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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2017 Cathartic Ethics in Psychoanalysis Dylan Timothy O'Brien Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation O'Brien, Dylan Timothy, "Cathartic Ethics in Psychoanalysis" (2017). LSU Master's Theses. 4543. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/4543 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CATHARTIC ETHICS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Department of Philosophy by Dylan Timothy O‟Brien B.A., Minnesota State University Moorhead, 2013 Graduated May 2013 May 2017 iii I dedicate this thesis to Oanh, without whom I would still operate under the comforting assumption that I had achieved a complete realization, thinking of ethics as little more than a tragic joke. “Life doesn‟t want to be healed. The negative therapeutic reaction is fundamental to it. Anyway, what is healing? The realization of the subject through a speech which comes from elsewhere, traversing it.” -Jacques Lacan, Seminar II, p. 233 ii Table of Contents ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE PLACE OF CATHARSIS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS…........1 2. THE PROBLEM OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC ETHICS, FREUD‟S AVOIDANCE OF IDEALISM………………………………………………………………………...........15 3. THE FORMATION OF THE EGO, A SYNTHESIS OF LACAN AND KLEIN‟S DISCUSSIONS OF THE EGO WITH MY OWN OBSERVATIONS………………24 THE CATHARTIC REFERENCE TO ETHICS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS…………37 4. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………45 ABBREVIATION KEY…………………………………………………………………………49 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………........50 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………..52 iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines the complex role of ethics within Psychoanalytic theory, finding not a prescriptive ethics, but a reference to ethics in the cathartic methodology that I argue underpinned Psychoanalytic thought from the very beginning. The introduction provides the reader with the necessary background to the material to be covered. The first chapter examines the neglectful attitude found throughout the foundational writings of Psychoanalytic theory in the work of Sigmund Freud, as well as covering two different methods by which ethics are often reduced, and which Freud successfully avoided. The second chapter seeks the origin of an alternative ethics in the traditional locus of freedom and agency: the ego, and explains how this assumption is problematic. The ego is shown to be surmounted through the cathartic method. The final chapter examines the processes of post-egoic ethics, shows their role in the Psychoanalytic relationship, and summarizes the entire project in the last two pages. iv INTRODUCTION: THE PLACE OF CATHARSIS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS We may characterize Psychoanalysis as a cathartic practice1, insofar as it seeks to discharge the pathologies of everyday life in order that free activity and association might take their place2. “Catharsis” is a Greek term, which translates to “purification” or “purging”, and refers in the context of Psychoanalysis to an abreaction/discharge of a fundamental and pathogenic trauma (Laplanche & Pontalis, p. 60). This method, although discarded in later formulations of Psychoanalytic theory, remained implicit in all of them, insofar as they continued to emphasize the direction of Psychoanalysis as guided by a desire for exteriority; a desire to exit a closed and stifling circuit. The oppressiveness of psychoanalytic theory is precisely an attempt to escape this element of experience by delineating it. Sigmund Freud‟s notorious emphasis on sexuality and familial relations was a result of his discovery that the ossifications of desire, in pathological states, follow certain patterns that lead to pathology through their constant repetition. In the case of neurotics, who make up the vast majority of psychoanalytic subjects, certain thought and behavioral patterns, often solidified at a young age, are repeated incessantly, and this leads to psychological disturbance. The goal of Psychoanalysis was (and is) not to inculcate these patterns, but to offer a path beyond them, towards a true relation with the world and others in their exteriority, and without sacrificing interior life to do so. Psychoanalysis, like any meaningful system, has the potential to take us well beyond impersonal duty and personal compulsion into a more broad, responsible, and 1 In spite of Freud‟s surpassing of the cathartic method to form the method later referred to as the “talking cure”, an emphasis on the curative potential of catharsis, re-named “abreaction”, remained in his later work, and remained a core principle of psychoanalysis. 2 Although Psychoanalysis achieves its cure through free association, free association is also a sign that it has succeeded. Pathological states always impose their schema on discourse, making relation itself impossible. 1 open-ended universe. This, as I will put forth in the pages that follow, lays the groundwork for a true ethical practice and eliminates the twin possibilities of false ethics, dedicated to top-down moralistic injunction, as well as to the bottom-up interior drives which form a kind of “private despotism” reigning over the interior life of the afflicted. If there is a process by which ethical spaces are opened up through psychoanalysis, it would be through catharsis. The cathartic abreaction, which empties the psyche of its excess cathexes, is a terrifying prospect for many who are initially exposed to Psychoanalytic theory and method, in that it makes explicit many of the less comfortable processes and objects involved in our day-to-day lives. The insights provided us by its theory of pathology (in this singular focus on pathology, Psychoanalysis was from its beginning a primarily negative theory, delineating pathological states, with ideals always remaining on the periphery), have a tremendous potential to arouse the fear of the philosopher or the philosophically minded. With its scalpel, it peers under the goodness that is assumed to be provided us by our loyalty to prescriptive formulas of ethics, to see if there is a hidden pattern of unconscious activity. The possibility of a return of the repressed, or a perceptible uprising of unconscious patterns, is a constant threat, and the higher we value our ideals, the more inaccessible their sources seem, the less likely we are to acknowledge the possibility of this occurring. Layers of distortion often cover the activity of the unconscious, placed as they are with the goal of preventing disruptive material from entering conscious awareness. When they do enter consciousness, they are often cloaked in reversals, denials, and other means of obfuscating their true nature. The only way to peer beneath these obfuscations is through interpretation. Ethical action itself often serves as one of the 2 most common “masks” of unconscious activity, because it allows one to continue one‟s activities unmodified while reassuring oneself of the justification of one‟s practices within greater society. Ethics easily takes on a ritualistic character, becoming a form of sacrifice of freedom encoded in widespread discourse. Through ritualistic compulsion, the neurotic gives up their agency in order to reach regress comfortably to a stage of primal dependency or omnipotence (this will be discussed at length in Chapter 3). The language of the unconscious, however, stands out from these distortions involved in traditional ethical discourse in that it “[…] speaks all by itself […]” (OSP, p. 70), while traditional discursive ethics speak for us, offering us a static means to measure our level of conformity to its codes and prescriptions. Although it is clear that ethics must involve autonomy on one level or another, most ethical systems end up undermining this autonomy by bringing them entirely into the domain of representational consciousness. Pathology represents a troubling surfacing of this autonomy, this lack of representation. Yet the goal of Psychoanalysis is not to decompose ethics by revealing its roots in pathology. Instead, Psychoanalysis as it was initially set forth by Sigmund Freud and further developed by Jacques Lacan, allows for the expansion of the study of ethics beyond their usual confinement to conscious representation and into the domain of the non-representational unconscious. By exploring the relationship of the unconscious to ethical behavior, we can illustrate the possibility of ethics beyond prescriptivity, beyond the rules that limit freedom. As is indicated by Freud throughout his writings, we may find the inverse of what we would expect in the ethical by studying their practice and their pathos, in that it is easy to sweep ethics up into the pre-ethical desires of the individual. The unconscious has its own motives, and unless these are properly 3 understood, we cannot make any assumptions about the veracity of any ethical system supposedly subscribed to by an individual: If anyone were to put forward the paradoxical

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