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Ronald Beiner

Dangerous minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the return of the Far Right

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.

Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

Transcript

August Baker: Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker, and today I'm talking with Professor Ronald Beiner about his book, Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, University of Pennsylvania Press. Welcome, Professor Beiner. Ronald Beiner: I'm happy to participate. Thanks so much for your interest in the book. That's great. August Baker: Yes. I actually listened to it on audio. It comes in audio. I listened to it but sort of read it first. Let me just, first of all, give the listeners an overview, at least through some of the reviews of the book, and I'll just read three quick paragraphs here. August Baker: One is from John McCormick, University of Chicago. "Ronald Beiner's Dangerous Minds is a staggeringly impressive and deeply needed book that traces the philosophical foundations of contemporary reactionary politics in the philosophical works of Nietzsche and Heiddeger. Beiner avoids both shrillness while confronting present-day opponents of liberal democracy; and shallowness while excavating the work of their intellectual heroes. Indeed, he treats authors such as Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin with deathly seriousness, and he soberly and with exquisite philosophical care delves into the fundamental core of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's writings. Dangerous Minds is elegantly structured and beautifully written. It will be widely read and debated in this frightening age of fascist resurgence." August Baker: Second one is Steven Smith, Yale University. "A great book. If it proves anything, it's that ideas have consequences, often profound and dangerous ones. One perhaps unintended benefit of the emergence of the new right is that it forces readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger to see them for what they are: apostles of a resurgent fascism. For those accustomed to reading these thinkers as prophets of individual liberation and moral self realization, Ronald Beiner has a clear message: think again." August Baker: Finally, from Contemporary Political Theory: "In this erudite, insightful and short monograph, Ronald Beiner takes aim at often French-inspired intellectuals who believe that Nietzsche and Heidegger can and should be deployed to advance a progressive or radically democratic politics. Beiner believes that the two philosophers often serve as better resources for fascists. Dangerous Minds mounts its critique in the light of the recent rise of far right movements, which often rely on Nietzsche and Heidegger for philosophical ballast." August Baker: Professor Beiner, do you have any corrections or clarifications on those? Ronald Beiner: No. I kind of appreciate the generous reactions to the book, and I think they all kind of stated what the basic enterprise is. So... August Baker: Good. Ronald Beiner: ... I'm comfortable with those blurbs. So... August Baker: Right. Right. I understand that. I want to read, start off, a paragraph from your book. You say, "Hopefully, no reader of my book will draw from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche Heidegger, that is, stop reading them. On the contrary, I think we need to read them in ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life, and hence what defines that view of life." Would you expand on that? I thought that was an interesting approach. Ronald Beiner: Yeah. Happy to do that. Someone actually said quite recently on a podcast where my book came up, said, "I don't want people reading Nietzsche. I'm trying to dissuade people from Nietzsche." Well, that's just complete nonsense. I never said that. I never have said it. I never would say it. It's kind of basically a slander. I myself been reading Nietzsche and Heidegger my whole adult life. I mean, since I became a political theorist in my early 20s. I've taught them. The book came from a grad seminar I taught on Nietzsche. So if I'm teaching him, I want people to read him and read Heidegger and learn from them and draw from them insights that will be helpful in dealing with contemporary cultural and political crises, which that's the context for the book. That gives us extra reason to read them, try and understand what their essential message is and learn from them. Ronald Beiner: Unfortunately, the people seem not to have gotten the core message or think that, well, there is no core message. He's just being playful or he's just tossing out ideas, or he's kind of contributing to a wonderful hyperpluralism or something like that. Well, I think that's just mistaken. I think people who think that need to reread Nietzsche or reread both of them and understand better what the core vision is. Once we understand that, perhaps it'll make it easier for us to cope with and respond to the kind of cultural and political crises we currently face. That's why I wrote the book. If you're writing a book on them, if I just wanted to shoo them away and or not engage with them and not encourage other people to engage with them. Ronald Beiner: The core insight one needs to get here is with respect to Nietzsche, to start with Nietzsche, and Heidegger in this respect is a kind of disciple of Nietzsche, political disciple of Nietzsche. I think he understood himself in those terms, that there is a definite political project in Nietzsche. I mean, it's just shocking the number of commentators who refer to Nietzsche as he's apolitical; he's antipolitical. There's no politics in Nietzsche; there's no political philosophy in Nietzsche. All that's just so totally wrong that it's hard to fathom how people could read this thinker and think such a thing. It may be that the majority of readers are somehow getting that crazy upside-down idea of Nietzsche from there not being a politics or political project in Nietzsche. That political project is what's powering, what's animating the whole thing. These thousands and thousands of pages he's writing, there's politics on every page of Nietzsche. Ronald Beiner: The core of his thought is that there is a political imperative to undo the cultural political dispensation in which we currently live, which is a kind of liberal egalitarian dispensation inherited from the French Revolution, liberal thinkers in 19th century, such as Hegel and Tocqueville assumed that that dispensation was irreversible, that the world we're launched into by the French Revolution cannot be undone and should not be undone and it raises us to a notably higher level. Ronald Beiner: Nietzsche thinks the opposite. That it's degrading. That it's dehumanizing, that it's impossible to have culture within the political, moral, political horizons shaped by the French Revolution. Nietzsche thinks that politics should be at the service of culture, but if you have the wrong kind of politics, you can't have culture. What is taken to be culture in a liberal egalitarian world is a non-culture, a pseudo-culture. Heidegger says the same thing, a moribund pseudo-civilization, he calls it. Ronald Beiner: The political project is to undo those horizons, undo that dispensation so we can once again live in a culture, live in a world where culture is possible. For Nietzsche, culture is what everything is about. But culture has political conditions. If you live in a world where everyone thinks they're the equal of everyone else... I mean, for him, the only real culture's top-down cultures. So if you live in a world where top-down cultures are unacceptable, then you live in a culture-less world. I think Nietzsche and Heidegger shared that view, and hence their political preoccupations were the same, that that world has to be swept away or it has to be razed, or we'd have to start over, wipe the slate clean and recreate a world where you can have real cultures. Ronald Beiner: So, the idea that this is unpolitical in any sense, that's just in insanity. If that's what most people are getting out Nietzsche, they really have to take another look at those texts and reread them because they're missing the forest for the trees. I'm trying to set that straight, not because I don't want them to read Nietzsche, but I want them to come closer to a genuine understanding of what his enterprise is such that they can then draw insights from that about our world that can help us respond to the crises of our liberal world. August Baker: Yes. I think you touched on this a little. It's not really the topic of your book, but you touched on it a little, that what is it about us with our intellectual heroes, that once we align with someone, we want to read everything they wrote in a positive light? It's difficult to see them complexly, it seems. I find that in myself. I'm kind of like rooting for this particular philosopher or this particular thinker, and it's difficult to see where they... It's like you spend a lot of time with them, and then it's difficult to see where they're just totally wrong and you end up wanting to defend them in some way. Ronald Beiner: I can totally understand that. I'd say I spent decades reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, probably read more Nietzsche and Heidegger than reading anyone else. I felt that in myself, that you don't want to think poorly of Nietzsche. He draws you into his net. You get seduced by him. He's a retortion of genius and he knows buttons to press and how to draw people's attention and how to keep their attention and how to make people feel drawn to him. Totally understandable. My way of thinking about the book was time to square accounts with Nietzsche, precisely because I was so drawn to and seduced by him myself. So, I totally understand that. Ronald Beiner: The times in which we're living are severely serious. Stakes are very high to understand what anti-liberal thinkers are really saying. There's much more extreme example than Nietzsche and Heidegger. Look at Carl Schmidt. Look at Carl Schmidt's reception in contemporary intellectual circles. He said [inaudible 00:11:18] the left. Well, how did that happen? He's much more evil than either of those two. He was a totally, totally committed Nazi. Not that Heidegger wasn't, but Carl Schmidt's much worse. Yet, he has the same loving defenders and people apologizing for him, people kind doing all kinds of somersaults to make him out to be a good guy and a healthy contributor to contemporary culture and theory. It's just insanity. Ronald Beiner: There's not much discussion of Schmidt in the book, but it's really a kind of trinity of people who being misguidedly appropriated by people, theorists and intellectuals you should know better. All three of these guys belong very much to the far, not just the right, but the far right. They themselves understood themselves that way. They all regarded liberalism and egalitarianism as a curse. They shared the project of putting an end to it and undoing the hegemony of liberalism and of the idea of the freedom and equality of all human beings. They tested that idea. They saw it as a destruction of genuine culture. We have to fight back. In order to fight back, have to understand clearly what their project is. August Baker: Start with Nietzsche. What does the far right find in Nietzsche? Well, he writes, you quote him in Ecce Homo, that his text Beyond Good and Evil is in all essentials a critique of modernity, encompassing the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern politics. The purpose is to conjure up a contrary type that is as little modern as possible, a noble yes-saying type. White nationalists and fascists appear to be noble yes-saying types? Ronald Beiner: Well... August Baker: To the [inaudible 00:13:32] Ronald Beiner: I don't see them that way. So if a fascist is reading Nietzsche, they're going to see themselves inscribed in Nietzsche's pages. When Nietzsche gave... Often, his descriptions are kind of cryptic or incomplete or just gestures towards something without filling in the details. But insofar as he does fill in the details, it does fit what became fascism. You can't call Nietzsche a fascist because fascism didn't exist in the 19th century. But when it did come to exist, there's no question that fascists saw Nietzsche as articulating their project, their endeavor. Ronald Beiner: George Lickteim wrote that not a single fascist from Mussolini to Oswald, mostly, escaped Nietzsche's pervasive influence. Well, that's just a historical fact. The influence of Nietzsche on fascism, that's not something a hypothetical. That's just empirical. The breeding ground for what became fascism in the 30s was the what has been called the conservative revolution in the 1920s. Those people were Nietzschean and through in through in their self understanding. That fed into Nazism. Now, once they saw Hitler and saw the Nazis in power, they didn't necessarily like what they saw. They maybe saw it as too plebeian. It wasn't aristocratic enough. But of course, you're going to have these grand ideas of some wonderful aristocracy. Nietzsche himself did. Ronald Beiner: So, if Nietzsche was still around in the 30s, he might have looked down at his notes at the fascists, and says, "Well, this is more democracy. It's not aristocracy." But of course, setting some agenda for some aristocratic revolution that's going to overturn liberalism and overturn egalitarianism, well, of course it's not going to quite match what your grand vision was. That would be true of Nietzsche, too. Ronald Beiner: But there are the kind of rhetoric he does, the great question is where do we look to for the barbarians of the 20th century? He wanted barbarians. He praises barbarians. He praises vikings or civilizations that had no qualms about shedding blood. That's kind of almost a test of... That was part of the tragic vision, that we can fight wars and be up to our knees in blood and not worry about it, feel that it's part of what it is to have a civilization. August Baker: In terms of the rhetoric that is appealing to the far right, you have this quote from an early Nietzsche text on the uses and disadvantages of history for life. In talking about, you might say, the modern liberalist... I think this is what the people on the right say... The modern liberal can no longer extricate himself from the delicate net of judiciousness and truth for a simple act of will and desire. Is that what you think? Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:17:03] There's no question that Nietzsche wants to reorient the core of human life from reason to will. That whole idea that, the will to power, that if you live in a civilization that's dominated by intellect and reflection and science and reason [inaudible 00:17:23] August Baker: Dr. Fauci and... Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:17:25] civilization, and hence the kind of pseudo-civilization. The test is whether can you have a kind of civilization that, I don't know, builds pyramids? Well, to have pyramids, you need slaves. To have slaves, you can't believe in equality. You have to believe that there's a kind of top-down dictation of cultural norms. There have to be people who are mirror instruments of that. If you can't believe, liberalism undermines a belief in the kind of top-down vision of things that make it possible for there to be cultures, any cultures. Ronald Beiner: Where does liberalism come from? Well, it ultimately comes from Christianity, mediated through the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution. But ultimately, it's traceable back to Christianity and the belief that we're all equal children of God. Well, for Nietzsche, those are culture-destroying premises and they have to be destroyed. So he declares war on Christianity. What's the reason for that? Well, that too is political, that if you start with the premises of Christianity, what you end up with are liberalism as egalitarian liberalism as a general dispensation. That means no culture. People have to be ruthless and impose their will and strive for the heroic and strive for grand visions of things. That's what the fascists were trying to do. Look at their architecture. Nietzsche says, well, look, at least they're trying to be a real civilization. They aspire to be around for a thousand years. Well, no liberal civilization is going to aspire to that. They hated Christianity for precisely Nietzsche's reasons. Ronald Beiner: There's a very powerful book, my book on Nietzsche and Heidegger's very short, 1,000 page book by Domenico Losurdo called Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel in which he kind of spells out how Nietzsche's political through and through. If you're not persuade by my little book, well, I'd encourage people to read the 1,000 pages of Losurdo. Bery incisive account of what the fascist owe to Nietzche. It's all spelled out, I think, in an utterly compelling way, in a way that's, I think, irrefutable. It's not an accident that fascists historically have looked to Nietzsche as an inspiration, including, including Mussolini, including Hitler himself, went to the Nietzsche archives and warmly embraced Nietzsche's sister and had himself photographed with a bust of his hero. And contemporary fascists all love Nietzsche. There's nothing accidental about that. They have a good case for him belonging to them rather than belonging to us. It's all fully intelligible, why fascist, whether fascists of the 20s and 30s or fascists in the 21st century would find inspiration from Nietzsche. And it all makes sense. Ronald Beiner: I mean, Nietzsche's fundamental purpose as an intellectual, as a philosopher, is to de-legitimize equality. In order to do that, he has to delegitimize Christianity. That's the twin project. Everything flows from that. If you can't see that as being at the core of Nietzsche's project, I don't think you can understand anything in Nietzsche. You have to appreciate what the core is because there is a core. It's not just playful pluralism. There is a hard core there. There's a political project in Nietzsche [inaudible 00:21:14] and then there's a political project in Marx. Ronald Beiner: For Marx, the political projects just carry forward to the next stage the egalitarianism of liberalism. In Nietzsche, it's the opposite. The civilizational commitment to equality has to be completely annulled, has completely annihilated in order that there be real cultures. I think fascists see themselves as carrying that baton and putting into practice and trying to put Nietzsche's theory into action. Whether Nietzsche would have been impressed, entirely happy with the results, well, that's a different question. But then would Marx be happy with Stalinism? August Baker: I... Ronald Beiner: It's not the point. The point is there is a vision there, and fascists saw themselves as trying to realize what Nietzsche had articulated normatively. August Baker: Would you say that both for Marx and Nietzsche, they were long on criticism and short on how the new world is going to be? Ronald Beiner: Yeah. 100%. You could say that's a kind of parallel between them, that they're both writing blank checks, very dangerous blank checks. And no. Nietzsche said that the 20th century would be ideological war the likes of which would had never been seen in human history. That was more or less true. That was pretty prophetic. The ideas, well, you have the Marxist on one side and you'd have the fascists on the other, and you'd have the liberals in the middle who would be irrelevant, and that he was on one side of that ideological war. Ronald Beiner: The problem is for Nietzsche as much as for Marx. They're both utopians, but they don't fill in the content of this utopia. All the emphasis is on destroying the existing order. For Marx, we wipe out capitalism, but then what succeeds capitalism? Well, we find out later. [inaudible 00:23:22] Leninism and Stalinism. In the case of Nietzsche [inaudible 00:23:28] that they're very powerful cultural critique. Sure. Let's destroy liberalism. Then what? Well, then we get Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche didn't spell out, well, if you follow this path, you're going to wind up with Hitler. There's society. Well, we'll get to the further shore. Well, we'll figure it out when the arrow hits the further shore. Well, by time you get to the further shore, sorry, it's too late. Ronald Beiner: So, yeah. It's that part of what makes him attractive as theorists is there's a kind of tremendous kind of ambition and reaching for the stars and climbing Mount Everest culturally and intellectually. That's part of what defines our theory tradition. But the theory tradition's dangerous precisely because you get in the theory can and by virtue of your ambition, but then that can turn out to be politically ambitious if all you've done is write a bunch of blank checks. Ronald Beiner: I think both Nietzsche and Marx did that. August Baker: Yeah. One of the [inaudible 00:24:35]. Ronald Beiner: We paid the place for it in the 20th century [inaudible 00:24:37] there's no guarantee right this moment that the 21st century won't be a replay of the 20th century. God help us if it is. But there's plenty to suggest that the 21st century could turn out to be as horrifying as the 20th century was. Again, that's part of [inaudible 00:24:57] August Baker: Be realistic. Ronald Beiner: ... of what I wrote, why I wrote the book. It's here we go again. It's like Weimar over again where you get intellectuals... I guess like most liberals, the assumption was, well, fascism now will never happen again. It's in the rubbish bin of history. It'll stay in the rubbish bin of history and wouldn't go to the extent of Fukiyama, that liberal democracy who will reign forever. That was, I think, obvious nonsense from the start. Ronald Beiner: But certainly, the idea of there being fascist intellectuals, trying to pull fascism out of that rubbish bin of history, that was sort of beyond my imagination. Then I don't [inaudible 00:25:38] starting in 2015 more or less, and then it got worse after Trump was elected. You start think, well, fascist intellectual do exist. And it's back. It's back not just in with respect to mob behavior, but it's back with respect to intellectual activity. That was a very scary realization for me. I wrote this book, I guess, as feeling a kind of citizens' imperative to say something or do something with the equipment I had, to say, well, we better wake up and smell the coffee. August Baker: Yep. Yeah. One of the points you made that I thought really interesting was you said Nietzsche puts a lot of energy into exposing liberal and leftist resentment, but he turned a blind eye toward or was silent about the resentment of the right, including his own. I was like, "Yes." Ronald Beiner: It's pretty hard not to see all the resentment in the pages of Nietzsche. For him, that's the standard of the things that he rejects, supposedly, are defined by resentment and all the business about yay-saying and that's the opposite of resentment. Well, his texts are, not always, at least not every page, but there's plenty of resentment packed into Nietzsche's texts. It delegitimizes him according to the standard he himself is applying. He's not as yay-saying as he makes himself out to be. There's this rhetoric of yay-saying, but he doesn't live up to that rhetoric. I think that that's true of the political legacy he's left up till the present. Right wing populism is powered more than anything by resentment against supposed liberal elites who are running the world and so on. Well, a lot of that you can actually trace back to Nietzche. He was completely ignored in his own time. Hardly anyone knew him. Hardly anyone knew who he was. August Baker: What a miserable life. Ronald Beiner: Yeah. Not a fun life. It's a lonely life. I think he bitterly resented the fact that he wasn't being treated as the intellectual giant that he took himself to be. He was right. He was right that people would start reading him in the 20th century, in fact, regard him as one of the leading thinkers of his time. But... August Baker: He only barely saw that, I think, before he went mad. Just briefly did he realize that he was becoming successful, as I understand it. Ronald Beiner: Well, he went mad in 1889. I don't think there was much there. Yeah. Hardly any knows [inaudible 00:28:36] August Baker: Hardly, right. Ronald Beiner: ... was starting. It really picked up in the 1890s, and then as one got into the 20th century, he took off and became perhaps the most influential thinker of the 20th century or one of the most influential thinkers. August Baker: You talked about culture and one of the things that you say was that Nietzsche would say that modern liberals are to reflective about their membership in cultures and about the equal validity of alternative cultures. We do talk a lot about culture, but not in the way... I was trying to think how, with all the talk of multiculturalism, how that fits in with his critique of cultures. Ronald Beiner: Well, again, I think that you can draw a direct line from that to the contemporary far right. I think in this sense, they're precisely Nietzscheans in the strict sense, that part of what we associate with modernity and part of why Nietzsche condemns modernity is one's trying to assent to a kind of universalism where one can appreciate different cultures and what different communities within the human world have to contribute to a larger conversation and a larger human experience and a kind of impartiality. Ronald Beiner: Again, I think here where you could see Heidegger as an intellectual heir to Nietzsche, that real cultures are so deeply rooted that they don't see outside of themselves, don't see outside of their own [inaudible 00:30:19] want to. August Baker: Interesting. Ronald Beiner: And you could say the central rhetoric in Heidegger is that modern man is homeless. You get this idea in his important Letter on Humanism, that homelessness is the core modern experience. Again, it's like for Nietzsche, is what condemns modernity. For Nietzsche, what condemns modernity is there are no horizons, that the universalism that has been introduced into Western experience by Christianity has dissolved horizons. The horizon for much of Christianity was the idea of God itself, and God's dead, and we're left with nothing and we're just left with some kind of residues of Christian civilization. But those are fast eroding. And so we're left just drifting. Our kind of supposed openness to a variety of cultures shows we have no culture; we have no horizons of our own. We live in this horizonless world. Ronald Beiner: Well, Heidegger similarly, we kind of live in this homeless world where everyone's trying to be universal and they're not rooted in any particular identity or cultural experience of their own. The kind of far right attack on multiculturalism, I think, just draws straight out of that. One of these alt-right thinkers, Greg Johnson, said that the originator of the European new right was Heidegger. I think that's a plausible claim. But I think you can trace similar preoccupations back to Nietzsche, and I try and do that in the book. August Baker: As we go to Heidegger, I think immediately of Rorty in the New York Times said similar to you in the sense that we're not trying to say don't read Heidegger, but Rorty said Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come. But the smell of smoke from the crematories, the grave in the air, referring back to Paul Celan's Death Fugue, the grave in the air will linger on their pages. Ronald Beiner: I think that's true. I discuss in the book how some of the most incriminating texts in Heidegger were taken out by Heidegger in the '60s, and then when they put together the collected works in the '80s, they were put back in. I think that that tells you a lot about Heidegger, that he was never prepared to admit that he had made any mistakes. He was silent about the Holocaust, or insofar as people forced commentary out of him, it was kind even more incriminating than silence. Ronald Beiner: I think it relates to what I was saying earlier, that the core project is to destroy the liberal egalitarian world founded on the idea of a universal dignity of human beings. The commitment to fascism is actually not some... I don't know... some ornament or some add-on, but what connects quite centrally to what his fundamental project was. In a sense, if fascism didn't work out in the 20th century, well, his thought will still be around centuries later and some later version will have to try and do what Hitler and Nazis failed to do in the '30s. I mean... August Baker: Rorty also says he lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did its best to ignore the murder of the European Jews. But for those who care about philosophy, things are not so simple. He says, as far as whether to read him, and this is again getting back to your point, he managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. You can't understand really Gadamer or Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas without reading Heidegger. That's what Rdy was saying. Ronald Beiner: I pretty much agree with all that. Yeah. We should read him. He earned his place in the canon of Western philosophy. I think it's almost certainly correct that people will read him long from now just as they read Aristotle store or read Hegel. I don't want to expel him from the canon and I wouldn't want to pull his books off the library, as one prominent critic of Heidegger suggested. So, I think that's right. There's a reason why people read him, and there's a reason why he's just been essential to 20th century, as he's been, and why he had the tremendous influence he's had on a whole generation of philosophers, many of whom I kind of cherish. Same for Nietzsche. I mean, they are a indispensable part of the history of modern philosophy. That's not a reason to try and whitewash them or [inaudible 00:35:32]. August Baker: Exactly. Ronald Beiner: ... apologize for them or kind of pretend that the project was something different than what it really was. August Baker: Right. Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:35:41]. August Baker: No, absolutely. Ronald Beiner: Look at that clear-sightedly and face up to it and understand why these thinkers have such attraction for people who are not good liberals, but who are ferociously anti-liberal. Those people are on the rise and have a big and growing following. If they understand themselves in Nietzsche and Heidegger in terms we have to understand that and maybe if necessary, reread Nietzsche and Heidegger until we're clear about it, and trying to contribute in my modest way to that. August Baker: That's certainly the way I understood it. Fascinating. We don't have time. But for the listener, there's an interesting anecdote you have about your own personal interactions with Gadamer and Habermas, which is quite interesting. Time, unfortunately. But I was just wondering, what are you working on now? Freud? Is that... Ronald Beiner: Well, I'm writing a book called Moses and Political Philosophy, looking at the whole diversity of appropriations of the Moses story within the Western theory canon, and I'm co-writing it with my friend Harrison Floss. Freud figures in that because of course he wrote [inaudible 00:37:06] that's why he gets included in the book. But it's kind of a broader story of how Moses intersects with Western theory. August Baker: Well, we look forward to that. Professor Beiner, thank you so much for talking with me. Was really interesting and I really enjoyed the book, and appreciate what you've done with that. Ronald Beiner: Great. Well, thanks so much for your interest in it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. August Baker: Same here. Okay. Bye.

