THE PSYCHOANALYTIC UNDERSTANDING OF
:
HUMAN FREEDOM:
:
FREEDOM FROM AND
-
JOSEPH
H. SMITH,M.D.
FREEDOM FOR
M
FREEDOM, which I take to be a power to actuate and be actuated in directions that promise the deepest synthesis of basic needs and ideals. My outline of the psychoanalytic understanding of freedom will begin with a discussion of freedom and psychic determinism and will center on the consideration of two early moments of self-evident freedom- the free attending of the infant and the free play of the child. I shall review some of our assumptions regarding the most primitive steps in mental development and also some part of our thinking about the most advanced levels of ego and superego functioning. Under the heading of the ego psychology of freedom, understod primarily as freedom from, I shal1.contrast the nonperemptory moments of attending and play with the peremptory moment of crisis, with the intention of showing how each shapes the other. Under the heading of the superego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom for, I shall review superego formation and function both in its defensive and its benevolent aspects, with an emphasis on the preoedipal appearance of both. In considering the superego as ego grade or as the I beyond the I, my purpose is to approach Ricoeur's location of man's fallibility in a persisting noncoincidence of the self with itself (Ricoeur, 1960a, p. 4). Indeed, my more general purpose in Y THEME IS HUMAN
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
88
JOSEPH H. SMITH
attempting to make explicit the psychoanalytic understanding of freedom is to suggest its compatibility with the concept of freedom advanced by Ricoeur in his ongoing studies on the philosophy of the will.' Freedom and Psychic Determinism
Although psychoanalysts ordinarily speak of autonomy and not of freedom, I would like to outline a concept of freedom which is implicit in psychoanalytic thought and practice, without prejudging whether or not it is precisely coterminous with the concept of ego autonomy. The danger in talking of freedom is that it could be taken as a reference to what Ricoeur calls the "freedom of indifferencen-a "freedom" devoid of constraints, without possibility of sustaining the dramatic, unstructured, literally out of this world, and thus trivial and uninteresting. On the other hand, the risk in not attempting to make explicit our concept of freedom is that psychic determinism could be misunderstood as referring to a simplistic determinism indiscriminately taken over from physics as a psychology of passivity, suitable for use in what Ricoeur calls "determinism as alibi," and just as devoid of paradox and the dramatic and just as uninteresting and trivial as the "freedom of indifference." Of course one could argue that these alternate risks are not so easily comparable. It is standard, for instance, to Freedom and Nature was published in 1950 as the first of three projected volumes on the philosophy of the will. The first-the eidetiw, the essential form or structure of the will-was to be followed by a volume dealing with the empirics of the will and then by a final volume dealing with the poetics of the will. The second has been published in two parts: Fallible Man (1960a) and The Symbolism of Evil (1960b). The articles published in The Conjict of Interpretations (1969) give some idea of the form to be taken by his forthcoming poetics of the will. Ricoeur's major contribution to our field is, of course, Freud and Philosophy (1970). His recent specifically psychoanalytic commentaries have included the Edith Weigert Lecture of the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities of the Washington School of Psychiatry. "Psychoanalysis and the Work of Art" (1976a). and the plenary address at the May 1976 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, "The Question of Proof in Psychoanalysis" (1976b).
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
89
acknowledge that they are opposites not to each other but to unfreedom and indeterminacy; that thpy are appropriate to different universes of discourse,' one having its realm of meaning in subjectivity, the other in objectivity; that both are interpretive assumptions beyond the arena of proof; and that for all these reasons there could be no real clash betwzen freedom and determinism. Furthermore, even if a clash were possible, matters would still not be on all fours because no serious man would advocate an absolute freedom without constraint, whereas every determinist worth his salt is an absolutist. Ricoeur has recognized a heroic dimension in such hard-nosed absolutism and elevated it into something approaching equal status in the conflict of interpretations. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud destroy illusions, expel man from a primary nayvete, and show him fundamental dimensions of his actual nature-for Ricoeur, an essential step in preparing the way for the achievement of a second nayvete. But the point I wish to stress here is that determinism is not simplistic by reason of its absolutism. Ricoeur insists that there is no such thing as determinism that is not absolute (1950, pp. 68, 187, 350, 422) and also cites Freud to that effect (p. 401). What is si,mplistic is the assumption that psychic determinism means that the subject, just like an inanimate object, is passively at the mercy of forces acting within and upon him. Stated in that way and going only that far, Ricoeur and psychoanalytic thought agree.3 The disSchafer's (1973, p. 185) action model could be seen as constituting a universe of discourse in which the question of freedom or determinism would not arise. However, what his model would reject or transcend is not freedom and psychic determinism as outlined here, but simplistic notions of "conscious autonomy" or "free will," on the one hand, and "a natural science, deterministic model," on the other. ' Of course, there are other profound levels of agreement quite aside from agreement or disagreement on the issue of determinism. For instance, and in agreement with psychoanalytic (Loewald, 1971b) and Cassirerian (1936) thought, Ricoeur (1950, pp. 224-225) wrote: "... dynamic concepts are applicable to several regions without belonging to any. In the 'region' of things or in the 'region'
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
90
JOSEPH H. SMITH
agreement comes with the psychoanalytic assumption of psychic determinism as absolute. Now, within such an assumption, is the whole hierarchy, structure, and variousness of life reduced to rubble, to "mental physics" to a play of forces that explains all in the sense of explaining away? I will here anticipate my response to this question in the form of perhaps an all-too-familiar assertion. Freedom, even freedom of choice in the most effortless moment of the child's play, is multiply determined. "Determined" in the context of psychological investigation means meaningful or non chaotic. It is not an assumption that reduces the more complex structure of the child's play to the less complex structure of the infant's attending. It does not blur but sustains the possibilities of distinguishing not only these but also other and higher levels of structure and functioning. It is not a reductionistic assumption which lends itself to firm placement on only one side of a conflict of interpretations. It is an article of faith which claims that the worldthe actual world and ourselves with and in it, the actual world in both the sense of physics and in the sense of Heidegger-is intelligible. These two worlds- the world of the humanly significant and the world of physical fact-are one world, but they are also two regions of world, each requiring its own ontology, a cardinal point in Cassirer's thought (1936). The quest for a metaphysical doctrine that would not rule out the possibilities of psychic freedom occasionally leads of consciousness there are many other concepts which thus overlap all 'regions,' as the terms object, property, relation, plurality, etc. Phenomenology of consciousness requires dynamics, just as it requires other concepts of 'formal ontology.' It is even possible to construct a purely psychological dynamics without reference to physics or even psychology. It was to avoid the sliding of psychological dynamics (with its concepts of force, tension, release, etc.) into a physical interpretation that we have held the description of willing as force in suspension until now and that we have considered it as thought, that is as practical, a-dynamic intension. Now we must not forget that voluntary and involuntary forces are also the forces which evoke or actualize a meaning."
