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Example research essay topic: Mind And Body Cartesian Dualism - 2,324 words

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... for reasons I gave earlier and is based on Descartes's definition of mind as having no language of its own: it is that which does not pertain to matter. For Descartes mind is the realm of free will, the sphere of soul, of the Church. There were a lot of philosophical and theological - i. e. cultural - reasons in the seventeenth century why it was defined in that way.

In Individuals P. F. Strawson shows, I think utterly persuasively, that you can think about minds only in a language which connects material objects to persons. Strawson maintains that we cannot individuate individuals in terms of 'consciousness as such', and that 'nothing can be a subject of predicates implying consciousness, unless it is, in that sense of the word which implies also the possession of corporeal attributes, a person, or at least a former person' (p. 121). According to Strawson's analysis, the concept of person comes first; it is ontologically prior to the concept of mind or of the human body. The relevance of this is that neither Darwin nor Freud thought in such terms.

Theirs was a dualistic world. One might consider, as Darwin did, reducing mind to matter or the mental to the biologically innate. Or one might, as Freud did, keep the two categories - the mental and the physical - in tension and hold to a doctrine of concomitance. As Alfred North Whitehead has so eloquently argued, this framework was and has remained disastrous. It was developed in the seventeenth century for certain philosophical and mathematical purposes, but it left us no way of speaking about people which could integrate the material aspects with feelings.

As Whitehead says: Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter and those who put matter. inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century. (1925, p. 82) A student of the history of psychology would find in the work of the pioneer of psychological associationism, David Hartley (1749), an attempt to speak in terms of particles and vibrations and what he called 'vibratuncles'. His was a physics's language spoken of in mental terms.

That approach to psychology was the most influential one in the empiricist tradition up to the work of Alexander Bain, whose The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859) were the standard pre-evolutionary texts. One attempt to shoehorn personal concepts into bodily language was phrenology, which combined a faculty psychology of personal attributes and traits (love of offspring, various kinds of memory, acquisitiveness, etc. ) with particular portions of the brain. The result was a one-to-one correlation between mental terms and portions of the brain. I mention these two examples because Freud's first book, On Aphasia, was in this tradition of mind-brain correlation (one which I have examined at length elsewhere), just as psychoanalysis remained a fundamentally associations psychology. I think it is extremely important to see Freud within this philosophical framework. He wrote as a humanist, and he wrote as a physiologist.

He was also importantly influenced by biology. However, he nowhere integrated his ways of writing about people and their minds with biology. The ontological gap between mind and body remained. His stopgap measure was psychophysical parallelism. Sulloway seems blissfully unaware of this set of constraints on how Freud thought. He fails to see the most basic ontological assumptions on which Freud based his thinking, whether in physiology, neurology, or psychoanalysis.

In the ontological gap between mind and body, Sulloway is a would-be ideological conquistador on behalf of twentieth-century biological reductionism, which brings with it cultural and political fatalism. Speaking as a historian of biology, psychology and neurology in this period, I claim that his analysis does not resonate with the terms of reference of the debates of the period, much less with the terms of reference of Freud's world-view. Just as significantly, I find that his way of writing about Freud has no resonances in my experience of clinical work as an analysand or as a psychotherapist. There is no space at all for experience in his presentation of Freud. There are only categories in the history of ideas. Far from being biological, however, in real life and in real psychoanalysis everything is relentlessly biographical.

Therefore, without wishing to withhold due historical homage to the role of the Helmholtz school, physicist physiology and neurology in Freud's thinking, it is worth recalling again that having written the 'Project for a scientific psychology', Freud put it aside and wanted it to be destroyed. It is true that he continued to use - in a metaphorical sense - some of the terms of neurology, physiology and physics in his writings, for example in the model of the mind in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams. But I think that it is too radical a reduction to try to capture Freud for the history of biology in the way Sulloway has. In summary, I would make two points - one about Bettelheim and the Strachey translation, the other about Sulloway's approach. When Freud is writing as a humanist - the moving passages about Oedipus, for example - he escapes the impoverishment of the Cartesian ontology and communicates in personally evocative and resonant ways. But, pace Sulloway, even when he is writing as a scientist within his psychophysical parallelism version of Cartesian dualism, he is not a reductionist.

His meta psychological language is richer than the translators convey - I rather than ego, it rather than id. Beyond that, his language is far richer than it would be if we saw it through the lens of Sulloway's conception of biology. Like his mentors, Mayr and Wilson, Sulloway would contextualize Freud in twentieth-century reductionist terms, remove him from the contemporary sense of Spencer and Jackson on the concomitance of mind and body and parachute him (anachronistically) into a biology rooted in genetics, sociobiology, pure materialism. Freud was a humanist with his soul and a dualist with his mind; never organismic, much less a modern desiccated biologist. Therefore, I incline to Bettelheim's rendition. The lesson to be learned here is, of course, that psychoanalytic metapsychology should begin to address itself to the metaphysical problem as presented by Freud and as exemplified by Sulloway's failure to understand the philosophical terms of reference of Freud's thinking.