Christos Tombras

Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan

This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger's philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan's post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting basic aspects of Heidegger's ontology, Tombras focuses on his incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan's re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan's work follows, to reveal its rupture with traditional philosophy, and show how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger's critique. This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both thinkers. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world.

Editorial Reviews Review

"Discourse Ontology is an original, highly learned and dazzling work of scholarship, that will be an invaluable reference for those seeking an overview of Lacanian and Heideggerian thinking and how the two relate and differ, whilst offering a new perspective through an original synthesis that will reward future reflection and consideration. As such, it is highly recommended and I hope it finds a wide audience, sparking a renewed debate about, and curiosity in, the foundations of psychoanalytic thought and what this might mean for psychoanalytic practice." (Barry Watt, British Journal of Psychotherapy 37, 1)

"Alongside this effort to construct a clear and coherent thesis Tombras equally acknowledges various points of discordance between Heidegger and Lacan, yet attempts a reconciliation through reference to Heidegger's notion of a 'circle of understanding', as a means of generating a coherent synthesis that serves to usher in the galvanising notion of a discourse ontology. ... The scope and range of this book is impressive and goes far to set out the main precepts for a serious dialogue between these seminal figures. I am sure this book will stand the test of time." (Gwion Jones JCFAR 30)

From the Back Cover This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger's philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan's post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting an overview of key concepts of Heidegger's ontology, Tombras sets out an incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan's re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan's work follows, which reveals its rupture with traditional philosophy, and demonstrates how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger's critique.

This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both Heidegger and Lacan. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Crucially, Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world. This book opens up new pathways in the study of ontology and epistemology and will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Christos Tombras is a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation, practicing in London, UK. Dr. Tombras is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK, and lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups. His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He has published in both English and Greek.

About the Author Christos Tombras is a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation, practicing in London, UK. Dr. Tombras is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK, and lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups. His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He has published in both English and Greek.

