26 Response to Commentaries, Paul Whittle (Cambridge)
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Transcript of 26 Response to Commentaries, Paul Whittle (Cambridge)
This article was downloaded by: [Gazi University]On: 19 August 2014, At: 08:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journalfor Psychoanalysis and the NeurosciencesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnpa20
Response to Commentaries, Paul Whittle(Cambridge)Paul Whittlea
a Les Cordiers, 84490 St Saturnin Lès Apt, France, e-mail:Published online: 09 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Paul Whittle (2000) Response to Commentaries, Paul Whittle (Cambridge), Neuropsychoanalysis: AnInterdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 2:2, 259-264, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2000.10773318
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2000.10773318
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Response to Commentaries
meetings were seen as offering a forum for a livelydiscussion of important scientific issues.
Before the talk began I was fairly clear aboutwhat the content of Paul's talk would be-especiallysince the title had been public for some time. On thatbasis, I could foresee a number of possible scenariosas to how the lecture might be received-and almostall of them were negative. My impression was thatPaul's original reputation in the department had beenbased on his work on psychophysics-the sort of experimental psychology so beloved by this empiricallyminded institution. In spite of this (or perhaps becauseof it?) his interest in psychoanalysis had grown overthe years, but it seemed well worth keeping such aninterest a secret, or at least playing it down. This department would be the last place where one shouldreveal an interest in an area regarded by almost all thestaff as having little scientific credibility-one mightas well have announced that you were interested inastrology. However, over the years, Paul had chosento gradually reveal his arcane interest to his colleagues; for example, by offering an optional undergraduate course on psychoanalysis. 1 Nevertheless,Paul's interest in psychoanalysis was never mentionedin the department-except in rather hushed tones.Thus, by standing up and announcing the basis for hisconviction in such a public forum, it seemed to me thatPaul was about to commit some variant of professionalsuicide. I listened to the lecture with great trepidation,and I still regard its delivery (given the nature of theaudience) as an act of great personal courage.
It is remarkable, therefore, that the reception ofthe paper should have been so muted; so "reason-
I "Optional" seems a rather inappropriate word to describe thecourse. Its content stood out starkly from the rest of the curriculum, andalthough only an optional course, it was attended by almost all the undergraduates.
Response to CommentariesPaul Whittle (Cambridge)
Several commentators expressed their heartfelt recognition of the personal situation I described, that oftaking psychoanalysis seriously in a university department of psychology. We should not lose sight of how
Paul Whittle is Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University ofCambridge.
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able." As I recall, there were a number of questions,all of them implying that the audience had been listening carefully, even if they were unfamiliar withmuch of the content. Alas, I don't recall the specificsof the discussion after the talk. Nevertheless, it wasquite clear to me that the type of difficult question thatI had been anticipating-such as "What on earth isyour evidence for these ridiculous claims?-simplydid not appear. The audience may, of course, havemerely been humoring a colleague. However, I wasleft with the feeling that the audience did understandthat experimental psychology did seem to be failingto build a complete account of mental life, and I suspect that the audience was fairly comfortable with theidea that psychoanalysis was a discipline trying to address some of the "missing" issues. This is not to say,of course, that the academic staff left the room witha newfound respect for psychoanalysis, or with thefeeling that they were spending their careers pursuingmeaningless scientific questions. Naturally, all professionals have a well-developed set of defenses designedto avoid intrusive ideas that would undermine theircareers. However, I was left with the impression thata number of people left the room a little more openminded than when they entered it. As a general principle, I would like to believe that even difficult arguments can be put across to a hostile audience, if theyare structured appropriately-and it seems to me thatPaul's lecture achieved that aim.
Oliver Turnbull, Ph.D.School of PsychologyUniversity of Wales, Bangor LL57 2DG,United KingdomTel: 0044 (1248) 383670Fax: 0044 (1248) 382599e-mail: [email protected]
extraordinary it is that serious discussion of the pastcentury's most influential current of psychologicalthought should be almost taboo in such departments.Oliver Turnbull, in his perceptive description of theoccasion of my lecture, nicely describes his anxiety(which I shared) about its reception in the supposedlyfriendly atmosphere of the weekly departmental semi-
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nar. It is not as though the influence of psychoanalysiswere due to some accident of charisma or fashion.It is influential for many reasons, not least becausecountless intelligent thoughtful people, among themsome of the deepest thinkers, have found that it illuminated their experience in new and surprising ways.