What are we to put in place of what one student of psychosomatic phenomena called the Mysterious Leap from the Mind to the Body? (see Deutsch, 1959). What can we do to think organismic and personal terms so that we are not stuck with such barbaric phrases as 'somatic compliance'? Why are we reduced to writing of the most intimate personal phenomena in terms of object relations', thereby repeating the traditional subject-object distinction which has been bequeathed to us by Western epistemology as the twin bugbear with 'mind-body' dualism? The language of object relations is an advance on physicist concepts, but remains a scientistic rendering of human intimacy. Why must we continue to write in terms of object relations, mental apparatuses, the anatomy of the mental personality? My, own inclination is to return to Teiresias, a person who was blind to the external object world but who saw deeply within.

What happens in psychoanalysis is that people tell stories with meanings, metaphors and symbols. They tell them again and again, in search of insight, and they are helped to achieve this by someone who is also listening very carefully to what is heard and what is evoked in himself or herself. It seems to me that psychology is prose, that human nature is personal and that it is historical. As Marx said, 'we know only one science, the science of history'. From this point of view, theory should be worn lightly, and theoretical concepts should be seen as heuristic devices.

Of course one should attempt to explore the relations between concepts, but one should not try to do so on the model of a theory of the periodic table of elements or fundamental physical particles. It should be possible to think about the container and the contained, the psychic skin, paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, projective identification, alpha and beta elements, envy, hope, splitting, transitional objects and phenomena, and a number of other useful theoretical insights - without having to reduce them to too much order. These need not be elements in a would-be periodic table of mental elements. Rather, they should be seen as useful tools for a craft, lying loosely in a bag of insights available to the people who try to help others become themselves. The key is in the method and the process, in the transference and, above an, its relation with the counter transference - i. e. , the human dialectic.

I am sure that many of the terms I have just listed will not be familiar to a non-specialist audience, although they would be to psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic psychotherapists. In giving this paper to a group of human scientists I feel hopeful, since the name of the group itself breaks away from various reductionism's implied in 'behavioural science, social science', and other question-begging designations about how we think about people. I would argue that the basic discipline for a truly human science is biography and that Freud has given us the best insight there is into the understanding of biography. I hope you will not think I am making very heavy weather of Freud. Philip Ref has called his work 'the most important body of thought committed to paper in the twentieth century'.

Peter Medawar (to whom we owe much alleviation of human suffering in burn therapy and transplant surgery) has said the opposite: The opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well - something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity. (quoted in Sulloway, p. 499) In the face of this modern scientistic bigotry, it is gratifying that Medawar's daughter is a clinical psychologist, training to become a psychoanalyst. Freud is cited more often in introductory psychology texts than anyone else in Britain, Canada and the United States, according to Bettelheim (p. 19 n). What is made of him is therefore of more than passing interest. It is also important to note that it is inescapable that something will be made of him. Throughout my years of research as a philosopher and historian of science, one of the things which has become most powerfully borne in upon me is that there is no neutral observation language in science or history or therapy. There is no such thing as the Freud.

There are, of course, important constraints on what we can say about him if we are being serious and attempting to tell the truth as best we can. In case you are wondering what I would like you to take away from all this, it is that psychoanalysis just is not like that - it is not like a theory in natural or biological science. The ontology within which Freud lived was one of mind and brain, with a 'holding action' theory of their relations in psychophysical parallelism or the doctrine of concomitance. 'Biology' was not brain, nor was it a category that filled the Cartesian space. Least of all did it connect with a psychology of persons - of persons, selves and souls. Into the Cartesian space Freud and his followers, apostates and current sectarians have poured a variety of languages and concepts, beginning with those borrowed from physicist physiology and extending to ego psychology, cybernetics, systems theory and Wilfred Bion's principled use of empty categories.

I am suggesting that we take stock and move from objects to persons, not only wearing theory lightly but treating it heuristically, wearing system lightly; and, above all, that we should stop trying to assimilate psychoanalysis to other disciplines - especially neurophysiology, biology, ethology and sociobiology. In attempting to be the broker of such a wedding, Sulloway is still clinging to natural science as the paradigm discourse for ontologically and epistemologically insecure human science. But he is doing this at a time when philosophers and philosophers of science are turning away from that idealization, partly because natural science, shorn of purposes and values, has turned out to be a false guide and partly because it is a will-o'-the-wisp - a fruitless, barren marriage. Can we not let go of the urge which leads us to seek to have human projects and human understanding underwritten by nonhuman authority? If we could let go of the naturalization of value systems, perhaps we could explore and contest the competing value systems on offer as potential ego ideals for our cultural - including our psychoanalytic - visions. If we could once accept psychoanalysis as a full-blooded humanism, we could then begin to challenge the false neutrality and scientific ity of its practices and institutions and ask ourselves what kind of humanity we wish to create, in full knowledge of the biological and ideological constraints on our visions and our attempts to make them real.

Only then, it seems to me, can we safely begin to build a theory and practice of human nature which brings together the concepts of organism and person, shorn of the reductionism which the former usually brings in tow and the idealism associated with the latter. That is, we must try for a human nature which is not in danger of falling back into the extremes of impoverished body and disembodied mind bequeathed by Cartesian dualism.


Free research essays on topics related to: mind and body, cartesian dualism, object relations, twentieth century, seventeenth century

Research essay sample on Mind And Body Cartesian Dualism

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