Transcript

August Baker: Hello, and welcome to New Books in Psychoanalysis. This is August Baker. Today we're talking to Dr. Christos Tombras, a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation practicing in London. He's a member of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. And he lectures, runs workshops, and facilitates reading groups. His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Today we're talking to Dr. Tombras about his recent book, Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, From Heidegger Through Lacan. Welcome, Dr. Tombras. Christos Tombras: Welcome, and thank you very much for having me. August Baker: Oh, it's my pleasure. I said your main research interest, and I remember one of the interesting points in your book is you're quoting Lacan. He's talking about his frustration and he says, "It seems to me that it's hard to take an interest in what is becoming a research project. I mean that I'm starting to do what the word research implies, namely to go around in circles." Christos Tombras: Yes. August Baker: Tell us about this project, and whether it involved going around in circles. Christos Tombras: I did not know. Lacan at some point was quite frustrated with the progress of his own research, so that's why he goes into etymology. In my case, I was interested in Lacan because this is my training, and this was my focus in psychoanalysis. But reading Lacan, you can recognize continuous references to Heidegger, either directly or indirectly. And so that raised my interest to see what is this Heidegger about? And then I saw that Heidegger actually is very critical of psychoanalysis, of the Freudian kind of psychoanalysis. But he's very, very critical. So I was intrigued: how do these things, Heidegger philosophy and psychoanalysis as a science, as I thought it was reconciled, one with the other? This was the starting point. And gradually, I became more and more immersed in the subject August Baker: It's quite a nice book. I learned a lot from reading it. Well, Heidegger's background is interesting, of course, because ... Maybe we should just right off the bat touching on his affiliation with national socialism, and his refusal to apologize for that afterwards. And I think he had a significant breakdown after World War II, and went to psychanalytic treatment, or psychotherapeutic treatment, engaged in a collaboration with Medard Boss. Could you give us some background on that? Christos Tombras: Yes, yes. One important thing is my position about Heidegger's Nazi connections. These are very problematic in my view, and one should not ignore them. In fact, this could be a deal breaker if I could see, if one can see in Heidegger's philosophy, in Heidegger's phenomenology or ontology; if one can see elements that could be thought as Nazi or fascist, then the whole project should be abandoned. It would be very problematic if it was something of that sort. But I cannot see anything in Heidegger's ontology and fundamental ontology in his philosophy, not in the moral aspects of his philosophy. I did not see anything that I could actually think of it, or could be thought as Nazi or fascist. Which then allowed me to say that as far as some of the conclusions of Heidegger are concerned can be useful in my own research, I will use them. I consider Heidegger to be like a tool, like an instrument facilitating a kind of thinking. I'm not interested in apologizing about his political affiliations and mistakes. That said, because of the collapse of Germany and his being banned from academia after the World War II, he did suffer, Heidegger, a mental breakdown. This was not however that may brought him in contact with Medard Boss. Medard Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist read Being and Time by Heidegger, and was intrigued by the repercussions this book had in his own thinking about psychiatry. So he came into contact with Heidegger, Medard Boss, regardless of Heidegger's mental suffering. And Medard Boss asked him, Heidegger, to clarify some questions that he had, and confirm some suspicions that Medard Boss had about psychiatry and Heidegger and philosophy. This encounter led to a number of seminars that Heidegger gave to some colleagues and students of Medard Boss later in the 1950s and '60s, which have been published. With this seminars hold great interest for the field of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. It is in these seminars that Heidegger elaborates his critique and makes his disagreement with Freud clear. August Baker: And at that point he has been someone whom had benefited from; I don't know what they would call it, analysis or treatment; but I think the person's name was Gebsattel, the analyst that he saw. Christos Tombras: Yeah, I'm not sure about that. August Baker: And of all of the letters that he receives, Heidegger, he did show an interest in psychology and psychiatry. And in a sense, I think you say in your book, I think it's very difficult to improve on Heidegger's writing because he chooses his words so carefully. But I think you clarify or you summarize it very well. And one of the things you say is that he considers the adoption of the modern scientific worldview as an impoverishment; that it comes with a number of unexamined presuppositions which narrows the way we're open to being and our encounters with other beings. Christos Tombras: Yes, indeed. I think we need to go a tiny bit through the origins of Heideggerian thought. Heidegger became interested in the question of being, what was called being in philosophy, through Brentano. Brentano, a philosopher of the late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, had posited the idea of intentionality: that you cannot study the human intellect, the consciousness, regardless of the entities that it is observing. It is always directed towards entities. This thought of Brentano was taken by Husserl, who was a student of Brentano and became a maxim of a philosophy that said, "Let's go back to the things to see what it is, the human mind looking at things and this connection between the things and the human mind." Husserl created a field of philosophy which he called phenomenology. And Heidegger took this maxim of Husserl's to its extreme. He said, "If we're going to see about the things themselves, go back to the things themselves, it is almost unavoidable to see that the human mind cannot be separated from the things it is observing at all. "That the distinction between object and subject is a problematic distinction, is a mistake, is an error that we do because we are confused by the fact that we have an intellect. And we look at things and we think that we can do without it." Reaching this conclusion, Heidegger then reconstructs his philosophy on the basis of that: that the human being is in the world in a way that cannot but be in the world, and sees things in a way that can then study it, and understood as being historical changes with the centuries, with the millennia. Observing that, Heidegger says that there is a worldview which is the ancient worldview. And this worldview, the ancient worldview; meaning the ancient of the Western canon, ancient Greek mainly; is giving its place to the modern worldview that starts with Descartes and Galileo in the 16th century. That change, Heidegger claims, is crucial. Because it changes the way we think about what we can know about the world. Changes the way we can have scientific research, for example. And that change, because it entails an engagement with mathematics and mathematical concepts, measurement and formulas and so on and so forth, becomes a bit, Heidegger claims, mechanistic and poor; impoverished. It distorts the phenomena that it purports to study. This is where Heidegger says that modern worldview, even though at some specific fields has done wonders: for example, modern technology, exploration of space, exploration of the body, medicine and so on and so forth. When it speaks about the human being, it distorts the phenomena. It destroys the phenomena, really. And cannot, in any effective way, speak about the human being; modern science, Heidegger claims. And he thinks, Heidegger thinks, that the same sin, let's say; if you can call it sin; is committed by Freud. That Freud, in his attempt to speak about the human being, uncritically adopting the modern worldview, scientific worldview, Freud distorts the phenomena that he proposes to study and understand. August Baker: How does this quote relate to what you're saying? This is Lacan. I'm quoting from your book, and Lacan says: "I am saying contrary to what has been trumped up about a supposed break on Freud's part with the scientists of his time, that it was this very scientism that led Freud, as his writings show, to pave the way that shall forever bear his image. The subject upon which we operate in psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science." Christos Tombras: Yes. August Baker: How does that relate to Heidegger's critique of the scientific worldview? Christos Tombras: Hmm. That is a very interesting point, actually. What Lacan would be in agreement with Heidegger in this, that with Descartes and with the modern scientific worldview, we have the human intellect. Descartes sees the human intellect, a subject that observes objects and studies these objects and is interested in these objects: objects of the world, all kinds of objects of the world. Also, Descartes claims that the human mind has the tools, mathematics studies, to speak about these objects, to have a scientific understanding of these objects. Previously, many of the aspects of being in the world; many of the facets, that some would call them; of being in the world were thought as being related to divine revelation or divine messaging or unexplained phenomenon, and so on. It is with Descartes that we think that everything is in principle explainable. And Freud, like [inaudible 00:11:36], takes the phenomena of the human mind: for example, a dream, a symptom, a hysterical symptom, an illness, a mental illness. And he says, truthful to Descartes, that "These are in principle explainable. These are not chance phenomena. These are not coincidences. These are phenomena that can be studied and understood. And it is for the human being who has experienced this phenomena, the task to look at this phenomena and tell us about them." That is Freud's scientific worldview, that Lacan says is at the origin of psychoanalysis. The subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of science. This sentence of Lacan implies that unless you think that the phenomena of the mind are explainable, you will not be able to see what psychoanalysis is all about. August Baker: I see; that's helpful. As I understand it, you're going to look at Lacan and work with Lacan and see whether he can avoid Heidegger's criticisms. Christos Tombras: Yes. I mean, reading Freud, you can see many things. And Lacan does read Freud. You can see many things. You can see the brilliance of his intellect. You can see the daring nature of his conclusions. But you can also see that deep in mind, somewhere hidden, is disbelief that everything that happens, everything that is observable by psychology, by psychoanalysis after all, can be explained with the concepts like energy, which is affected with laws that can actually operate in this way, not the other way. Even though Freud is careful not to speak about, for example, causality and determinism, he allows this to be shown only very limited places in his work. There is that underlying belief that this is, in principle, possible: that you could have a final deterministic understanding of the human psyche. Now, Lacan rejects that. He doesn't say in any explicit way that Freud was wrong, but he rejects that. He says that if we look at what Freud does, not at ... He doesn't say that in these words, but this is my understanding of what he says. If we look at what Freud does, not his conclusions, not his explanations, not his theoretical models; which after all, he, Freud, reserved the right to change as needed, as he said, progressed. If you look at what he does, we see that the phenomenon he observes are phenomena which are mainly linguistic phenomena. Human beings suffer with language, in language. We speak about our suffering in language, and we can be treated with language. This is something that Lacan says you cannot avoid it in psychoanalysis. Whatever you think about what unconscious is, what the drives or the instincts are, what biology does behind all of these. The fact of the matter is that psychoanalysis is something that works with words on material, which is words: something that the patient says to you in the room, not anything else. Just words. When he goes there, Lacan goes into the material of psychoanalysis, and he observes what I just said. That is just words; he recasts the Freudian conclusions in terms of the linguistic phenomena that they represent, for example. August Baker: Right, right. Christos Tombras: When Freud speaks, for example, about condensation in a dream, or displacement of meanings in a dream as some of the mechanisms that you can observe in the dream work, Lacan says these mechanisms are very similar to what linguists call metonymy and metaphor, for example. In fact, they are the same mechanisms. Only the field of operation, the realm, is different. These are the same mechanisms. So he starts by doing a rereading, let's say, of Freud, avoiding the mechanistic remnants of the 19th-century scientism in Freud's background, and staying at the phenomena that Freud observes. This is the starting point of Lacan's avoiding Heidegger's criticism. But we don't need to go into Freud's conclusions. We can stay with the phenomena and see what we can think about them. August Baker: Right. I think a lot of listeners here would say, "Well, there's a lot more that goes on in psychoanalysis than words. There are blushing, embarrassment, squirming, body gestures, missing appointments, telephoning." Isn't there a lot more that goes on in psychoanalysis than words? Christos Tombras: Yes. That's a very interesting thing. Because what is, exactly, language? What are words? And what are all these things, really? I think we need to understand language as something much more general than just the verbal aspect of words. Yes. August Baker: Yeah, comprehensive. Christos Tombras: Comprehensive, perhaps. What is the important thing is this: that something can stunt for something else. The idea that something can refer to something else. That's the important thing. When you speak about blushing: blushing is an event, a bodily event which happens within a context. The context is something is being said, and you feel embarrassed. Perhaps we can imagine now that you feel embarrassed. Embarrassed would perhaps mean that you think of what the other individual looking at you can think or might think about you, any conclusions they might reach and so on. All of this happens in a split second. You don't put it in words. But it involves the whole world in which you are the person you are. You have the identity you have, and you are exchanging something with the person in front of you, or the people in front of you. Or you are in your thoughts, but you are not just a biological entity as such. You are a human being within a world where what you do has a meaning. And what you do or not do has repercussions. That is a linguistic world. This world only exists because human beings sustain that in language; in this course, to put it in a different way. August Baker: I see. Christos Tombras: So you don't blush outside language. August Baker: Interesting. Christos Tombras: The only way you can blush outside language, it would be if we can imagine someone who is incommunicative state in a hospital bed, and perhaps there is kind of extra flush of blood in the face. That would be not blushing, though. August Baker: Perhaps this is related, perhaps it isn't. But I thought one of the many interesting points in your book was what Lacan said about his dog. He says, "I have a dog. My dog, in my sense, and without ambiguity, speaks. My dog has, without any doubt, the gift of speech. This is important because it does not mean that she possesses language totally. "What distinguishes this speaking animal, from what happens because of the fact that man speaks, is that contrary to what happens in the case of man insofar as he speaks, she never takes me for another. By taking you for another, a subject puts you at the level of the capital O Other. "It is precisely this which is lacking to my dog. To her, there's only the small other. As regards to the big Other, it does not seem that her relationship to language gives her access to it." I don't know if that's related to what you were saying. It seemed to me it was. Christos Tombras: Yes, it was. Yes, it is. Because the speech of the dog is just that the dog says, "Something something," well, love, let's say. August Baker: Maybe like watching. Christos Tombras: And expect something from you. Then you exchange messages with the dog, and that's it. But what you do to the dog and what the dog does, if you say to the dog ... I mean, the dog will speak to you and you can speak back to the dog. But it will stay at that. The dog will not reach conclusions about whether you love him or her more than you love the other dog, or whether you have other dogs that you're going to when you leave the room. Or something of that father. The dog sees you as who you are, and just this. While, with a human being, you meet another person. And the other person is not only who you think the other person is, but also who you expect them to be for you, who you confuse them with, who do you identify them with, who do you think you can appear to them as, present yourself to them as. It is very complicated. The communication between two human beings is much more than a channel of sound waves that go from one to the other. August Baker: Right. Interesting. I think when we go to Lacan, I think at some point you say Lacan starts with the body, when we move to his model: the body and the real and jouissance. I mean, your book describes these and how symbolization arises out of them. Could you give us an overview? Christos Tombras: Yes. I mean, the tricky concept that you're bringing in this discussion is the concept of jouissance, which is tricky in the sense that it is very complicated. Even the term is not translated into English, even though some people do translate it as "enjoyment." We would need to go into a genealogy of this term to really grasp the totality of what is meant by the Lacanian theory of jouissance. But we can say this in some way. It all starts with the body, in the sense that we are bodies in a world. A world that within our community of interactions, discoursive community of interactions has a meaning for us. But we are entering this world as bodies. We are