The two lengthiest commentaries on my targetpaper, papers in themselves, make it abundantly clearthat all is not well in either house. Fonagy writes ofthe "possible imminent demise" of psychoanalysis.Panksepp writes: "The one thing all might agree onis that the experimental psychology that emerged during the past century has yet to give us a lasting andcoherent science of the human or animal condition."This reminded me of an audible whisper during mytalk, between colleagues acutely aware of our discipline's shortcomings: "Why is he being so polite?"
My talk was trying to make sense of the experience of many years of tacking between experimentalpsychology and psychoanalysis. Its fundamental argument, taken up most directly by Oatley, but endorsedby several others, was that we have to do here with agap between subcultures or ways of life. This idea hastwo parts. One, that a life is a coherent whole; allthe parts hang together. I do not presume to instructpsychoanalysts on that. Two, that many of the waysthe parts hang together are not individual, but social.This is the web of culture, much of which is unconscious, and which defends itself by emotionallycharged border tactics (cf. Turnbull's anxiety and Panksepp's frustrations). Individual psychologists, adescription covering most psychoanalysts and experimental psychologists, do often need to be reminded ofthat. This sort of gap cannot be closed, although itseffects may be mitigated, by prescriptions such as paying more attention to scientific methodology, or beingmore open to the evidential force of individual lifestories. It goes much deeper than that. The right context is Clifford Geertz's wonderful essay "The WayWe Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of ModernThought" (Geertz, 1983). In the last section he writes:
The problem of the integration of cultural life becomes one of making it possible for people inhabitingdifferent worlds to have a genuine, and reciprocal,impact upon one another. If it is true that insofaras there is a general consciousness it consists of theinterplay of a disorderly crowd of not wholly commensurable visions, then the vitality of that consciousness depends upon creating the conditionsunder which such interplay will occur. And for thatthe first step is surely to accept the depth of the differ-
Paul Whittle
ences; the second to understand what these differences are; and the third to construct some sort ofvocabulary in which they can be publicly formulated...[po 161].
In my talk I was trying "to accept the depth ofthe differences" and "to understand what these differences are." I offered, as I said, an "essay, a discussion" intended "to leave a lot of issues more openthan they usually are" (Whittle, 1999b, p. 235, note6). In hindsight, I'm struck by what heavy use I madeof rhetoric in my attempt to get people on both sidesof the chasm to hear me. I tried to cajole and to entertain by telling stories and being, by academic standards, slightly outrageous. I didn't reach much of aconclusion, or make much progress on Geertz's thirdobjective; "some sort of vocabulary" in which thedifferences "can be publicly formulated."
Where I feel I differ from most of my commentators is that I am now even more doubtful than whenI gave my talk in 1994 about the goal of a singletrue psychology. Even more than before, we have "adisorderly crowd of not wholly commensurable visions," and I am not sure that is a bad thing. A livelyconversation has many merits. It does not have to bea Babel of mutual incomprehension.
A number of changes in the intellectual landscapehave occurred since 1994. One is the growth of theneuroscience of emotion. The foundation of this journal is partly due to it. Prominent figures such as Panksepp, Damasio, and LeDoux draw inspiration fromFreud, where the majority of experimental psychologists have been prevented from doing so by the insecurities and rigidities of their discipline. Brain science,more confident of its scientific credentials, has fewerinhibitions. But similar openings between the subcultures have occurred before when the need for and interest in ideas outweighed the pressures towardmethodological purity; for instance in the' 'creativity"movement that Hudson (1966) describes, or in the discussions on child development edited by Tanner andInhelder (1956-1960). It will be interesting to seewhether the present opening leads, as Panksepp hopes,to a more lasting rapprochement. Obviously this journal is a promising start.
In the rest of my reply I want to discuss threethemes: the relevance of experimental psychology andother scientific approaches to psychoanalysis; the relevance of psychoanalysis to experimental psychology;the current diversity of the field of psychologicalthought. My talk presented this latter rather misleadingly as a dichotomy. My treatment will be very selec-
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Response to Commentaries
tive, and I apologize in advance for not taking up manyof the points made. In particular I cannot possibly dojustice to the long articles by Peter Fonagy and JaakPanksepp, though I am delighted to have provokedthem.
The Relevance of Experimental Psychologyand Other Scientific Approaches toPsychoanalysis
Several commentators give examples of the relevanceof experimental psychology to psychoanalysis. Someof these concern particular topics, like the study ofunconscious perception (Shevrin) and others I shallmention later. Such knowledge can usefully take itsplace in the background of psychoanalytic thought.