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN. FREEDOM
91
psychoanalysts to invoke Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle (including Waelder, 1936, p. 30, although the gist of his thinking, e.g., pp. 50-51, accords with Cassirer's). Here are relevant passages from Cassirer: "Kant always insisted on the principle that no augmentation but only a distortion of the fields of knowledge results when we permit their boundaries to run into each other. Such a running together of boundaries occurs when statements about indeterminism in quantum theory are directly connected with metaphysical speculations about the freedom of the will . . . [it is] necessary to perceive each set of problems in sharp isolation and to see in each set its own characteristic uniqueness" (p, 197). "Ethics would certainly be in a bad way-it would lose all dignity-if it could maintain its authority and fulfill its function in no other way than by keeping a lookout for gaps in the scientific explanation of nature and taking shelter, so to speak, in these gaps" (pp. 197-198). Interpreting Spinoza, Cassirer wrote: "We cannot nor do we wish to withdraw from the dominion of general laws of nature; but these take on a different character when they refer not to the motions of bodies but to our self-conscious activity, to our representing, desiring and willing." Interpreting Kant, he wrote: "As our actions belong to the realm of nature, so they also belong to the realm of purposes and must be referred to the systematic unity of this realm and judged in accordance'with it. This judgment is governed by entirely different concepts and rules from those on which the intuition of the phenomenon 'nature' rests" (p. 201). "Kant can remain a strict empirical determinist and can nevertheless assert that precisely this empirical determination leaves the way open for another determination through the moral law of the pure autonomy of the will. The two are not mutually exclusive . . . but rather require and condition each other" (p. 202). Finally, Cassirer wrote: "The examples quoted are only to prove one thing, that none of the great thinkers who were Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
92
JOSEPH H. SMITH
deeply conscious of the problems connected with this concept and continuously wrestled with them ever yielded to the temptation to master them simply by denying the general causal principle and equating freedom with causelessness. Such an attempt is not to be found in Plato or Spinoza or Kant. For all of them, freedom did not mean indeterminateness but rather a certain form of determinability . . ." (p. 203). It could be said that determinism as a concept has a purely abstract aspect, which permits its deployment in various regions where its specific meaning will be defined by the character of the region. The assumption of psychic determinism is not a reduction of the psychic to the physical, nor is it posited, in the first place, as a means of understanding a connection between the psychological and the biological. It is an assumption on purely psychological grounds which attributes intelligibility -meaningfulness -to all psychic processes. T o paraphrase a remark of Loewald's (1971a, p. 61; see also Loewald, 1971b, pp. 100-101 for a similar observation on psychic energy), the thing to keep in mind about psychic determinism is that it is psychic. The problem of posing determinism in its aspect of abstract concept is that it might be taken to mean a general theory. But determinism is not an empirically grounded fact, or a scientific hypothesis, or even a theory in the sense of being a claimed framework for intelligible perception or explanation of aspects of reality. It is subject neither to proof nor disproof, and all discussions of the topic that involve efforts to prove or disprove it are sterile. T o that extent, Hampshire is quite right in pronouncing the matter uninteresting (1975, p. 113). It does not fall within the subject matter of science. It has its life as a prescientific basic assumption, and it provokes both discord and accord with reference to the claimed intuition that our freedom is simultaneously both more than and less than merely relative-an intuition of the paradox of freedom in a determinate world, perhaps not to be expressed in terms of either science or philosophy. It is an intuition of Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
93
paradox, but is also a working assumption within which we all more or less knowingly carry out our projects. Ricoeur does not address himself to the question of psychic determinism and freedom in either/or fashion. He does demonstrate how a determinism proper to the realm of physics would not be proper to the realm of the will. On this point, psychoanalysis is in agreement. Freedom as Hierarchy: Two Early Paradigms
In 1905, Freud wrote "I doubt if we are in a position to undertake anything without having an intention in view. If we do not require our mental apparatus at the moment for supplying one of our indispensable satisfactions, we allow it itself to work in the direction of pleasure and we seek to derive pleasure from its own activity. I. suspect that this is in general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation, but I understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this statement" (1905, pp. 95-96). As a text for introducing the psychoanalytic concepts of freedom and intentionality, this passage has limitations. For one, it reflects a persistent confusion through which Freud struggled for a never fully clarified differentiation of the pleasure principle from pleasure seeking. It does, however, contain the kernel of an idea which unites freedom and intentionality (and sublimation to boot). Let us transpose the passage from its setting in adult humor to the earliest experiences of consciousness. Here, a caveat should be entered, to nonanalysts especially, that interest in genesis does not mean that the higher or later is understood only in terms of the lower or earlier. The para* Cf. Ricoeur (1950. pp. 99-106) on pleasure as goal, which the thrust of Freud's thought approaches. Although there are passages in which he specifically differentiates the two. which Rapaport cites (1960, pp. 875-877), the closest he came in his basic theory-building to clear differentiation was in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," but, oddly, the meaning of that title and that book is not beyond the pleasure principle, but beyond pleasure seeking (Smith, 1977). Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
94
JOSEPH H. SMITH
digmatic basis for interpreting an early, primitive mode of functioning is always a later, more advanced mode. But once an early mode is identified, the two interpret each other in a way that may shed light on previously unnoted aspects of each or even reveal modes higher than the originally paradigmatic one. The moment in primitive consciousness which the passage would describe is that of nonperemptory awareness-the initially fleeting periods of wakefulness before hunger has mounted to peremptory level and before falling asleep following satiety (Wolff, 1959), wherein the infant can behold his world in the wonder which Descartes and Ricoeur emphasize. Could we say "free to behold in this prevoluntary, pre-ego, preautonomous state? If so, what are the significant constraints that safeguard even this level of freedom from being the freedom of indifference? . The activity of free attending occurs by virtue of conflictfree functions, including those innately given-but nonreflexive and thus modifiable-adaptive functions which Ricoeur terms "preformed skills" (1950, pp. 233, 237-238, 243). These factors, the mother-child situation, and the objects attended, can be seen as at once enabling and constraining aspects- as structuring aspects. But another shaping factor stands in the background of this activity. It is the consciously mute but effective influence of a prior moment of peremptory need when attention had been riveted on the object of need. What justifies the interpretation of this additional constraint upon the free play of attention? Prior to observation, one proceeds by inference in the light of a higher paradigrnthe free play of the child. There we know that the play is free, i.e., the child has options, is not peremptorily compelled but free to invent variations on the theme of his interest of the moment, but we also know that the play, no matter how joyous, is guided by underlying themes of serious significance to the child, themes having to do with important needs and Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING H U M A N FREEDOM
95
their objects, important traumas and their mastery. Of course, with development comes hierarchic structuralization. Basic needs give rise to derivative needs and quasineeds, which is to say that the intentional structure of the child's play is multilayered. How do these two paradigmatic moments of self-evident freedom-free attending of the infant and free play of the child-shed light on each other and on freedom itself? First, the greater structural complexity in the child is correlative with an active and enlarged freedom in the child's play; by comparison, the infant's free attending is passive and prevoluntary. Difference in the two levels was conceptualized in terms of passivity and activity by Rapaport (1953) in an important article which Brenman (Rapaport, 1953, p. 535) suggested might have been treated under the general heading of "metapsychological considerations of freedom of the will." Erikson, in his article "Psychological Reality and Historical Actuality" (1961), later questioned the term passivity out of consideration for the infant's strength in actuating maternal response; in a sense, mother and infant are equal partners in a strength of mutual actuation. Though in fact compatible with Rapaport's conceptualization, Erikson's point raises the question of whether we might not be able to give the name of freedom to aspects of even the most primitive behavior. Even at the moment of frustration, the infant is not locked into only passively experiencing the pain of need. Though fostered and led by drive and affect, what we assume takes shape ideationally in the conscious mind of the infant is an image of the object- an image of fulfillment- and it is as much this as signals of distress that actuates a maternal response. It is an innately given power of access to the object and a power to anticipate and, in anticipating, to actuate the object. Regarding the engendering of a history, Ricoeur (1969, p. 405) wrote: ". . . history . . . is less the experience of the change of everything than the tension created by the expectation of a fulfillment; history is itself hope of history, for each fulfillment Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
96
JOSEPH H. SMITH
is perceived as confirmation, pledge, and repetition of the promise. This last designates an increase, a surplus, a 'not yet' which maintains the tension of history." I have suggested that both moments of freedom, each of which embodies Freud's delineation of a time of freedom from the compelling pressure of peremptory need, are nevertheless shaped by such needs; that the prior and anticipated experience of delay in supply of an indispensable satisfaction, even though not in conscious focus, continues to influence, to structure, and to sustain a dramatic quality in the spontaneity of free attending and free play. This is not to say that we understand the meaning of the spontaneous activity by reduction, i.e., only in the light of potentially peremptory needs now in abeyance. The shaping, structuring-even constituting -influence goes in both directions (Loewald, 197lb). The dialectic needs to be fully traced out.
