectivity of experience,
which, -so they claimed- as it was neither verifiable by logic, nor by (natural)
scientific or linguistic methods, was much better explored in great art, poetry
and music, activities which are expressive of visions, feelings, and emotions
and, as such, perfectly legitimate as long as they make no claims to genuine
cognition, or, representation of REALITY.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY: Subjective experience was, however, a research
field in the philosophical (later phenomenological) psychology of Franz von
Brentano, but in the latter's work the view of (experiential) reality was
entirely different from Freud's. Brentano did not support Freud's view of
psychological reality as layered and disagreed with Freud (who attended
Brentano's lectures) in the matter of the latter's assumption of an Unconscious.
In William James' "The Principles of Psychology" there is in the 688 pages of
the work one reference to literature (Coleridge) see index New York: Dover
Publications, the edition is supposedly of the 1970s). Obviously for
wissenschaftliche, or philosophical psychologists literature represented
experiential reality: a type of reality that was not supposed to yield
wissenschaftliche  knowledge of the mind, or of (phenomenal) consciousness.
        It was precisely Freud's literary view of psychological reality as
layered, implied in his 'psychic determinism' that enabled him to ask literary
"Why" questions , which involved a preoccupation with MEANING (to which I shall
come back presently).. The view of reality as layered was not specifically
Freudian :Kurz places that view in a wider, cultural context when he writes:
"The archeological impulse, the search for the city beneath the cities which
unites Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka in a single configuration  as modern
excavators of the human psyche". undertaking .". an archeology of the mind, of
life itself, at the risk of disturbing deeply repressed emotions"; envisioning
".a psychology that probes the mind 's depth in order to enter an inner world
which they regard as constitutive of human nature.." Nietzsche and Freud
understand their respective  archeological projects as a subversive,
ideologically sceptical, interrogation of meaning and intention.(Gerhard Kurz.
"Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka",  in: 'Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the
Fin-de-Siecle'. Pp. 128-9.New York: Schocken books, 1989).

DETERMINISM IN LITERARY CRITICISM. The view of reality as layered also occurs in
'scientific' literary criticism: during Freud's lifetime it was still taken for
granted (in the wissenschaften: absolutely not in the (natural) sciences) that
psychology was in some sense identical to literature and could best be explored
by examining the way in which great writers presented the feelings and actions
of their characters. In the mid- nineteenth-century - at the height of scientism
- literary critics began to apply  scientific theories of psychology in their
work.  Hippolyte Taine (1828-93): French thinker, critic, historian, and
Positivist attempted to apply scientific method to the study of the humanities
in his notable "History of English Literature"( Histoire de la littérature
anglaise, 4 vols. (1863-64). Hyppolyte Taine 's celebrated "Introduction" to the
History offers a basic text for the understanding of his scientific attitude to
literary criticism. Taine - applying the scientific principle of causality -
claims  in the 'Introduction' that the same great causal factors underlie any
cultural artifact of a given age and society. By studying the literary documents
one may understand the psychology of their author, and this, complemented by
scrutiny of the facts of his life and personality, illuminates the "faculté
maîtresse," the predominant characteristic that determines the writer's work;
this, in turn, can then be "explained" by reference to three great conditioning
facts, "la race," "le milieu," and "le moment"; i.e., the writer's inherited
personality, his social, political, and geographical background, and the
historical situation in which he writes.

The difference between Freud's determinism and the more general cultural version
was his notion of an Unconscious. Freud's ' psychic determinism' loomed large in
his theoretical framework, and was seen by him as an indispensable element in
the scientific approach, but it presupposed a perception of the (unconscious)
deeper layers that is neither shared by Taine (who, as a positivist did not
believe in underlying causal factors that could not be quantified) nor by
medical psychiatry, scientific, or empirical (Brentano) psychology.

PSYCHIC DETERMINISM IN PSAS. In Psas, all psychological events, however random
and accidental they appear to be on the surface  are the products of deeper
lying (unconscious) INTENTIONS. In designating an intention as  the centre of
psychological explanation , psas is drawing a SEMANTIC element in its procedures
as well as in its theory: Thus, Psas  aims to reveal what a psychological event
SIGNIFIES: the 'true' MEANING and (psychological, unconscious) origin of an
event.. This is radically different from contemporary (to Freud) scientific and
phenomenological disciplines (except religion, theology) which did (and do) not
believe in meaning, neither behind Nature, nor behind the human psychological
system. Consequently their method is syntactic  (as the work of the cognitive
scientists Lakoff and Johnson on metaphor as a vehicle of meaning (I'll come to
that later), focused on description, and the machinery of psychic life: its
functioning, not its semantics.

Wittgenstein criticized ( Freud's )determinism as an approach to the
subjectivity of experience : "Determinism applies to the mind as truly as to
physical things" [says the scientific psychologist]. This is obscure because
when we think of causal laws in physical things we think of experiments. We have
nothing like this in connection  with feelings and motivations. And yet
psychologists want to say: There must be some law" - although  no law has been
found. (Freud:" Do you want to say, gentlemen that changes in mental phenomena
are guided by chance?"). Whereas to me the fact that there aren't actually any
such laws seems important" (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics,
Psychology, and Religious Belief. Ed. Cyril Barrett. "Conversations on Freud",
pp. 41-52. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989).