Fonagy, however, raises a more general point.This is the importance for psychoanalysts of adoptinga more scientific attitude. Fonagy belongs with Bowlby in the group of "psychoanalysts ... who would beat home in a department of experimental psychology"(Whittle, 1999b). But as he recognizes ("I shudderedwith painful recognition' '), he is one of the exceptionsthat prove the rule. He supplements my account by asearching critique of the current intellectual and scientific failings of orthodox psychoanalysis (see Young[1998] for another withering critique from within thetradition). He writes with something close to desperation of "the possible imminent demise of the discipline, ' , in striking contrast to my own upbeatassessment of its vitality. I think we are both right,though plainly of different strands. Fonagy is concerned with orthodox psychoanalysis of the kind sojealously guarded by the institutes. I am pointing towhat one might call the diaspora of psychoanalysis:the proliferation of psychodynamic therapists andcounsellors and their dozens of training organizations;the continuing demand for "psychoanalytic studies"in universities; and to the stimulating and creativebooks that continue to pour from the presses. Freudseems to me to be in no more danger of imminentburial than Darwin. To the outside observer, the travails of orthodox psychoanalysis resemble the declineof established churches in a world where religion isbooming. They have their own valuable and hard-wonbeliefs and practices, but they seem to have lost touch,and to be overconcerned with maintaining control. Forpsychoanalysis, this process started with the rise of thepsychoanalytic profession after the First World War,which stifled the dialogue with other sciences that was
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exemplified by people like W. H. R. Rivers (Shakowand Rapaport, 1964; Whittle, 1999a).
Science is only one direction in which to lookfor greater humility and openness. Openings to philosophy, anthropology, or sociology can be just as beneficial as toward natural science.
Fonagy would like his work to contribute to ascientifically based psychotherapy. Of course, allbackground information can be useful to psychotherapists, but my prejudice is that psychotherapy is toovarious to be regarded as applied psychology. I amthinking of its ethical, existential, and relational aspects, of the injunction to attend first and foremostto the person as individual, without preconceptions(which pushes the statistical findings of psychologyinto the margins), and to be continually prepared toreturn anew to fundamentals. However, there is obviously room for many styles of psychotherapy, and Fonagy's scientifically based psychodynamic variety isone of them, which would surely be of use to, forexample, the beleaguered therapists in the NationalHealth Service of Great Britain.
I should like to use Panksepp's work, not onlyhis commentary but also his (1998) book AffectiveNeuroscience, to illustrate a neglected but importantaspect of the relevance to psychoanalysis of other sciences. It is a point that is difficult to state withoutcourting misunderstanding, but I think it sufficientlyimportant to take the risk. Panksepp provokes thisthought by his deep personal commitment to his science. He exemplifies the passionate approach that Polanyi (1958) argues is essential to creative science.Further, he finds his knowledge of brain mechanismsof emotion helpful in understanding his own experience (this is more explicit in Affective Neurosciencethan in the commentary on my paper). What I wantto point out, and this is not meant at all as a criticism,is that this use of brain science as personally meaningful, is optional. It is not compelled by or even dependent on the validity of the science. The sciencefunctions here as a resource for stories, given dignity,structure, credibility, and beauty by their context ofbiology and deep evolutionary time. For self-understanding, we draw on an open, dynamic network oflively stories-some old, some new, from religion,literature, history, science, psychoanalysis, and thefolk psychology it grew out of, and more local storiesfrom family, friends, and so on. It is in terms of suchcultural resources that we understand ourselves, asPanksepp himself points out. We can use brain scienceas a resource, but this use of it floats free, as it were,from its validity as science. The scientist may argue
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that brain science is a better resource than religion,for example, because it is truer, but I think this is quitewrong except in that it expresses the scientist's ownconviction. Scientific stories have no intrinsic advantage for self-understanding. Indeed, they have someobvious disadvantages; for example, they generallytell of causes rather than reasons (although that canbe an advantage if one is looking for fate), and theyare often short lived because science is always movingon. Why they can be better for a scientist is becausehe or she believes them. This confronts us with thephilosophical and psychological mystery of belief;what is it that allows us to invest ourselves in certainideas, or as we significantly say, what gives them' 'authority" for us? This question of belief is completelyelided in much thought about the relation between science and schemas, like psychoanalysis, for self-understanding. It is elided because the authority of scienceis taken for granted. But the relation pivots on belief,an intensely vulnerable human propensity.