The Ego Psychology of Freedom: Freedom From A . The Dialectic of the Peremptory and the Nonperemptory Ricoeur in his early work (1950, p. 252) questioned, and Robert White in his mature work (1963) indicted, psychoanalysis for its attention to crisis as opposed to freedom in early development; to anxiety rather than wonder; to motives as they compel rather than as they incline. It is true that the primary models of thought, affect, and action as constructed or reconstructed by Rapaport (1951) have their setting in such critical moments. However, it is also true that Rapaport, more than anyone, stressed the human capacity for autonomy as an achievement partially enabled by the very drives that yield to autonomous control. In his terms the instinctual drives are the assurance of autonomy from external stimuli-the proof against stimulus slavery. The drives are the most vivid hallmark and ultimate guarantor that the subject comes into being as himself a center of motiDownloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
97
vation. On the other hand, the attunement to and dependence on others and the external world ultimately guarantee autonomy from being passively enslaved by the instinctual drives. The always relative autonomy of the ego arises in the context of these polar inner and outer dependencies, each providing a foothold and fostering a way of avoiding enslavement to the other.5 Rapaport wrote both of ultimate and proximal guarantors of autonomy, but with an acknowledged accent on autonomy from rather than autonomy for (1957b, p. 731). Autonomy from implies conflict and ultimately a peremptory moment. Autonomy for implies relative freedom from conflict and, in early development, a nonperemptory moment. Let us look in more detail at how these moments shape each other. In the Freudian text the paradigmatic crisis occurs when need mounts to peremptory level in the absence of the object. The accent is on frustration-a state of being impulse ridden or impulse driven- and a primordial crying out for the object. That is, even at this primitive, preobjectal, undifferentiated level, behavior is structured by an innately given coordination of need and object of need. In Rapaport's phrasing ". . . the defining characteristic object is the outstanding conceptual invention ,in Freud's theory of the instinctual drive" (1960, p. 877). It is the cornerstone of the "profound intentional analysis" (Kohak in Ricoeur, 1950, p. xxv) embodied in the Freudian text. In psychoanalysis the instinctual-drive theory is not something apart from object-relations theory; it .is objectrelations theory in its most fundamental form. After a first experience of satisfaction, mounting need is represented as a wish in the form of an image of the absent object of need-an image of the prior experience of satis1 believe this general statement of Rapaport's thesis stands unchallenged by questions raised by Miller (1962) and Holt (1967a) regarding the specific empirical phenomena to which Rapaport pointed as evidence for or application of the thesis. For pertinent discussions of freedom and autonomy see also Holt (1967b) and Rubinstein (1967).
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
98
JOSEPH H. SMITH
faction, no matter how diffusely, globally, or partially represented in the mind of the infant. As hallucination, i.e., prior to the differentiation of memory and perception or of ideation and perception, such an image is termed an identity of perception. But what allows for moving from an identity of perception to an identity of thought, i.e., to the capacity for distinguishing between an idea -an image -of the object and the actual object? It is interaction with the object at a nonperemptory moment. Such a moment of freedom from the riveting of attention on the object only in its dimension as object of imperative need provides the leeway for active thought to receive a variety of perspectives on the object and for these to be transcended in a synthesis of recognition of the object- a synthesis which, Ricoeur (1960a) suggests, is expressed in speech as a naming of the object. But prior to naming and the human-speech capacity, there is a structure-a syntax-of behavior in the anlage of a noun phrase as the "I" which has its focus in a need represented by affect, and the anlage of a verb phrase in the action pattern and the object which allows for fulfillment of the need (Smith, 1976). It is not only that the influence of a prior or anticipated peremptory moment sustains a dramatic quality in the nonperemptory; the structure of the peremptory moment is also the structure of the nonperemptory. Both are embodiments of the motivational, need-action-object structure of behavior. But it is the nonperemptory moment which allows this structure to come to light and be recognized and differentiated, first of all by revealing the object in aspects other than those directly tied to imperative need. The two moments shape and constitute each other. The interiorization, for example, of the capacity for control as active delay even in the face of peremptory need is partially derived from the experience of delay in a nonperemptory moment. Such experience carries over as an influence and modifies repression, a prior passive and peremptory defense against the need, in the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
99
direction of a judgment to delay. Similarly, synthesis of fragmentary perspectives into a unitary idea of the object, achieved at a nonperemptory moment in the presence of the object, is fostered by the prior experience of absence of the object. I have hardly more than touched on the psychoanalytic theory of ego autonomy as advanced in the work of Freud, Hartmann, and RapaportY6 only gathering elements sufficient to highlight the dialectic of the peremptory and the nonperemptory and the interconnectedness of autonomy from and autonomy for, which I take to be essential to a nontrivial psychoanalytic concept of freedom. I would like to point toward superego psychology by summarizing these thoughts on ego psychology in the following way. The ego arises not only by differentiation from an ego-id matrix, but also from an immersion in its objects. Primitively, both peremptory and nonperemptory perception and ideation are focused on the object. The mute "I" of primitive ideation, even prior to differentiation of the I and not I, is already ahead of itself, over there with the to-bedifferentiated object in an image of remembered and anticipated fulfillment, with its own affective attunement to the image of fulfillment. The I at the core of indigence, also mute, but the I that can come to display the strength of indigence as its own, is manifest at this early level only in affective signals of need. Two points: the first is the delineation of an I of fulfillment and an I of indigence-a variation of the good-me, bad-me phrasing-which approaches Ricoeur's thesis of a fallibility-vulnerability to a particular kind of conflictrelated to a persistent lack of coincidence of the I with itself (1960a). The second emphasizes the object as the primitive V have bypassed specific consideration of Rapaport's article on motivation (1960) and aIso Loewald's (1971b). The former is an important response to what is essentially a misreading of the Freudian text by White (1963-see also Rapaport, 1957a). The latter is a rich discussion of many issues scarcely approached here.