in this world as bodies. A newborn baby is coming into the world; things are happening to the body of this baby. "Things happening" means the baby is caressed, cleaned, but people are speaking and singing and whispering to the baby. All of these are events that happening in the body of the baby. And the baby starts organizing this, what is happening to the body, into categories. For example, this friendly face: that is the mother or the carer. Or this friendly voice or this friendly breast that will give nutrition and so on and so forth. So whatever happens to the body, we can call it jouissance. But the jouissance obtains some kind of regularity and can be systematized. It is transformed into something that can have a meaning. So the friendly face, which is as such an aspect of jouissance, becomes the friendly face that comes again and again. That means the mother, so becomes the symbol of something. From the real of the friendly face, we have an identity. An identity is constructed, the mother. And from the identity that is constructed, the mother, a system of identities is also constructed. The mother, the other person, the need of the mother to go somewhere, my needs to have my mother next to me, the love that the mother gives to me, and so on and so forth. This is the construction of the world out of these small interactions, which at the end are interactions on the level of the body. August Baker: And it's a movement from continuous to discontinuous, you point out. The movement from the body to symbolization. Christos Tombras: Yes. That's a very tricky and difficult subject, actually: how this passage from the complete continuity of what's happening in the chaos of the world, in the eyes of the newborn infant, to the distinct and constructed world that we are occupying as children or adults. This passage from continuity to discontinuity is a very complicated field of research. I don't have the answer how this can happen, how this can be described. It's something that it is to be explored further. August Baker: Right. And you end up with using the tripartite division of ... Let's see ... real, signified, and imaginary in your synthesis; that part of Lacan remains. Is that right? Christos Tombras: Yes. The real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. August Baker: And at one point you're talking about Gebsattel. Christos Tombras: Gebsattel. August Baker: I don't know if that's the way you pronounce his name. You said that he provided a ninefold division and you say, "This doesn't seem like it'll be useful." Lacan was mainly interested in clinical applications. So this tripartite model is something that is meant to be useful in thinking about what happens in psychoanalysis. Is that right? Christos Tombras: In the clinic as well, yes. I mean, it is these concepts, these registers that I said of the real, of the symbolic, of the imaginary, are used to describe the phenomena that we are all in. It's not only to describe the clinical phenomena in session. But in the session, it is the focus of the setting is on how these things interrelate, interconnect, and interact. For example, one can say in the Lacanian understanding of what is happening in the session, that there is an axis of communication between you and the patient or you and the analyst, whichever the point of view we decide to take, which has expectations, ideals. You believe that this is the best analyst in the world. You went to them, because they are [inaudible 00:25:05] knowledge and they are going to heal you or help you suffer less. All of this can be thought in the Lacanian understanding of the three registers that we just said. These are imaginary identifications. Do you think that this person who is in front of you; let's imagine that this is a male analyst; that this person who is in front of you is a benign figure like your father? Or unlike your father, or something of that sort? That would be an imaginary construction that you are entering the setting of the session. The analyst can see that this is happening, and can choose to actually distance themselves from this imaginary axis by positioning themselves with what they say, or what they do somewhere else unexpectedly. Let's presume that they have a clinical reason to do that, but when they do that, they go beyond the imaginary axis. They go to a symbolic axis, for example. August Baker: How does one understand what happens in psychoanalysis when it works well? Do you understand it in terms of a draining or liquidating of the real into the symbolic, or from the imaginary into the symbolic? How do you see successful analysis? Christos Tombras: Yes. I'm not completely sure if you can say that. I think as we indicated earlier, the concepts: real, symbolic, and imaginary, are concepts that describe all kinds of human interactions, not only the ones in an analytic setting. And they describe the ways of engagement that human beings have, regardless of whether they know it or not. But if you know it, which is something that the theory brings here in the picture, that allows you if you are the analyst to position yourself, and the way you interact with your patient, in such a way as to make something change. Now, what is changing cannot be predicted as such. But starting from what we said earlier, that everything starts with the body, and this resounds. And through a number of imaginary identifications, it becomes a symbolic system of interactions: a proper word, let's say. If we have this general scheme that from the real, we go to the imaginary and the symbolic, it's not completely accurate. But now for the purposes of this discussion, let's imagine that something like this is happening. Then you can say that a person that comes to you; you are the analyst; comes to you for treatment, they have a suffering, something that they're experiencing eventually in their body. For example, an anxiety, or for example, the symptom that it could be disturbs their normal life. And you try to make this and allow it to become something different, which is not coming together with suffering. Then, if you describe it in this way, you can say that some part of the real; because an anxiety, we'd imagine, as being on the level of the real; becomes more manageable, more familiar to you. And eventually, okay, you are not suffering from that anymore. So you can say that even though it is a bit schematic, I think in fact it's rather schematic. This, what I'm saying. August Baker: I'm wondering the real, this is center of chaos; and here's another quote from Lacan from your book. "The subject," Lacan says, "is not the cause of himself. He bears within him the worm of the cause that splits him. For his cause is the signifier, without which there would be no subject in the real. But this subject is what the signifier represents, and the latter cannot represent anything except to another signifier." This is one of those Lacanian statements that seems so true, and yet it's also so difficult to interpret. Christos Tombras: Yes. Now, how could we try to approach this? I mean, we need to clarify some concepts. The subject, what is the subject? The subject in Lacan is not identical. It's not equivalent to saying "the human being." A human being can be a subject, but it's not always the case that a human being is a subject. So they're not exactly identical; they're not synonyms. So a subject implies that you are already a subject of language; that you are within a system, a linguistic discoursive system of interactions. A world that is constructed and maintained by other people who speak with you, at you, parallel to you, and so on and so forth. That subject, the subject which the human being is, but is not identical to the human being, is confusing, actually. It is difficult to actually describe it. August Baker: The subject is represented by his or her own sequence of, or network of, signifiers. Christos Tombras: The tricky thing is that the signifiers; that means the words that they are using; we are not inventing them. We are not inventing them. We are using words which are coming to us, because we are entering a world that had the language before we came into existence. So we are entering a linguistic world, and we are forced by this entrance into the linguistic world to adopt it and use it. But we don't have any guidance in the beginning at all. The only guidance that we can have is with other signifiers. We are entering a world of signifiers. And whatever we do with these signifiers is guided and helped and facilitated by other signifiers. Let's say the baby cries, and the mother says, "What is happening to you? Are you hungry?" Then the baby in that way, in this very simplistic way, understands, learns that his cry, his or her cry, was a cry for food and nutrition. And then this is a meaning that has been introduced to the crying of the baby, that the meaning was not there in the beginning. This is a signifier. The human being adopts signifiers, becomes a subject of language, and uses the signifiers. And in the way every human being uses the signifiers, that is invested with; or occupied by, actually; in the way they use these signifiers, they present themselves. It is in this sense that Lacan says that the subject is what one signifier represents to another signifier. August Baker: [inaudible 00:31:18] Christos Tombras: That is in the interconnection of signifiers, your identity is coming through to me. August Baker: I see. Christos Tombras: That is the way you as a subject is represented in the signifiers to me. The tricky thing with the signifiers here is that I'm using signifiers to speak to you. You are using signifiers to speak to me. Lacan is using signifiers to explain all of this. We are already in the world which is forced onto us, in a linguistic world which is forced onto us. We are suffering in language, and we cannot but suffer in language. And yet, we are trying to speak about language. That is the main difficulty of these concepts, and now these ideas: that we are on the same level of the phenomena that we are trying to describe. We cannot stand aside. We cannot stand a bit elsewhere and look this phenomena from a distance. And for example, to connect it with earlier, this is what Heidegger says as well: "It is not that a human being can stunt vis-a-vis the world and decide not to take the world and go and do something else. You are already always in the world. You cannot do otherwise." Similarly, in the Lacanian understanding of what is happening both in the session, but also in life in general, you are in language and you try to speak. That means you are in something that comes to you from outside, has been forced to you from outside because you were forced to accept this language as your own. You are there, you're trying to speak about yourself, and this is a tension. There's always a tension between what is yours and what is not yours: what is internal and what is external. August Baker: Now, I thought that parable that you present, that Lacan presented of a egg. Lacan focused on the question of limits in connection to the human body. The rims around holes on the body surface causes loci where jouissance flows faster, so to speak. To picture this, Lacan used a small parable in which he referred to the human being as a smooth-surfaced egg that breaks because of language. I thought that was a helpful metaphor. Christos Tombras: Yes. This touches upon the other issue that we said earlier: how from the continuity we go into the discontinuity? Because all of these questions are connected, interconnected. August Baker: Exactly correct. Christos Tombras: So this problem, the human being as an egg, that is smooth: nothing changes, everything flows around it. You can imagine it in a river. And the water goes around it without making any turbulence, nothing. Because the human body is not an egg, things are happening on the human body in localities. Some things are happening around the mouth, some things are happening around the eyes, and so on. If we continue imagining this water flowing around the egg, some part of the egg reveals itself as the mouth, let's say, or the eyes. And the flowing of the world; let's call it like this; around this egg has a small turbulence, local turbulence there. This becomes more and more complicated, shall we say. And eventually, discontinues; something breaks. Lacan actually make this joke: "From this egg, you make an omelet." An omelet that is home, that is a small omelet of a man, let's say. Manelet, I think, it has been translated into English. This is a parable, of course. This is not what is happening. Obviously, human beings are not eggs. But he's trying to describe this: that from something that in the beginning is completely undifferentiated and chaotic, like white noise, nothing changes. All of this simultaneously, continuously in all frequencies, differentiations appear. And when you have a differentiation, then you can have a distinction between presence and absence. You can start having things that can be identified. And you enter into the arm of the imaginary, like we said earlier, because you can identify something. That is in contrast to, that is not it anymore. The breast: breast versus the absent of the breast. Then it becomes more complicated and so on and so forth. August Baker: So you end up with a discourse ontology. Can you tell us about the choice of those two words, and what you mean by an "ontology" here? And I guess "discourse" is a Lacanian term of art. You're using it in Lacan's sense? Christos Tombras: Yes, yes. Discourse is in the way that we were describing just now: that human beings speak together. And whether they do speak simultaneously to each other, it's not the important thing. That there is a community of human beings that create a world. This is a discoursive space. And that discoursive space allows a world to manifest itself. As we said earlier, that when you speak to someone and you blush, there are many, many, many things that happen simultaneously with this blushing. Your identity, your expectations, your thoughts about the expectations of the others, your history and so on and so forth. All of this, the collection of entities that comprise your world, is an ontology. It is an ontology. It has always been called an ontology philosophy. This is what ontology means. It means collection of entities. This is what Heidegger also says when he speaks about the clearing where entities gather for design to see. So this collection of entities which comprise your world, which is an ontology, can only be sustained for as long and as far as there are human beings holding the discourse. I'm not claiming; I'm systematizing. I'm not inventing this, but I'm systematizing the conclusions that one can reach by bringing, as we said earlier, Heidegger together with Lacan. But it's not that there is an ontology regardless of the human beings that have constructed this world. It's not that each and every human being has direct say into how this world is constructed. It's not my invention. It's not your invention. We are brought into this. We are forced to accept it. We are forced to occupy it. But when we occupy it, we recreate it. We sustain it within our interactions in the discoursive space constructed by us. I thought that the best way to speak about the world as far as human beings are concerned: and that's the important thing, as far as human beings are concerned. It's not the world that is Martian beings are concerned or other kinds of beings. We do not know about them. I do not know anything about them. But as far as human beings are concerned, the world that we built together can be described with something which I call discourse ontology. And I thought systematizing, I say again, the work of some of the conclusions of Heidegger's and some of the conclusions of Lacan; I thought that you can fruitfully approach this discourse ontology in five different axes. Which I identified as the speaking being, which is the human being that speaks; and then that which means sustains the discourse; truth, the question of what truth is, is a whole subject for its own. We can go a bit later if we have time. Time, as such. Time meaning what permeates our being in the world, in the sense of presence versus absence. The most basic aspect of time is that the body as being the locus within from which everything starts. What we were calling earlier about the jouissance and the events that happen on the body. And then all of this, how it brings together a world which is constructed by the discoursive interactions of these bodies who are there. August Baker: Who were thrown in, right? Christos Tombras: Yes. August Baker: I think you carefully do all this with a minimum of concepts from the outside. I think you say you do use the concept of a structure; other than that, you are paying attention to Heidegger's critique that we might be using these concepts which come from a scientific worldview, which we haven't really thought through. Christos Tombras: That is very true. I don't think we can get away without using the word structure. Because structure, what does it mean? Structure? I don't mean any structured structure in any specific way. I mean a configuration of elements which has some stability. August Baker: Yeah, I think I looked it up. If I'm right, it's a piling together. Christos Tombras: Piling together. There has to be some elements are together, and have some specific configuration. If I don't have a specific configuration, then we don't have a structure if they're randomly thrown together. But if they are thrown together in such a way as to the interactions to have some kind of regularity, then we speak about structure. So it is a necessary [inaudible 00:40:09] concept, and it is not the case that we have always structures. There can be situations where there is no structure. But if we speak about the human beings and the way that we're trying to understand what is the world, what is the symbolic, what is suffering and so on, we need at least this extra concept that things can coexist in some kind of regular and stabilized way. That we have a structure. August Baker: Right? Unfortunately, we are five minutes over time. Yeah. There's so much that your discussion of sexuation and truth and the Kant statement that I always speak the truth, the death drive, treatment of psychosis versus neurosis. There's just so much here; but unfortunately, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Tombras. Christos Tombras: Thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss this. And yes, the time was limited. I hope we were not being too schematic about some of this very complicated [inaudible 00:41:08] August Baker: It is; very true. Well, the book is very careful, and I recommend it highly. So thank you very much. Christos Tombras: Thank you. August Baker: And have a good evening. Christos Tombras: Thank you very much. The same to you. Bye-bye.