The Relevance of Psychoanalysis toExperimental Psychology
Commentators take up the theme of the relevance ofpsychoanalysis to experimental psychology in a lessdirect way. Shevrin makes the striking point that experimental psychologists select subjects whom analysts would describe as showing a positivetransference, that is, who are obedient and get on withthe task required, like good patients who lie back andfree associate. They discard, on one pretext or another,those who object to or refuse the experimental task or,I am sorry to say, produce bizarrely anomalous results.I recognize my own behavior here with some discomfort. This criticism is much more than a methodological quibble. It resonates with the title of Danziger's(1990) Constructing the Subject, whose deliberate ambiguity expresses a searching historical critique of thefoundations of experimental psychology.
Panksepp takes up the influence of psychoanalysis in the indirect form of the potential effect on experimental psychology of taking emotion as fundamental.He has a seductive vision of a psychology and a psychoanalysis transformed by a "fuller confrontationwith the ancient foundational value substrates of themind." This is as yet a vision,l compatible with the
1 Or a wager, as he puts it in Affective Neuroscience (1998). "Imaginethat you have been cornered by the evil one ... your hopes for a pleasantfuture hang on your ability to answer one devilishly simple question: doother mammals have internally experienced emotional feelings that controltheir behavioral tendencies or do they not? The devil knows the correct
Paul Whittle
neuroscientific evidence, rather than compelled by it,as Panksepp admits in his more cautious moments.I find it a very attractive vision, and wish him luckpromoting it, even though I might find it a little toomonist for my more pluralist taste. He is clearly nothaving an easy time, and has been driven to a "twoculture" analysis related to mine. What he calls his"oversimplified tongue-in-cheek analysis" in termsof left versus right brain is \vhat I pointed to in citingHudson's converger-diverger distinction.2 Of coursewhat all such accounts in terms of personality differences ignore are the powerful sociopolitical pressuresthat maintain the disciplinary status quo.
I read Panksepp's commentary while writing alecture on the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson. Iwas surprised to find several links (free associations,if you like) between the two. Gibson also had a visionfor psychology, which he sometimes expressed as ifthe evidence compelled it, but in more cautious moments as a program for the future. Gibson too hadroots in psychodynamics, via his teacher E. B. Holt,whose book The Freudian Wish (1915) was an influential early example of a psychologist writing aboutpsychoanalysis (Reed, 1988). Finally, Gibson andPanksepp together instantiate Thorne Shipley's (1995,p. 145) surprising injunction: "treat mental life as anirreducible process, not ever as a thing; and ... devisemethods for its analysis consistent with the principlesof biological evolution, on the one hand, and with thehighest and most subtle flights of imagination, on theother. Only from this, and from the melange of depthpsychology and perception, can come a science thatone might call a veridical psychology."3 We surelyneed such visionaries.
A final comment on Panksepp's commentaryconcerns his engaging metaphor of the deep unconscious as carp, swimming beneath the superciliousswans of conscious cognition. All I want to point outis that while it is natural to a psychologist "to seediversity as surface and universality as depth," eth-
answer and you must make the correct choice in order to enjoy the remaining days of your life. How would you reply?" (p. 341).
2 This was another local touch. Hudson's work was done when hewas a graduate student in Cambridge. His Contrary Imaginations (1966)is, incidentally, a good example of unselfconsciously bridging the subcultures of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis.
3 Shipley founded the journal Vision Research, which is now perhapsthe foremost journal for vision science. It now, 30 years later, adoptsthe strictest conventional criteria of scientific respectability, with no tracewhatsoever of this vision of its founder. That is one reason I describedShipley's injunction as "surprising," though in the history of science suchan evolution from inspiration and inclusiveness to narrow respectabilityis common.
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nographers may beg to differ.4 It depends on one'spoint of view. Culturally specific acquisitions may beindelible, and human universals taken-for-grantedtrivia.