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
100
JOSEPH H. SMITH
point of both peremptory and nonperemptory ideational focus. To underline the central ideational focus of the object is, again, to underline purposiveness and anticipation as embedded in the structure of both peremptory and nonperemptory psychic action even prior to the opening up of the temporal dimensions. B. Repression and Judgment
Primal repression refers to the innately given direction of attention away from indigence as danger and toward the object. With structural development, an internalized capacity to delay- repression proper -evolves, which can eventually be replaced by an act of judgment. To think of the act of judgment itself simply as a passive vector result of multiple forces is to misunderstand the psychological in terms of the physical. The idea of a receptive moment at the heart of every psychic act does not reduce activity to passivity. The person in the act of decision has the power to actively consider the variety of motives and the valency of their objects and to choose in the light of memory and anticipation. On the other hand, to think of such a choice as somehow necessarily an escape from an assumption of psychic determinism is also to allow for no difference of regions and to assume that determinism means inevitably only passivity. Within a broad assumption of determinism, how a psychological event is determined differs from how a biological or a physical event is determined. How a psychological event at one level of development is determined differs from how a psychological event at another level of development is determined. To understand these differences is to understand the structure and dynamics of the separate regions and levels.
The Superego Psychology of Freedom: Freedom For The I of fulfillment (which could be thought of as an ego nucleus or a grade within the ego) is the forerunner of the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
101
benevolent superego. The object of fulfillment (in primitive mentation, the undifferentiated I/object of fulfillment)being already with the anticipated object-gives existence from the beginning its futural caste under the sign of the superego. This would in no way diminish the critical importance of the step in superego consolidation correlative with resolution of the oedipal phase and its recapitulation at a higher level in adolescence. Nor would the emphasis on the archaic nature of the benevolent superego in any way subtract from the equally archaic and equally fundamental nature of superego forerunners as defense evoked by delay. The heightening of the threshold of need in response to absence of the object is one aspect of the response to delay. It can be interpreted as the internalization of a no and as one form of representation of the object. In Rapaport's phrasing (Miller, 1967), "Structure building is an identification already; it represents the absent object." Another aspect of response to delay is the formation of an image of the object as anticipated on the basis of a prior experience of satisfaction. The latter can be interpreted as the internalization of a yes, which institutes trust and, of course, also is a representation of the object. Freedom is structured both by the no- by the defenses and the more flexible controls that evolve from them-and also by the yes, by trust. (Freedom is not simply a matter of freedom from frustration. A no can be benevolent and actuating and a yes-in the case of parental overindulgence or of superego corruption-can be malevolent and deactuating.) Loewald (1962) has written of degrees of internalization. Aspects of the relationship with the object that are internalized as superego elements can be further internalized as core aspects of the ego. But the fate of the superego as a structure is neither to be discarded nor to be merged with the ego, but to remain as that internalized but still projected gradient within the I toward which I live as toward my future; it is the embodiment of ideals and values claimed as my own, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
102
JOSEPH H. SMITH
but still heard also as partaking of a parental voice in the context of an original parental presence. Claimed as one's own must be understood as a manifestation of autonomy through which certain values of the parents have been claimed and others disclaimed. T o that extent, superego elements achieve an impersonal, depersonified stability. One could think of two meanings or directions of "degree of internalization." One would refer to a superego element becoming an aspect of the ego core. The other would refer to claiming as one's own a parental value. This would be a greater degree of internalization but within the superego core. My point is that this latter process of internalization, claiming, and depersonification is never without remainder and that the remainder may be subject to characteristic transformations of its own. The individual remains an intentional, object-oriented creature living toward a future and toward new objects shaped in some degree by his past. The ultimate fate of original experience with the absent object may be a tendency, possibly even a universal conscious or unconscious actuality to posit, in Ricoeur's (1950, pp. 3233) terms, "a presence which constantly precedes my own power of self-affirmation, even when the latter always seems to be on the verge of engulfing it." The superego is heard and felt, not only as the voice of claimed, internalized, depersonified values, but also as the voice and presence of the object, in whatever form, that I anticipate and that I experience as anticipating me. Rapaport (1959, pp. 464-465) in speaking of morality, religious feelings, and the superego mentioned that "What we learn as we mature, or in analysis, is not that the whole world is rational . . . what we learn is to accept that there is within us something utterly irrational. One comes to accept that there is something in us which requires such things, and one yields to it to a great extent, and generally one feels happy to yield to it." In contrast to earlier dependency on parental approval, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
103
we ordinarily stress the impersonal nature of the established superego. But impersonal in this sense need not imply dispassionate. Ricoeur's way of phrasing what he would consider the ultimate transfiguration of primitive trust, cited above, no doubt seems foreign to most of us. However, the task of comprehending phenomena to which our superego concept refers was, prior to analysis, the province of philosophers and theologians, and we may still benefit and our superego concept may be enriched by attending to their insights. One dimension of what we mean by superego depersonification was expressed, for instance, by Kierkegaard (1851, p. 158) as follows: " . . the race, or a considerable number of individuals within the race, have outgrown the childish notion that another person can represent the unconditional fo; them and in their stead. Very well; but for all that, the unconditional does not cease to be necessary. Rather it is the more necessary the more the individual outgrows childish dependence upon other men. Hence 'the individual' himself must relate himself to the unconditional. "
.