Joel Whitebook

Freud: An intellectual biography

The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

About the author

Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and raised in a secular and liberal Jewish family. Joel attended the University of California at Berkeley in the late sixties where he majored in philosophy. The Berkeley experience was decisive in shaping his future career in two ways. After he joined the New Left and became more political in his outlook, the brand of analytic philosophy he was being exposed to in the university's department increasingly appeared too restricted to him. And while he was a student and activist at Berkeley, Joel discovered the tradition of the Frankfurt School, largely through the work of Herbert Marcuse.

Seeking a different approach to the field, Joel became a doctoral student in the philosophy department of The New School For Social Research, where he had the good fortune to study not only with Hannah Arendt, Aron Gurwitsch and Hans Jonas, but also with Albrecht Wellmer, a representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. Through his work with Wellmer, Joel's involvement with Critical Theory and the other thinkers of that tradition deepened significantly. He became particularly interested in the Frankfurt School's attempt to integrate psychoanalysis into critical social theory. In fact, he adopted that project as his own and has pursued it throughout his career.

After receiving his Ph.D. from the New School in philosophy in 1977, Joel decided to become a practicing psychoanalyst. To this end, he took a second doctorate in clinical psychology at CUNY and received his psychoanalytic training at The New York Freudian Society. Joel hung out his shingle in 1985, and for the next twenty-five years combined a life of private practice and teaching, first at New School, then at Columbia, as well as in a number of clinical settings. He is currently on the faculty of Columbia's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Director of its Psychoanalytic Studies Program.

In his book Perversion and Utopia and in numerous articles, Joel has sought to continue the Frankfurt School's attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and Critical Theory in a particular way. Following the lead of Hans Loewald and Cornelius Castoriadis, he has examined the major developments in psychoanalysis since the middle of the last century — often grouped under the notion of "the preoedipal turn" — and attempted to work out their consequences for contemporary psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. He has also used preoedipal theory to explore the problem of "the missing mother" in his recent intellectual biography of Freud.

That he was a member of Slate's discussion group on the Sopranos is one of Joel's proudest credentials. During the second and third seasons of the show, he participated in a weekly roundtable discussion of Tony's relationship with Dr. Melfi along with three psychoanalytic colleagues.