The Diversity of Psychological Thought.Psychoanalysis among the Human Sciences
Foldi, Brickman, and Borod quote Ryle's (1949) description of psychology as "a federation of enquiriesand techniques." This is just as true, or truer, in theyear 2000, when we have in addition to all the olddivisions of psychology, many new ones: computational and neural subcultures of various complexions,and others such as cultural psychology, discourse psychology, narrative psychology, and so on. The American Psychological Association has 49 divisions,according to another thought-provoking essay byGeertz (2000), on the present state of psychology. Thedichotomy that structured my talk, of experimentalpsychology versus psychoanalysis, was a misleadingoversimplification. The diversity of enquiries withincontemporary psychology makes it even more anomalous that psychoanalysis is so rarely a valued part ofit. How can it fail to make or find links with narrativepsychology, or a developmental psychology that concentrates on early parent-child interactions? And ofcourse there are some such links being made. Billig's(1999) book, Freudian Repression, is a distinguishedrecent example. One could throw the net wider. It isopen to psychoanalysis to take its place as an important member of the human sciences. De facto it hasbeen exactly that for a hundred years. And yet thedivisions remain. Psychoanalysis remains an anomaly,and my description of this situation continues to evokefeeling recognition not only among psychology students or faculty. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber describes some scholarly work on one way to makesense of this: that psychoanalysis is indeed an anomaly, sui generis. I think it probably is, but then so to
4 My quote is again taken from Geertz (1989). It may be useful togive it in full: "About that other conjuration 'The Human Mind,' held upas a protective cross against the relativist Dracula, I can be somewhatmore succinct: for the general pattern, if not the substantial detail, is verymuch the same. There is the same effort to promote a privileged languageof 'real' explanation ('nature's own vocabulary,' as Richard Rorty (1983),attacking the notion as scientistic fantasy, has put it): and the same wilddissensus as to just which language-Shannon's? Saussure's? Piaget's?-that in fact is. There is the same tendency to see diversity as surfaceand universality as depth. And there is the same desire to represent one'sown interpretations not as constructions brought to their objects-societies, cultures, languages-in an effort, somehow, somewhat to comprehendthem, but as quiddities of such objects forced upon our thought" (p. 59).
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some extent are most other disciplines. A further factoris the tendency to isolation of the psychoanalytic profession that I have already touched on. Anyone whodeals with that profession in trying, for instance, to setup academic courses, meets far too often an attitude of"only on our terms." In the domain of practice, thisis even stronger, as witness the withdrawal of the analysts from the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.5
What to do about this? I return to the idea ofembracing plurality, as I did above, and at the end ofmy talk. Perhaps we should lower our sights a little,welcome the "disorderly crowd of not wholly commensurable visions," and just get on with the conversation. Many are doing exactly that. Others will workat trying to unify perspectives, and that too will bevaluable, but we should not despair when it seems impossible.
References
Biagioli, M. (1990), The anthropology of incommensurability. Stud. in Hist. & Philos. Sci., 21: 183-209.
Billig, M. (1999), Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Danziger, K. (1990), Constructing the Subject: HistoricalOrigins of Psychological Research. Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press.
Geertz, C. (1983), The way we think now: Toward an ethnography of modern thought. In: Local Knowledge. London: Fontana.
--- (1989), Anti anti-relativism. In: Available Light.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp.42-67.
--- (2000), Imbalancing act: Jerome Bruner's culturalpsychology. In: Available Light. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, pp. 187-201.
Holt, E. B. (1915), The Freudian Wish. London: FisherUnwin.
Hudson, L. (1966), Contrary Imaginations. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Panksepp, J. (1998), Affective Neuroscience: Foundationsof Human and Animal Emotions. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Polanyi, M. (1958), Personal Knowledge: Towards a PostCritical Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Reed, E. S. (1988), James J. Gibson and the Psychology ofPerception. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
5 Against, one may note on the credit side, considerable oppositionfrom within the profession, overcome by the leaders using tactics some ofwhich one can only call political skulduggery (see, for example, Young[1998]).
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Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.
Shakow, D., & Rapaport, D. (1964), The Influence ofFreudon American Psychology. New York: International Universities Press.
Shipley, T. (1995), Intersensory Origin of Mind: A Revisitto Emergent Evolution. London: Routledge.
Tanner, J. M., & Inhelder, B., Eds. (1956-1960), Discussions on Child Development, 4 vols. London: Tavistock.
Whittle, P. (1999a), W. H. R. Rivers and the early historyof psychology at Cambridge. In: Bartlett, Culture andCognition, ed. A. Saito. Hove: Psychology Press, pp.21-35.
Paul Whittle
--- (1999b), Experimental psychology and psychoanalysis: What we can Learn from a century of misunderstanding. This Journal, (2):233-245.
Young, R. M. (1998), The culture of British psychoanalysis.http://www.shef.ac.uk/-psysc/staff/rmyoung/papers/paper53.html
Paul Whittle1£s Cordiers84490 St Saturnin Us ApiFrancee-mail: [email protected]
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