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PSAS AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY arises from
contrasting perceptions of reality informing contrasting methodologies:
syntactic (scientific) and  semantic methodology. That difference is still
significant today, now that the (cognitive) SCIENCES have ventured into the
research field of subjectivity (phenomenal consciousness) after a silence on the
subject-matter in those disciplines of more than a century. Take, for instance,
the cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's preoccupations with
MEANING, or metaphor as a vehicle of MEANING ("Metaphors we Live By". Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980). Like Umberto Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics
(1972)  Lakoff and Johnsons' approach to meaning is syntactic: they do not claim
that there IS meaning behind experience, or behind the human psychological
system, so they have no view of reality as layered in the Freudian sense. They
simply write about: "what people find meaningful in their lives"(ix)) exploring
the machinery of meaning as it operates in metaphor. Their scientific perception
of experiential meaning is deeply different from psas as they explore meaning as
the act of some transcendental Ego,  cut off from its  body, and therefore from
its individuality, gender, family-structure, and personal history, as Julia
Kristeva wrote in her review of Umberto Eco's " Theory of Semiotics" , in an
article in The Times Literary Supplement, October 12, 1973, entitled  "The
system and the Speaking Subject":

"A critique of this [Eco's ] 'semiology of systems'  and of its phenomenological
foundations is possible only if it starts from a theory of meaning which must
necessarily be a theory of the speaking subject.... . The theory of meaning now
stands at a crossroads: either it will remain an attempt at formalizing meaning
systems by increasing sophistication of the logico-mathematical tools which
enable it to formulate models on the basis of a conception (already rather
dated) of meaning as the act of a transcendental Ego,  cut off from his body,
its unconscious, and also its history; or else it will attune itself to the
theory of the speaking subject as a divided subject and go on to attempt to
specify the type of operations characteristic of the two sides of this split;
thereby exposing them as, that is to say, on the one hand, to biophysiological
processes (themselves already an inescapable part of signifying processes: what
Freud labelled 'drives' ), and, on the other hand, to social constraints (family
structures, modes of production, etc."(317)
Eco's response in a note to the 1979 edition of his work (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1979:217) was:"Insofar as the subject, along with some of its
properties and attitudes, is presupposed by the statements, then it has to be
'read' as an element of the conveyed content. Any other attempt to introduce a
consideration of the subject into the semiotic discourse would make semiotics
trespass its "natural" boundaries. I am aware that some semiotic approaches do
trespass on this threshold, making semiotics the study of this creative activity
of a semiosis-making subject, and intending this subject not as a
phenomenological transcendental Ego but a 'deep', profound subject (317).

So far about about the differences between the perception of reality
underpinning psas, versus that of the other wissenschaften and sciences and
their implications for scientific explanation.  Much more is to be said about
this subject-matter but not within the scope of  an e-mail. Freud's work holds
two realities that are incompatible,  not to say conflicting,  and lead to
entirely different perceptions of psychic life. Like scientific and
phenomenological psychologist he aims at an objective description of  the forces
operating on the person , a description which the person would not have been
able to give, but the CONSTITUENTS of the description are different as they
involve intentions, wishes, desires: unconscious factors  given a causal
status.

RETROSPECTIVE PERCEPTIONS OF FREUD'S TWO REALITIES. If you think that Freud
forged the incompatible 'Realities' into a 'whole' - as Norm did - then it is
interesting and necessary to define the relation between the wholes, what makes
them a whole, what keeps them together, which is Freud's PSYCHIC determinism. So
you need to support psychic determinism (including the unconscious) to 'see' the
whole.

Another, retrospective perception is to see Freud's psychic determinism as an
intuitive, literary  premonition of what is now going on in scientific brain
research, but Norm is , of course, much more of an authority in that field than
I  am. I was , however, impressed by a lecture given here in the Netherlands by
Nancy C. Andreasen (, M.D., Ph.D., Andrew H. Woods Professor of Psychiatry,
University of Iowa College of Medicine) on her article "Linking Mind and Brain
in the Study of Mental Illnesses: A Project for a Scientific Psychopathology" in
"Science" 1997, March 14. Andreasen - involved in research with brain-imaging:
the observation of the living brain in operation by means of advanced
scanning-techniques- shows  how, in the case of  "melancholy", neurological,
psychological, and psychiatric research all point toward the part of the brain
named the prefrontal cortex and amygdala The article moves beyond the
ideological espousement of mind and brain, so often invoked by the resistors to
modern neuroscience. As Dr. Andreasen concludes "[t]hese advances [in
brain-imaging research] have created an era in which a scientific
psychopathology that links mind and brain has become a reality." Andreasen
claimed - in a lecture I attended in Amsterdam in November 1997 -  that all
conscious experience causes modifications in the brain [and thus in human
signification and behaviour] upon which I speculated that this everchanging
brain might be the biological version of Freud's unconscious. I thought that, as
the brain is more impressionable when we are very young marks imprinted on the
brain by traumatic experiences at an early age might be deeper and thus more
likely to form patterns along which later, analogous experiences are formed.
This throws an interesting light on questions asked earlier on this list about
Freud's emphasis on experiences in childhood.

Those are the thoughts  I had when reading Richard's and Norm's comments. Some
people on this list have doubted the use of going into Freud's being/or not
being scientific. I think that any figure of a cultural and intellectual
stature  like Freud's is worthy of a cultural/ historical perspective (on any
aspect of his work) which brings out the impact of his life and work on Western
culture, including science .


With kindest regards, and sorry for my lengthy response, Francina Valk.