Conclusion
The psychoanalyst must account for the development of human autonomy within the assumption of a thoroughgoing psychological determinism. It is a hard and often-avoided paradox that the assumption of psychic determinism, while challenging any easy assumption of freedom, at the same time claims intelligibility for all behavior and thus leaves open the possibility of defining and accounting for human freedom. The alternative to avoiding the paradox is perhaps not that it should be overcome or resolved, but that it should be accepted and entered into as the necessary context for the thinking of freedom. Avoiding the paradox would be to assume that behavior is to some extent determined and to some extent not determined. Accepting the paradox is to acquiesce on the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
104
JOSEPH H. SMITH
assumption that no aspect of behavior is undetermined, yet also to acknowledge that the basic purpose of therapy is to actuate and to enhance the capacity to choose. Development proceeds from passive behavior with minimal or no knowledge of motives, means, or goals, toward an enlarged understanding of motives and an enlarged range of means and goals to be considered. Choice in this latter, more complex worldthough still determined, according to the psychoanalytic assumption-is neither narrowly blind nor passively experienced. What is influential in human behavior is probably more an envisioned future than a remembered past. While it is true that the envisioned future is shaped by the past, it is not a perfect replica of the past, which means there is leeway for self-initiated change. This leeway transcends the determinism that is proper to the realm of inanimate objects, but is an essential aspect of psychic determinism. In this consideration of freedom I have moved from ego to superego psychology, and I have associated freedom from with the former and freedom for with the latter. I am uncertain how valid this is. Surely there are ego functions that are freedom for or freedom to-to remember, to move, to think, etc. Perhaps the whole gamut of acts that mark our freedom could be considered ego functions. However, I have opted to follow Waelder (1936) in seeing the superego as the uniquely human structure, related to the long dependency period-the gradual and unique way of differentiation; the means of decentering in which a world of temporal dimensions opens up and thus the presupposition of specifically human ego functions. Language, for example, is an ego function, but is inconceivable outside the opening of a world mediated by the superego. I have tried to convey the idea of dimensions of freedom which open up with developmental levels and to formulate such a sequence within an assumption of psychic determinism. In so doing, I have not rejected the point of Spinoza and of Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
105
Hampshire (1951)- as I understand them- that the degree of freedom of the self is a function of knowledge of the self. However, I have tried to add to that an emphasis on the benevolent aspect of the superego and on trust as a necessary context of freedom at every stage of development. Freedom is not merely a function of the self-knowledge we already have, but also a way of being toward the future and toward that which we do not yet know. Finally, I have tried to present a psychoanalytic concept of freedom that is both compatible with an assumption of psychic determinism and that also has a chance of compatibility with the poetics of the will which Ricoeur has yet to write.
Summary Human freedom, understood as a power to actuate and be actuated in directions that promise the deepest synthesis of basic needs and ideals, has been considered in the light of the concept of autonomy, of Rapaport's activity-passivity formulation, and of Paul Ricoeur's reflection on the voluntary and the involuntary. Under the heading of the ego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom from, nonperemptory activity (e.g., free attending of the infant or free play of the child) was contrasted with the peremptory moment of crisis with the aim of showing how each shapes the other. Under the superego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom for, an emphasis was given to the benevolent aspect of primitive superego elements and their eventual depersonified guiding function. REFERENCES Cassirer, E. (1936), Deterrninrirn and Indeterminism in Modern Physics. Tr. 0.Theodor Benfey with an introduction by Henry Margenau. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956.
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
106
JOSEPH H. SMITH
Erikson, E. H. (1961). Psychological reality and historical actuality. In: Inright and Responsibility. New York: Norton. 1964, pp. 159-215. Freud, S. (1905), Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Standard Edition, 8. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. Hampshire. S. (1951), Spinoza. Baltimore: Penguin Books. (1975). Freedom of the Individual. London: Chatto & Windus. Holt, R. S. (1967a), Ego autonomy re-evaluated. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:481503. (1967b), On freedom, autonomy and the redirection of psychoanalytic theory. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:524-536. Kierkegaard, S. (1851), The Point of Viewfor My Work as an Author. Harper Torchbooks. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Loewald, H. W. (1962), Internalization, separation, mourning, and the superego. Psychoanal. Quart., 31:483-504. -(197la), Some considerations on repetition and repetition compulsion. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 52:59-66. (1971b), On motivation and instinct theory. The Psychoanalq.tic Study of the Child, 26:91-128. New York: Quadrangle. Miller, S. C. (1962), Ego autonomy in sensory deprivation, isolation, and stress. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 43:l-20. -(1967). Commentary on Holt (1967). Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:503. Rapaport, D. (1951). The conceptual model of psychoanalysis. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, 1967. pp. 405-431. -(1953), Some metapsychological considerations concerning activity and passivity. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books. 1967, pp. 530-567 (see also p. 739). (1957a), Letter: response to Robert W. White's review of Heinz L. and Rowena R. Ansbacher's T h e Individual Psychology of A b e d Adler. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, 1967, pp. 682-684. -(1957b), T h e theoryof ego autonomy: A generalization. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, pp. 722-744. -(1959). Seminars on Elementary Metapsychology, mimeographed transcripts, ed. S. C. Miller, Vol. I, 11, and 111. -(1960). O n the psychoanalytic theory of motivation. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, pp. 853-915. Ricoeur, P. (1950), Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated and with an Introduction by E. Kohak. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1966. (1960a). Fallible Man. Translated by C. Kelbley. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965. -(1960b), The Symbolism of Evil. New York: Harper & Row. Beacon Paperback, 1969. (1969). The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. D. Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1974, pp. 468-496. -(1970), Freud and Philosophy: An &say on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
-
-
-
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
107
(1976a). Psychoanalysis and the work of art. In: Psychiatry and the Humanities, ed. J . H. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 3-33. (1976b). The question of proof in psychoanalysis, plenary address at the May, 1976 meet in^ of the Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. ~ u b i n s t i i nB. , B. (1963, On the problemof ego autonomy. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:506-512. Schafer, R. (1975), Action: Its place in psychoanalytic interpretation and theory. The Annual of Psychoanaly$rj, 1:159-196. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. Smith. J. H. (1976), Language and the genealogy of the absent object. In: Psychiatry and the Humanities, 1:145-170. New Haven: Yale University Press. (1977). The pleasure principle. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 58:l-10. Waelder, R. (1936). The principle of multiple function: Observations on overdetermination. Psychoanal. Quart., 5:45-62. Also in: Observation, Theory, Application, ed. S . A. Cuttman. New York: International Universities Press, 1976. pp. 68-83. White, R. W. (1963), Ego and Reality in Psychoanalytic Theory: A Proposal Regarding Independent Ego Energies [Psychological Issues, Monogr. 111. New York: International Universities Press. Wolff, P. (1959), Observations on Newborn Infants. Psychosom. Med., 21: 110-118. 4705 Locut Hill Court Befhesda, Maryland 2001 4
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
:
HUMAN FREEDOM:
:
FREEDOM FROM AND
-
JOSEPH
H. SMITH,M.D.
FREEDOM FOR
M
FREEDOM, which I take to be a power to actuate and be actuated in directions that promise the deepest synthesis of basic needs and ideals. My outline of the psychoanalytic understanding of freedom will begin with a discussion of freedom and psychic determinism and will center on the consideration of two early moments of self-evident freedom- the free attending of the infant and the free play of the child. I shall review some of our assumptions regarding the most primitive steps in mental development and also some part of our thinking about the most advanced levels of ego and superego functioning. Under the heading of the ego psychology of freedom, understod primarily as freedom from, I shal1.contrast the nonperemptory moments of attending and play with the peremptory moment of crisis, with the intention of showing how each shapes the other. Under the heading of the superego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom for, I shall review superego formation and function both in its defensive and its benevolent aspects, with an emphasis on the preoedipal appearance of both. In considering the superego as ego grade or as the I beyond the I, my purpose is to approach Ricoeur's location of man's fallibility in a persisting noncoincidence of the self with itself (Ricoeur, 1960a, p. 4). Indeed, my more general purpose in Y THEME IS HUMAN
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
88
JOSEPH H. SMITH
attempting to make explicit the psychoanalytic understanding of freedom is to suggest its compatibility with the concept of freedom advanced by Ricoeur in his ongoing studies on the philosophy of the will.' Freedom and Psychic Determinism
Although psychoanalysts ordinarily speak of autonomy and not of freedom, I would like to outline a concept of freedom which is implicit in psychoanalytic thought and practice, without prejudging whether or not it is precisely coterminous with the concept of ego autonomy. The danger in talking of freedom is that it could be taken as a reference to what Ricoeur calls the "freedom of indifferencen-a "freedom" devoid of constraints, without possibility of sustaining the dramatic, unstructured, literally out of this world, and thus trivial and uninteresting. On the other hand, the risk in not attempting to make explicit our concept of freedom is that psychic determinism could be misunderstood as referring to a simplistic determinism indiscriminately taken over from physics as a psychology of passivity, suitable for use in what Ricoeur calls "determinism as alibi," and just as devoid of paradox and the dramatic and just as uninteresting and trivial as the "freedom of indifference." Of course one could argue that these alternate risks are not so easily comparable. It is standard, for instance, to Freedom and Nature was published in 1950 as the first of three projected volumes on the philosophy of the will. The first-the eidetiw, the essential form or structure of the will-was to be followed by a volume dealing with the empirics of the will and then by a final volume dealing with the poetics of the will. The second has been published in two parts: Fallible Man (1960a) and The Symbolism of Evil (1960b). The articles published in The Conjict of Interpretations (1969) give some idea of the form to be taken by his forthcoming poetics of the will. Ricoeur's major contribution to our field is, of course, Freud and Philosophy (1970). His recent specifically psychoanalytic commentaries have included the Edith Weigert Lecture of the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities of the Washington School of Psychiatry. "Psychoanalysis and the Work of Art" (1976a). and the plenary address at the May 1976 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, "The Question of Proof in Psychoanalysis" (1976b).
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
89
acknowledge that they are opposites not to each other but to unfreedom and indeterminacy; that thpy are appropriate to different universes of discourse,' one having its realm of meaning in subjectivity, the other in objectivity; that both are interpretive assumptions beyond the arena of proof; and that for all these reasons there could be no real clash betwzen freedom and determinism. Furthermore, even if a clash were possible, matters would still not be on all fours because no serious man would advocate an absolute freedom without constraint, whereas every determinist worth his salt is an absolutist. Ricoeur has recognized a heroic dimension in such hard-nosed absolutism and elevated it into something approaching equal status in the conflict of interpretations. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud destroy illusions, expel man from a primary nayvete, and show him fundamental dimensions of his actual nature-for Ricoeur, an essential step in preparing the way for the achievement of a second nayvete. But the point I wish to stress here is that determinism is not simplistic by reason of its absolutism. Ricoeur insists that there is no such thing as determinism that is not absolute (1950, pp. 68, 187, 350, 422) and also cites Freud to that effect (p. 401). What is si,mplistic is the assumption that psychic determinism means that the subject, just like an inanimate object, is passively at the mercy of forces acting within and upon him. Stated in that way and going only that far, Ricoeur and psychoanalytic thought agree.3 The disSchafer's (1973, p. 185) action model could be seen as constituting a universe of discourse in which the question of freedom or determinism would not arise. However, what his model would reject or transcend is not freedom and psychic determinism as outlined here, but simplistic notions of "conscious autonomy" or "free will," on the one hand, and "a natural science, deterministic model," on the other. ' Of course, there are other profound levels of agreement quite aside from agreement or disagreement on the issue of determinism. For instance, and in agreement with psychoanalytic (Loewald, 1971b) and Cassirerian (1936) thought, Ricoeur (1950, pp. 224-225) wrote: "... dynamic concepts are applicable to several regions without belonging to any. In the 'region' of things or in the 'region'
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
90
JOSEPH H. SMITH
agreement comes with the psychoanalytic assumption of psychic determinism as absolute. Now, within such an assumption, is the whole hierarchy, structure, and variousness of life reduced to rubble, to "mental physics" to a play of forces that explains all in the sense of explaining away? I will here anticipate my response to this question in the form of perhaps an all-too-familiar assertion. Freedom, even freedom of choice in the most effortless moment of the child's play, is multiply determined. "Determined" in the context of psychological investigation means meaningful or non chaotic. It is not an assumption that reduces the more complex structure of the child's play to the less complex structure of the infant's attending. It does not blur but sustains the possibilities of distinguishing not only these but also other and higher levels of structure and functioning. It is not a reductionistic assumption which lends itself to firm placement on only one side of a conflict of interpretations. It is an article of faith which claims that the worldthe actual world and ourselves with and in it, the actual world in both the sense of physics and in the sense of Heidegger-is intelligible. These two worlds- the world of the humanly significant and the world of physical fact-are one world, but they are also two regions of world, each requiring its own ontology, a cardinal point in Cassirer's thought (1936). The quest for a metaphysical doctrine that would not rule out the possibilities of psychic freedom occasionally leads of consciousness there are many other concepts which thus overlap all 'regions,' as the terms object, property, relation, plurality, etc. Phenomenology of consciousness requires dynamics, just as it requires other concepts of 'formal ontology.' It is even possible to construct a purely psychological dynamics without reference to physics or even psychology. It was to avoid the sliding of psychological dynamics (with its concepts of force, tension, release, etc.) into a physical interpretation that we have held the description of willing as force in suspension until now and that we have considered it as thought, that is as practical, a-dynamic intension. Now we must not forget that voluntary and involuntary forces are also the forces which evoke or actualize a meaning."