Review 'This is a brilliant book that combines psychoanalytic thinking and intellectual history to demonstrate that Freud remains central to current debates not only in psychoanalysis, but also in cultural theory, philosophy and gender studies. With his expertise in psychoanalytic theory, Joel Whitebook elucidates the development of Freud's thinking and presents a radically new way of reading him. He appropriates insights from feminism, pre-Oedipal theory, and clinical experience with non-neurotic patients to transform our picture of the founder of the field. When one focuses on early development, the maternal presence and the repudiation of femininity, Freud no longer appears as another dead white male, but as a vital thinker whose ideas have important consequences for the contemporary world.' Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Director of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center's Parent-Infant Program, and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris 'Whitebook has written a distinctive kind of intellectual biography, with a rich and complex agenda, which is far from reproducing those already available. He offers a perspective on Freud that incorporates new developments in psychoanalytic thinking and integrates psychoanalysis with broader philosophical trajectories. The result is outstanding: a biography with intellectual force that captivates its reader.' Sebastian Gardner, University College London 'Despite all attempts to bury him, Freud remains the ultimate revenant, haunting the twenty-first century at a time when all the best efforts to outgrow our self-incurred immaturity have come to naught. Drawing on his sustained experience as a practicing psychoanalyst and deep immersion in contemporary theory, Joel Whitebook shows how relevant many of Freud's ideas remain. By linking critical elements of Freud's thought with crucial aspects of his life - his vexed relationship with his mother, troubled friendships with Fliess and Jung, ambivalent response to war, and ruminations on mortality - he offers a fresh and insightful reading, neither excessively pious nor reductively dismissive, of a thinker we are only beginning to understand and from whom much is still to be learned.' Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley 'With the clinical acumen of an analyst and the intellectual rigor of a philosopher, Joel Whitebook gives us a Freud for our disenchanted but perhaps a bit wiser times. Never minimizing the greatness of the thinker or the magnitude of his achievement, Whitebook makes extensive and judicious use of the recent scholarly critiques of the man and his work, as well as of the expanded scope of psychoanalysis that has deepened, augmented, and where necessary corrected Freud's own inaugural discoveries and formulations, pursuing his inquiry with Freud's own ideal of the relentless pursuit of the truth. In the resulting brilliant study of the intertwining of the life and the work, we recognize a very human Freud with outsized gifts and equally outsized flaws and limitations, neither idealized nor condemned for his very real but comprehensible weaknesses and blind spots, but understood in the light of analytic neutrality in the best sense.' Robert Paul, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University, Atlanta 'The distinguished psychoanalytic scholar and analyst Joel Whitebook's lively new intellectual biography of Freud gives us a strikingly plausible view of its subject. With special attention to Freud's tangled family circumstances in childhood, Whitebook evokes a figure of the 'dark enlightenment,' committed to the ideal of scientific inquiry yet fully aware of the irrationalities, even the pre-oedipal ones, to which the enquiring mind is subject. Whitebook reads this attitude in relation to Freud's personal and professional 'break with tradition.' He also engages with the feminist critique of Freud by pursuing the theme of 'the missing mother,' the absence of women as protagonists in any of Freud's key dramas being, in his view, a submerged but haunting presence occasioned by the disappearance or 'psychological death' of his earliest caregivers. This book is well worth promoting to the top of the queue on anyone's Freud reading list.' Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University 'Joel Whitebook presents to us an extraordinary new biography of Freud. In contrast to the classical biographies he is in a position to use our current psychoanalytic knowledge on the early development of the child and the early mother-child relationship to show the development of Freud's personality and his theoretical work in a new light. The missing of the maternal dimension in the unfolding of his ideas was one of the most important consequences of Freud's early traumatic experiences for his thinking. With his profound psychoanalytic and philosophical knowledge, great empathy and integrative strength Whitebook brilliantly describes the central motifs, the creative ways and also the wrong tracks in the development of Freud's theoretical thinking, confronting it with critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy … His book is a masterpiece.' Werner Bohleber, author of Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis and editor of Psyche 'Whitebook is fascinating on the historical theme of 'the break with tradition' both in 19th century intellectual life and in Jewish history.' Jane O'Grady, Daily Telegraph 'An elegant foray into the man and his mind … rich and illuminating.' Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian 'At almost 500 pages and supported with extensive footnotes, the book is a treasure trove for readers who want to better understand one of the most significant and prolific minds of the last 150 years.' Mike Phelps, Simply Charly (www.simplycharly.com) '… it should be mandatory reading for graduate students in the field of psychiatry.' C. D. Quyn, San Francisco Book Review (www.sanfranciscobookreview.com) '… strongly argued, well-informed … a sensitive account.' Stephen Frosh, Jewish Chronicle 'The book is a readable, enjoyable and well-documented biography of Freud that summarizes current scholarship, and makes good use of recently published archival materials.' Metapsychology 'This book is more than merely a descriptive path through Freud's life. More accurately, it is a case study of Freud's life using the ideas that Freud pioneered. Many sources are traditional and historical, but Whitebook also expertly incorporates recent publications in the area of Freud studies - whose emergence shows no sign of abating.' Choice 'Professor Whitebook is an insightful scholar and a remarkably readable writer and he has skillfully steered his way between the hagiographers and the 'Freud bashers'. He always has an eye for the telling detail.' The Quarterly Review ''Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?' Perhaps no longer, for Whitebook has covered an extraordinary amount of territory. What one is left with upon closing the covers of this 'intellectual biography', it should be further noted, is something more than an identification of the sociocultural milieu in question, something more than a drawing out of the interrelation of the life and work of the subject, and something more than a comprehensive investigation into the historical implications of each: one is left, whether or not it was the author's intention, with an ever deepening sense of compassion for one of the greatest thinkers, founders even, of the modern era.' Lois Oppenheim, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Book Description This book presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and challenging stereotypes. Podcast transcript August Baker: Welcome to New Books in Psychoanalysis. I'm August Baker. We're talking today with Dr. Joel Whitebook about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography. Dr. Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who maintained a private practice for 25 years and is on the faculty at Columbia University. Welcome, Dr. Whitebook. Dr. Joel Whitebook: It's a pleasure to be here. August Baker: Thank you. I wanted to know to start if there's some more you'd like to say to the listeners about your background, your intellectual orientation, your influences and mentors, things like that that might be helpful for people approaching the book? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yes, I think that would be a good idea. My general background has been in critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. I started out as a philosopher and then, after completing a doctorate in philosophy, became a psychoanalyst. But the type of philosophy that I was oriented towards, or the school that I was trained in, which as I mentioned was a Frankfurt School, was one of the first, if not the first, group of philosophers and social scientists in Europe to take Freud seriously, to teach him at the university. In fact, they even promoted his receiving the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, and he was a pillar of their project along with Marx and Hegel and Max Weber. They attempted to formulate a critical theory of modernity by integrating these four major figures. So a main element of their project was the integration of psychoanalysis into a critical theory of society, or you might say a critical theory of modernity. And that's the project which I have tried to pursue and continue to pursue. You could describe my work in recent years as an attempt to update what earlier critical theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition have done in terms of psychoanalysis and critical theory by bringing more recent developments in psychoanalysis to bear on critical theory. August Baker: I see. Okay. That's very interesting. And what were the four figures? You said Freud, Marx, and who were the other two? Dr. Joel Whitebook: I would say Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Max Weber. August Baker: Okay. And I wanted to note also that you say in the beginning of your book that your aim is not here to provide a comprehensive biography. There are many of those. And you say you want to provide a narrative of the relation between Freud's life and his work, which is a very psychoanalytic thing to do, and you want to try to do it without being reductive. And you say you want to do it from the perspective of two particular themes. Could you tell the listeners about those two themes? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yes. When I was asked to do the book by Cambridge University Press, it was specifically to be an intellectual biography, which meant that my task was to interpret the development of Freud's thinking against the backdrop of what was going on in his life and in the general culture. So when I say it's not a general biography, what I meant by that more specifically was that it was an intellectual biography. And the two themes which organize my narrative are what I've called the Break With Tradition, which tries to locate Freud in the historical developments of his day and in terms of the theorist who are trying to understand those developments, and then also the second theme was what I call the Missing Mother, which has to do with the fact that the theme of the mother is sorely underdeveloped in Freud's thinking. August Baker: Okay, that's very helpful. As I read the book, which I really enjoyed, I was thinking, you're looking at his life and his work, and it's not just here's his early childhood and here's his theories. You're also looking at his love life, you might say, his passions and his battle with illness. So you're kind of intertwining his theories and his logic, his theories in his life throughout his life. Is that accurate? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yes, and I'd specify it even more. There are two schools of thought when it comes to relating a person's life to their work. One school of thought is what you might call the content, for lack of a better work, and that says that a person's biography shouldn't be taken into consideration in appreciating their work or in evaluating or interpreting their work but that the work should stand in its own right and be approached in its own terms. In other words, you shouldn't try and understand a Mozart symphony or opera in terms of what we know about Mozart's life. And that goes for any great thinker. And the worry there is reductionism. They want to guard against having a person's work reduced to its genesis and the person's life history. And it often turns into a sort of gossip where you try and uncover the dirty window in a person's life as a way of reducing their work. Now, that's a valid concern, but they go too far in the other extreme and just want to consider the work in its own right without any consideration of its genesis and the development of the person's life. The other issue- August Baker: Ah, could- Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah, go ahead. August Baker: No, that's a good point because you are talking about new developments in psychoanalytic theory throughout the book. Dr. Joel Whitebook: I'll come to that after I make one more point. The other pole, which as I've already indicated, is reductionism, which you found in earlier forms of either vulgar Marxism or vulgar Freudianism, or now you might even say neuroscience, which tries to reduce a person's accomplishments to debunk them in a way by reducing them to some lower level explanation. In vulgar Freudian terms, it would be in terms of their psychosexual life. In vulgar Marxist terms, it would be in terms of their economic situation. And today, you might say in neuropsychological terms, it would be reducing them to their brain chemistry. So, that's the other pole that has... It's the Scylla and the Charybdis, and that's the Charybdis as opposed to the Kantian Scylla, which has to be avoided. Now, the third position, which I would say is the truly psychoanalytic position and one which Freud himself advocated, is trying to understand the relationship between what is called genesis and validity, how certain things, accomplishments arose out of the conditions of a person's biography but somehow achieve an objective validity of their own, which while being related to those circumstances isn't reducible to them. Of course, he postulated the idea of sublimation as a marker to explain this process whereby genetic material gets turned into valid cultural objects, you might say. August Baker: Right. I keep thinking about this quotation that you have here. Maybe this is related. You talk about Freud coming to understand the human mind as naturally oriented toward the external world and resisting an attempt to redirect its gaze inward. And you have a quote that he wrote to Albert Einstein. "All our attention is directed to the outside, whence dangers and satisfaction beckon. From the inside, we want only to be left in peace. So if someone tries to turn our awareness inward, then our whole organization resists, just as, for example, the esophagus and the urethra resist any attempt to reverse their normal direction of passage." And you say this observation helps us understand the widespread hostility towards psychoanalysis. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah, I make several points. First of all, one way I would say, a very interesting way, or actually the way that I would put it, and I take this largely from somebody who deeply influenced me and whom I draw on and mention in the book but who's not that well-known in this country, namely a Greek philosopher and psychoanalyst who lived in Paris for many years named Cornelius Castoriadis, and Castoriadis argued that Freud's project or what we should take from Freud's project is the attempt to understand the relationship between psychic reality and social reality, between the inner world and the social world. And of course, one could argue that Freud's great discovery in the interpretation of the dreams was psychic reality, that we are citizens of two worlds, we live in the world of a psychic reality and we live in the world of social reality, and that the real interesting question and the goal is to try and understand the relationship between the two. The next point is there are many explanations for why there is such a resistance, indeed a hostility, towards psychoanalysis, going back to the fact that Freud argued or discovered, you might say, infantile sexuality, or that he said that we have innate aggressive drives, which seems to contradict the conventional picture of human beings as being essentially good and sociable, or even going further, that we have a death instinct. I mean, all these help to explain or are good reasons for accounting for the hostility or resistances, analysts say, to psychoanalysis. But in the quote that you read, that points to another resistance which I think is equally powerful and which is only being appreciated more in recent years, which is people's resistance to psychic reality, resistance to the fact that we are determined to a large extent by inner events which we don't have great control over, or as Freud put it, "The ego is not master in his own house." And one of the difficulties in clinical work and helping somebody to get involved in a psychoanalytic process is helping them to accept the fact that there is this powerful psychic reality and that one is better off dealing with it than leaving it alone. I mean, all too often patients, people in treatment would much rather attribute their problems to the external world, to society, to their spouses, to their bosses, what have you. For some reason, it seems to be a fact that it's easier to attribute things to the external world than to look within. And one final point, I think today, when we live in a world where we are constantly distracted by screens, everywhere you go, you to your doctor's office, there's a television, you go to the train stations, there are televisions, even now when you go to a gas station, they have these little screens while you're filling your tank, and all I have to is walk down the street and everybody's got their nose buried in a phone, and today we are bombarded by so much external stimuli that it makes the task of turning inward even that much more difficult. There are innumerable reasons for the decline of psychoanalysis in today's culture, but I would say this is perhaps a more recent one but one of the very powerful ones. August Baker: That's a very powerful point. Maybe could you give a quick overview of Frankfurt School? Because when I hear you saying that we're going to be combining Freud and Marx, I'm thinking of that as Freud being more the internal and Marx more the external. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Well, one way to understand that, I mean, they were a group of German Jewish philosophers and social scientists who started out in the '20s but really consolidated in the '30s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. And while they were generally Marxist in their orientation, they were never dogmatic and they were always anti-Stalinists. But when in the '30s, one had an economic crisis, the Great Depression, which according to Marxist predictions should have produced a socialist revolution, it in fact produced just the opposite, namely a large part of the European working class was turning to fascism. And this was a anomaly, to put it mildly, that any Marxist had to confront. And methodologically, the critical theorist in the Frankfurt School concluded that the problem was that Marxism didn't study the subjective dimension. In other words, consciousness, subjectivity was basically reduced to material conditions. So in order to explain the fact that the working class hadn't fulfilled this historical mission but on the contrary had done just the opposite they concluded, A, that Marxian theory had to be augmented by psychology and that Freudian depth psychology was the best to do it, and that they could deploy Freudian categories to try and explain why this had occurred. And under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, they produced a series of volumes called Authority and the Family, which tried to explain the makeup of the German working class in terms of their peculiar family relations and how this gave rise to an authoritarian character or sensibility. August Baker: Oh, that's helpful. Thank you. And then, as I understand, your project would be to take some of the more recent developments in psychoanalysis and build them in. And as I understand it, much of that is under the label of pre-Oedipal as opposed to Oedipal, or what you call the Missing Mother. Is that correct? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yes. One could argue that the most significant development after Freud's death, which, as they say in psychoanalysis, is the second world, is the so-called pre-Oedipal term, which is the turn towards understanding the first three years of life and the infant child relationship. I mean, my thesis in the book is that Freud was basically a theorist of what he called the father complex. When you read his case studies one after another, it's always a polemic for the importance of the father complex, the Oedipus complex. He referred to the Oedipus complex as the "nuclear complex of the neurosis." He, in his cultural writings, most notably in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, he explained the origins of religion in terms of the Oedipus complex. So when the Frankfurt School, not only the Frankfurt School but most psychoanalytically oriented social theorists prior to the '60s, say, and there are a few exceptions, adopted Freudian theory to explain social phenomena, they basically employed his Oedipal theory, his theory of the father complex. So that after the Second World War, and we could discuss the reasons for this, there was an intense interest in the early mother infant relationship developed. And a number of the most important psychoanalysts after the war, and I would say Donald Winnicott is the most important here, started exploring the first three years of life, the early separation-individuation process. Then that was followed by infant research and attachment theory. So the great augmentation of psychoanalytic theory has been the addition of pre-Oedipal theory to Oedipal theory. So when I am trying to expand and continue the project of the Frankfurt School, which as I said is to try and integrate critical theory and psychoanalysis, what I have tried to do is to examine how we would rethink some of the central problems using pre-Oedipal rather than Oedipal theory. August Baker: Interesting. That makes it very clear. And I guess to help understand it, could you help explain how treatment and psychoanalytic treatment proceeds for a classical patient, one that is seen as an Oedipus complex versus a unclassical one with pre-Oedipal issues? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Perhaps Winnicott put it best. He said Freud basically not ignored but radically didn't pay sufficient attention to the first three years of life. That is the years of life when separation-individuation takes place until what's called a unit self is formed, the consolidation of self, which takes place in the third or fourth year. So, Freud assumed the existence of the unit self, which had an interior structure, which he said was made up of the id, ego, and super-ego, and that this person interacted with other unit selves and suffered from what were called intrapsychic conflicts, that is conflicts that occurred within a self that was already unified and formed. And his approach to psychoanalysis, his clinical technique, his understanding of the psychoanalytic setting was all predicated on the idea that he was a unit self and he was dealing with other unit selves and that the analysis involved the interaction between these unit selves. What this meant in practice was that, I mean, and this is how he described what was referred to as the classical patient or the good neurotic, and in practice, what this meant was that these people were basically able to make use of the psychoanalytic setup, or what's called the psychoanalytic frame, and be able to abide by the structure of psychoanalysis and come so many times a week and free associate and accept interpretations and would be helped in terms of interpretation. Now, whether or not this classical patient ever existed is a disputed issue, but we won't get into that. One of the things that led to the pre-Oedipal turn after the war, and this was especially true in London, but also in the States, that analysts were seeing more and more patients couldn't be reached with a classical method. Not only couldn't be helped by it, but often couldn't be reached by it. They, you might say, couldn't accept the rules of the game that were necessary to involve oneself in psychoanalysis. So in order to understand this, the new patient, the post-classical patient, the non-neurotic patient, however you want to call it, analysts began examining pathology, which stems from the earlier phases of life, relationship to the early mother, the separation-individuation process, as I said, the formation of a stable unit self, which meant that those issues themselves became the topic of psychoanalytic interventions, were called pathologies of the self. And in addition to, or before, I mean, there's difference of opinions about this and it varies from case to case, before dealing with Oedipal issues having to do with later stages of development, it's necessary to address issues with a patient that stem from these early forms of what's self-pathology or what's sometimes referred to as narcissistic pathology. August Baker: I thought this probably relates. You say, "When these people," meaning unclassical patients, "are able to articulate their experience, they provide us," and you're referring to Loewald, "Loewald maintains, 'With insight into the psychotic core of the personality, which is rarely accessible in higher functioning individuals, though it is present in all of us.'" Maybe that's what you meant by whether there ever was a classical patient. Could you speak to this psychotic core? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Well, I mean, this is also somewhat a matter of contention, but if you assume as I do, and as Loewald does, by the way, he's, I would say, one of the most important theorists after Freud, and one who has influenced me enormously, that we begin life in some sort of undifferentiated or symbiotic stage or a merger with the mother and the development consists in moving away from, differentiating oneself away from that originally undifferentiated stage, then, well, if you take that line of analysis and you also believe that earlier stages of development aren't just eradicated but somehow stay active in the psyche, are somehow sedimented in psychic life, then you can assume that residues of that undifferentiated stage, what he calls a psychotic core, psychotic meaning because it's a merged state, the psychotic core exist in all of us, just in patients who are able to, for whatever developmental reasons, achieve a higher degree of individuation and a more firmly structured and stable self, that core is further buried. But in patients, the post-classical patients I've been mentioning, that stage remains less well buried and is more accessible and is encountered more easily than it is... The neurotic patient, the so-called high-functioning patient in some way doesn't have access or it's more difficult for them to gain access to the more archaic parts of the personality having to do with this psychotic core. So that when we deal with the less high-functioning patients, I want to use terms that are non-judgmental here, non-stigmatizing, so that when we deal with the less high-functioning patients, we often gain insight into deeper levels of the psyche that aren't accessible with the higher functioning patients, and as Loewald says, and Winnicott, well, actually, he took this from Winnicott, believe they have a lot to teach us about what Winnicott said, "What life is all about." August Baker: And Freud, of course, would be a very high-functioning patient who may not have had so much access. Well, he didn't go through an analysis either. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Received interpretation of Freud, which he himself promulgated, and which analysts believed for many years, was that he was a high-functioning, neurotic patient who hadn't suffered any early traumas and that he was very well put together. But what research into his early life in Freiberg by historians and by academics and Freud studies has revealed in recent years, and this is one of the points of departure of my narrative, is that in fact his first three years in Freiberg and his relation to his mother was really quite traumatic and that this presentation of himself as this high-functioning, rational, well-integrated "normal" masculine person was in many ways defensive. And what he had done was actually split off and repress the earlier stages in his own life and the psychic phenomena that are attached to them because he had denied this part of himself. Because he had dissociated himself from his earlier years and his more primitive experience, he wasn't able to see it in his patients and incorporate it in his theory. And that's why I have the thesis of the Missing Mother. And part of what I attempted to do was to trace the ramifications of this throughout the history of his theory. August Baker: That's very helpful. Yes. And I think another bit of new research is now the letters that Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, right? Those were- Dr. Joel Whitebook: Letters between both of them. August Baker: They were only available in 2011. So, that's another piece of something that was hid that also you make a great use of here. We don't have a lot of time, but do you want to talk about, I mean, there's just so much to talk about, some of the early trauma that has been revealed? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Well, before doing that, if we could do both, I'll try and be quick. I mean, I'd like to say something about the Fliess letters. August Baker: Yes. Dr. Joel Whitebook: The Freud establishment, which was made up of Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris and Anna Freud, believe that in order to protect Freud's reputation and the fragile reputation of psychoanalysis, they had to suppress some of the more controversial material in his life. So when the Fliess letters were first discovered in the '50s, a very censored expurgated edition of them was brought out by Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, and that was sort of the official view that was followed until Anna Freud died in the '80s and Jeffrey Masson brought out a complete un-expurgated version. And by the way, the letters are fantastic. They are almost, I would say, a piece of literature, and they offer you an unprecedented view into the inner workings of a man's mind and his struggle to understand himself. And also, you see what a compassionate and thoroughly human person he was. It's not just Freud, works and all, it's Freud in all his humanity. And the Freud establishment in some way, one, thought they had to deny his humanity. And my experience was in reading them and seeing him in all his vulnerability, rather than turning me off to him, it made me appreciate him much more. But once you had the Fliess letters where he gave some hints about what had actually gone on in his first three years in Freiberg, this led to research into those years which uncovered how problematic and traumatic his relationship to his mother had been. August Baker: Right. And of course, the Fliess letters also refer to... There's some homosexual or homoerotic excitement there. You have this quote where Freud is anticipating an upcoming Congress, and he wrote to Fliess, "I bring nothing but two open ears and one temporal lobe, lubricated for reception." I don't know if you've read the biography of Kohut by Strozier, but the way the psychoanalytic establishment frowned on homosexuality or needed to distance itself from homosexuality is a big part of the story, at least in the US. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Well, I think it's a big part of the story of the way the Freud establishment tried to control the publication of these things. I mean, I quote a feminist theorist, I think her name was Garner, I don't remember, who said, when she first read the Fliess letters, she said it occurred to her that these were love letters. August Baker: Right. Dr. Joel Whitebook: And although we have no evidence that it was ever enacted and completed sexually, he was passionately in love with this man. And the homosexual love not just can't be denied, like the passage you just quoted, I mean, it's there to be observed, as is the extent of his cocaine usage. Jones said before, I think in the late 1880s, but in fact it went on to 1896. So they felt like they had to bury these facts in order to preserve his reputation. And in addition to the pre-Oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, I think the fact that the culture has become much more tolerant towards homosexuality and the analytic world has made a valiant attempt to make amends for the past and revise its views on homosexuality, it makes it much more possible for us to view his homosexual dimension of his relationship to Fliess, as well as to Jung, to view it in a much more neutral way. August Baker: Right. I thought it was really convincing to me as an outline of him, first Freud first falling in love at 16, and then, tell me, and correct me if I'm wrong, being kind of overwhelmed by that, turning to work, then falling in love with Martha, and then having the passion of a love affair, which is separated by distance and put into writing. And then once he gets married and Martha becomes the mother at home, there's kind of like, well, where does all of this energy go? And then Wilhelm Fliess was there, and it went right there. Correct me if I'm wrong, that's the overview I got from your book. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yes. And there's one more point to it, that it's often been said that Freud was an epistolary lover. He was separated from Martha for six or seven years during their so-called betrothal, their engagement. Martha's mother didn't particularly like Sigmund, and she grabbed her daughter out of Vienna and dragged her to Hamburg so she'd be away from him. So for the greater part of their engagement, he didn't see her that much. And this love affair took place to a large degree in his fantasy life, which was recorded in these wonderful letters, all of which have been recently published. So he was able to maintain this passionate and idealized love as long as the real object wasn't there. And then when he finally had to move in with her and see her doing the dishes, or I guess they didn't do dishes- August Baker: Exactly. Dr. Joel Whitebook: ... I guess they didn't do dishes in those days, or whatever, it sort of collapsed, and then all of that passion was redirected towards Fliess. But again, Fliess lived in Berlin. He didn't see him that often, and he carried on largely an epistolary love affair with Fliess. August Baker: Yeah, it's fascinating. Dr. Joel Whitebook: I mean, one of the hardest tasks for all of us, and one of the tasks in most therapies and analyses is learning to give up our idealized fantasies and our narcissistic self-protection and love a real human being with all their flaws and who won't conform to our wishes. August Baker: One point you talk about transference and you say that it's often questioned what Freud's fundamental discovery was, and is it the meaning of dreams, the existence of psychic reality, free association, or even the psychoanalytic setup itself? The question is impossible to answer. But you also talk about transference and the way it's enacted both inside and outside of the psychoanalytic setting, and that is a prime candidate for his fundamental discovery. I wondered if you could talk about his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess as a transference drama and as having both an Oedipal and a pre-Oedipal level. I think you said in the pre-Oedipal stratum Fliess was in the role of a breast mother that he wanted to surrender to, and on the Oedipal level, Freud was in what he considered a passive homosexual attitude. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah. First of all, people tend to think of transference as just one thing, but transferences assume many forms deriving from all layers of psychic life and stages of development. And with Fliess, I mean, I don't remember who it was, somebody observed... Fliess actually became his doctor and started intervening on him, operating on his nose and cauterizing it. We're not exactly sure what he did, but he did operate on him. So I think we all know from our experience as little children that one develops these powerful transferences to their doctors. I mean, they're seen as these very powerful figures, these authority figures, these magicians who carry the magic of curing you. So the fact- August Baker: Especially surgeons. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Especially surgeons. Yeah. So the fact that Fliess became his doctor meant that Fliess was open to all the transferences that are associated with the figure of the father doctor, and which meant he was an authority figure. He had all this magical knowledge. He addresses one letter to him, "Dear Magician," and the sort of passive homosexual mode. I mean, that's Freud's term for him. For him, male homosexuality was the passive feminine role or the passive homosexual role. I mean, as you said, as the surgeon, what actually penetrated his body, Freud's homosexual desires to be penetrated by him were activated. But in so far as he thought Fliess as the medicine man, the witch doctor, the magician, the shaman, contained all these magical powers, he was object of a maternal transference where the fantasy is the mother has all this wonderful warm milk that can alleviate all my discomfort and suffering. August Baker: I guess that pre-Oedipal transference is the one that would be more difficult for Freud to verbalize or to get at. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the last things Freud said, I mean, this is the way I almost end the book, he says that there is a limit to how far a man can go in psychoanalysis because to put himself on the couch and put himself in a passive position to an analyst, a male or female, men, because of their fear of their passive homosexual female wishes can never allow themself to really give themselves over to analysis. And he called this the biological bedrock, which constituted the limit to how far an analysis could go. Now, my point is, because of his own discomfort with his own passive feminine wishes, Freud couldn't explore them sufficiently. So rather than saying, "This fear of passivity is bedrock," what he should have done, and what we're trying to do today, is to analyze that fear of passivity and to understand where it arises in male development and partly in man's relationship to his separating from his mother. August Baker: Right. It wasn't a biological bedrock, it was his own personal bedrock, which may have been shared by a lot of other people and can be related to all the trauma in his early childhood. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Right. By saying it's bedrock, what you do is you arrest curiosity, you arrest exploration. It, like everything else, should have been a topic for psychoanalytic exploration. He couldn't get curious about his own rejection of the passive female position. He couldn't get curious enough. August Baker: I understand that. There's so much I want cover, and we're running out of time, but I wondered, another thing that you get into is his illness and this terrible illness and the amount of pain he went through and his confronting death, and I was really taken by your description of his grandson's game, the Fort/Da game, which I had never really seen the significance of, I wondered if you could tell our listeners about that? Dr. Joel Whitebook: Well, he observed his grandson playing this game over and over again where he would have a spool of yarn and throw it and then retrieve it, and he would yell, "Fort," when he threw it. And then when he'd pull it back in, he would say, "Da." So there, here. And the boy had a very good relationship with his mother, and he actually handled his separations from her very well and would play this game when she was gone. And Freud, as well as his mother, became very curious about the meaning of it. And what Freud came to conclude or to hypothesize was that in this game, the child was reenacting and overcoming the separation. August Baker: Symbolically. Dr. Joel Whitebook: So to Freud, the spool was a separation, and the bringing it back in was mastering it. And this was the key to something that he saw as a fundamental mechanism in psychic life and in culture. By doing this, he was not just mastering it, but he was mastering it by symbolizing it and acting it. August Baker: Yes. Freud calls his grandson's "great cultural achievement." Dr. Joel Whitebook: Great cultural achievement. Because, I mean, one of the great facts of the human condition that we all have to face, and one of the great tasks is how we are going to deal with all of the inevitable separations and losses that we have to experience in life. August Baker: Right, right. Dr. Joel Whitebook: And Freud's answer is that the way we learn to deal with them and the way we make them tolerable is through symbolic activity, by symbolizing them. So, that's- August Baker: And play. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah, play. Yeah. Winnicott went on to say by play. I mean, there's intimate connection between symbol play and symbolization. And by doing this, we not only learn to tolerate separation and loss, but we also create meaning out of it. I mean, symbolizing loss is the source of meaning for Freud. August Baker: Right. That's fascinating. That's just one nugget. There are so many others. I wish I could talk to you about more, but we are at the end of our 50 minute hour. Dr. Joel Whitebook: As we analysts say, "Time's up." August Baker: Which is terribly traumatic for a pre-Oedipal patient. But I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I really enjoyed the book. And thank you for appearing on New Books in Psychoanalysis. Dr. Joel Whitebook: Yeah. I also want to thank you for asking very insightful questions- August Baker: Oh, I appreciate that. Dr. Joel Whitebook: ... and facilitating the discussion. August Baker: Thank you.