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN. FREEDOM
91
psychoanalysts to invoke Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle (including Waelder, 1936, p. 30, although the gist of his thinking, e.g., pp. 50-51, accords with Cassirer's). Here are relevant passages from Cassirer: "Kant always insisted on the principle that no augmentation but only a distortion of the fields of knowledge results when we permit their boundaries to run into each other. Such a running together of boundaries occurs when statements about indeterminism in quantum theory are directly connected with metaphysical speculations about the freedom of the will . . . [it is] necessary to perceive each set of problems in sharp isolation and to see in each set its own characteristic uniqueness" (p, 197). "Ethics would certainly be in a bad way-it would lose all dignity-if it could maintain its authority and fulfill its function in no other way than by keeping a lookout for gaps in the scientific explanation of nature and taking shelter, so to speak, in these gaps" (pp. 197-198). Interpreting Spinoza, Cassirer wrote: "We cannot nor do we wish to withdraw from the dominion of general laws of nature; but these take on a different character when they refer not to the motions of bodies but to our self-conscious activity, to our representing, desiring and willing." Interpreting Kant, he wrote: "As our actions belong to the realm of nature, so they also belong to the realm of purposes and must be referred to the systematic unity of this realm and judged in accordance'with it. This judgment is governed by entirely different concepts and rules from those on which the intuition of the phenomenon 'nature' rests" (p. 201). "Kant can remain a strict empirical determinist and can nevertheless assert that precisely this empirical determination leaves the way open for another determination through the moral law of the pure autonomy of the will. The two are not mutually exclusive . . . but rather require and condition each other" (p. 202). Finally, Cassirer wrote: "The examples quoted are only to prove one thing, that none of the great thinkers who were Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
92
JOSEPH H. SMITH
deeply conscious of the problems connected with this concept and continuously wrestled with them ever yielded to the temptation to master them simply by denying the general causal principle and equating freedom with causelessness. Such an attempt is not to be found in Plato or Spinoza or Kant. For all of them, freedom did not mean indeterminateness but rather a certain form of determinability . . ." (p. 203). It could be said that determinism as a concept has a purely abstract aspect, which permits its deployment in various regions where its specific meaning will be defined by the character of the region. The assumption of psychic determinism is not a reduction of the psychic to the physical, nor is it posited, in the first place, as a means of understanding a connection between the psychological and the biological. It is an assumption on purely psychological grounds which attributes intelligibility -meaningfulness -to all psychic processes. T o paraphrase a remark of Loewald's (1971a, p. 61; see also Loewald, 1971b, pp. 100-101 for a similar observation on psychic energy), the thing to keep in mind about psychic determinism is that it is psychic. The problem of posing determinism in its aspect of abstract concept is that it might be taken to mean a general theory. But determinism is not an empirically grounded fact, or a scientific hypothesis, or even a theory in the sense of being a claimed framework for intelligible perception or explanation of aspects of reality. It is subject neither to proof nor disproof, and all discussions of the topic that involve efforts to prove or disprove it are sterile. T o that extent, Hampshire is quite right in pronouncing the matter uninteresting (1975, p. 113). It does not fall within the subject matter of science. It has its life as a prescientific basic assumption, and it provokes both discord and accord with reference to the claimed intuition that our freedom is simultaneously both more than and less than merely relative-an intuition of the paradox of freedom in a determinate world, perhaps not to be expressed in terms of either science or philosophy. It is an intuition of Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
93
paradox, but is also a working assumption within which we all more or less knowingly carry out our projects. Ricoeur does not address himself to the question of psychic determinism and freedom in either/or fashion. He does demonstrate how a determinism proper to the realm of physics would not be proper to the realm of the will. On this point, psychoanalysis is in agreement. Freedom as Hierarchy: Two Early Paradigms
In 1905, Freud wrote "I doubt if we are in a position to undertake anything without having an intention in view. If we do not require our mental apparatus at the moment for supplying one of our indispensable satisfactions, we allow it itself to work in the direction of pleasure and we seek to derive pleasure from its own activity. I. suspect that this is in general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation, but I understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this statement" (1905, pp. 95-96). As a text for introducing the psychoanalytic concepts of freedom and intentionality, this passage has limitations. For one, it reflects a persistent confusion through which Freud struggled for a never fully clarified differentiation of the pleasure principle from pleasure seeking. It does, however, contain the kernel of an idea which unites freedom and intentionality (and sublimation to boot). Let us transpose the passage from its setting in adult humor to the earliest experiences of consciousness. Here, a caveat should be entered, to nonanalysts especially, that interest in genesis does not mean that the higher or later is understood only in terms of the lower or earlier. The para* Cf. Ricoeur (1950. pp. 99-106) on pleasure as goal, which the thrust of Freud's thought approaches. Although there are passages in which he specifically differentiates the two. which Rapaport cites (1960, pp. 875-877), the closest he came in his basic theory-building to clear differentiation was in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," but, oddly, the meaning of that title and that book is not beyond the pleasure principle, but beyond pleasure seeking (Smith, 1977). Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
94
JOSEPH H. SMITH
digmatic basis for interpreting an early, primitive mode of functioning is always a later, more advanced mode. But once an early mode is identified, the two interpret each other in a way that may shed light on previously unnoted aspects of each or even reveal modes higher than the originally paradigmatic one. The moment in primitive consciousness which the passage would describe is that of nonperemptory awareness-the initially fleeting periods of wakefulness before hunger has mounted to peremptory level and before falling asleep following satiety (Wolff, 1959), wherein the infant can behold his world in the wonder which Descartes and Ricoeur emphasize. Could we say "free to behold in this prevoluntary, pre-ego, preautonomous state? If so, what are the significant constraints that safeguard even this level of freedom from being the freedom of indifference? . The activity of free attending occurs by virtue of conflictfree functions, including those innately given-but nonreflexive and thus modifiable-adaptive functions which Ricoeur terms "preformed skills" (1950, pp. 233, 237-238, 243). These factors, the mother-child situation, and the objects attended, can be seen as at once enabling and constraining aspects- as structuring aspects. But another shaping factor stands in the background of this activity. It is the consciously mute but effective influence of a prior moment of peremptory need when attention had been riveted on the object of need. What justifies the interpretation of this additional constraint upon the free play of attention? Prior to observation, one proceeds by inference in the light of a higher paradigrnthe free play of the child. There we know that the play is free, i.e., the child has options, is not peremptorily compelled but free to invent variations on the theme of his interest of the moment, but we also know that the play, no matter how joyous, is guided by underlying themes of serious significance to the child, themes having to do with important needs and Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING H U M A N FREEDOM
95
their objects, important traumas and their mastery. Of course, with development comes hierarchic structuralization. Basic needs give rise to derivative needs and quasineeds, which is to say that the intentional structure of the child's play is multilayered. How do these two paradigmatic moments of self-evident freedom-free attending of the infant and free play of the child-shed light on each other and on freedom itself? First, the greater structural complexity in the child is correlative with an active and enlarged freedom in the child's play; by comparison, the infant's free attending is passive and prevoluntary. Difference in the two levels was conceptualized in terms of passivity and activity by Rapaport (1953) in an important article which Brenman (Rapaport, 1953, p. 535) suggested might have been treated under the general heading of "metapsychological considerations of freedom of the will." Erikson, in his article "Psychological Reality and Historical Actuality" (1961), later questioned the term passivity out of consideration for the infant's strength in actuating maternal response; in a sense, mother and infant are equal partners in a strength of mutual actuation. Though in fact compatible with Rapaport's conceptualization, Erikson's point raises the question of whether we might not be able to give the name of freedom to aspects of even the most primitive behavior. Even at the moment of frustration, the infant is not locked into only passively experiencing the pain of need. Though fostered and led by drive and affect, what we assume takes shape ideationally in the conscious mind of the infant is an image of the object- an image of fulfillment- and it is as much this as signals of distress that actuates a maternal response. It is an innately given power of access to the object and a power to anticipate and, in anticipating, to actuate the object. Regarding the engendering of a history, Ricoeur (1969, p. 405) wrote: ". . . history . . . is less the experience of the change of everything than the tension created by the expectation of a fulfillment; history is itself hope of history, for each fulfillment Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
96
JOSEPH H. SMITH
is perceived as confirmation, pledge, and repetition of the promise. This last designates an increase, a surplus, a 'not yet' which maintains the tension of history." I have suggested that both moments of freedom, each of which embodies Freud's delineation of a time of freedom from the compelling pressure of peremptory need, are nevertheless shaped by such needs; that the prior and anticipated experience of delay in supply of an indispensable satisfaction, even though not in conscious focus, continues to influence, to structure, and to sustain a dramatic quality in the spontaneity of free attending and free play. This is not to say that we understand the meaning of the spontaneous activity by reduction, i.e., only in the light of potentially peremptory needs now in abeyance. The shaping, structuring-even constituting -influence goes in both directions (Loewald, 197lb). The dialectic needs to be fully traced out.
The Ego Psychology of Freedom: Freedom From A . The Dialectic of the Peremptory and the Nonperemptory Ricoeur in his early work (1950, p. 252) questioned, and Robert White in his mature work (1963) indicted, psychoanalysis for its attention to crisis as opposed to freedom in early development; to anxiety rather than wonder; to motives as they compel rather than as they incline. It is true that the primary models of thought, affect, and action as constructed or reconstructed by Rapaport (1951) have their setting in such critical moments. However, it is also true that Rapaport, more than anyone, stressed the human capacity for autonomy as an achievement partially enabled by the very drives that yield to autonomous control. In his terms the instinctual drives are the assurance of autonomy from external stimuli-the proof against stimulus slavery. The drives are the most vivid hallmark and ultimate guarantor that the subject comes into being as himself a center of motiDownloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
97
vation. On the other hand, the attunement to and dependence on others and the external world ultimately guarantee autonomy from being passively enslaved by the instinctual drives. The always relative autonomy of the ego arises in the context of these polar inner and outer dependencies, each providing a foothold and fostering a way of avoiding enslavement to the other.5 Rapaport wrote both of ultimate and proximal guarantors of autonomy, but with an acknowledged accent on autonomy from rather than autonomy for (1957b, p. 731). Autonomy from implies conflict and ultimately a peremptory moment. Autonomy for implies relative freedom from conflict and, in early development, a nonperemptory moment. Let us look in more detail at how these moments shape each other. In the Freudian text the paradigmatic crisis occurs when need mounts to peremptory level in the absence of the object. The accent is on frustration-a state of being impulse ridden or impulse driven- and a primordial crying out for the object. That is, even at this primitive, preobjectal, undifferentiated level, behavior is structured by an innately given coordination of need and object of need. In Rapaport's phrasing ". . . the defining characteristic object is the outstanding conceptual invention ,in Freud's theory of the instinctual drive" (1960, p. 877). It is the cornerstone of the "profound intentional analysis" (Kohak in Ricoeur, 1950, p. xxv) embodied in the Freudian text. In psychoanalysis the instinctual-drive theory is not something apart from object-relations theory; it .is objectrelations theory in its most fundamental form. After a first experience of satisfaction, mounting need is represented as a wish in the form of an image of the absent object of need-an image of the prior experience of satis1 believe this general statement of Rapaport's thesis stands unchallenged by questions raised by Miller (1962) and Holt (1967a) regarding the specific empirical phenomena to which Rapaport pointed as evidence for or application of the thesis. For pertinent discussions of freedom and autonomy see also Holt (1967b) and Rubinstein (1967).
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
98
JOSEPH H. SMITH
faction, no matter how diffusely, globally, or partially represented in the mind of the infant. As hallucination, i.e., prior to the differentiation of memory and perception or of ideation and perception, such an image is termed an identity of perception. But what allows for moving from an identity of perception to an identity of thought, i.e., to the capacity for distinguishing between an idea -an image -of the object and the actual object? It is interaction with the object at a nonperemptory moment. Such a moment of freedom from the riveting of attention on the object only in its dimension as object of imperative need provides the leeway for active thought to receive a variety of perspectives on the object and for these to be transcended in a synthesis of recognition of the object- a synthesis which, Ricoeur (1960a) suggests, is expressed in speech as a naming of the object. But prior to naming and the human-speech capacity, there is a structure-a syntax-of behavior in the anlage of a noun phrase as the "I" which has its focus in a need represented by affect, and the anlage of a verb phrase in the action pattern and the object which allows for fulfillment of the need (Smith, 1976). It is not only that the influence of a prior or anticipated peremptory moment sustains a dramatic quality in the nonperemptory; the structure of the peremptory moment is also the structure of the nonperemptory. Both are embodiments of the motivational, need-action-object structure of behavior. But it is the nonperemptory moment which allows this structure to come to light and be recognized and differentiated, first of all by revealing the object in aspects other than those directly tied to imperative need. The two moments shape and constitute each other. The interiorization, for example, of the capacity for control as active delay even in the face of peremptory need is partially derived from the experience of delay in a nonperemptory moment. Such experience carries over as an influence and modifies repression, a prior passive and peremptory defense against the need, in the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
99
direction of a judgment to delay. Similarly, synthesis of fragmentary perspectives into a unitary idea of the object, achieved at a nonperemptory moment in the presence of the object, is fostered by the prior experience of absence of the object. I have hardly more than touched on the psychoanalytic theory of ego autonomy as advanced in the work of Freud, Hartmann, and RapaportY6 only gathering elements sufficient to highlight the dialectic of the peremptory and the nonperemptory and the interconnectedness of autonomy from and autonomy for, which I take to be essential to a nontrivial psychoanalytic concept of freedom. I would like to point toward superego psychology by summarizing these thoughts on ego psychology in the following way. The ego arises not only by differentiation from an ego-id matrix, but also from an immersion in its objects. Primitively, both peremptory and nonperemptory perception and ideation are focused on the object. The mute "I" of primitive ideation, even prior to differentiation of the I and not I, is already ahead of itself, over there with the to-bedifferentiated object in an image of remembered and anticipated fulfillment, with its own affective attunement to the image of fulfillment. The I at the core of indigence, also mute, but the I that can come to display the strength of indigence as its own, is manifest at this early level only in affective signals of need. Two points: the first is the delineation of an I of fulfillment and an I of indigence-a variation of the good-me, bad-me phrasing-which approaches Ricoeur's thesis of a fallibility-vulnerability to a particular kind of conflictrelated to a persistent lack of coincidence of the I with itself (1960a). The second emphasizes the object as the primitive V have bypassed specific consideration of Rapaport's article on motivation (1960) and aIso Loewald's (1971b). The former is an important response to what is essentially a misreading of the Freudian text by White (1963-see also Rapaport, 1957a). The latter is a rich discussion of many issues scarcely approached here.
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
100
JOSEPH H. SMITH
point of both peremptory and nonperemptory ideational focus. To underline the central ideational focus of the object is, again, to underline purposiveness and anticipation as embedded in the structure of both peremptory and nonperemptory psychic action even prior to the opening up of the temporal dimensions. B. Repression and Judgment
Primal repression refers to the innately given direction of attention away from indigence as danger and toward the object. With structural development, an internalized capacity to delay- repression proper -evolves, which can eventually be replaced by an act of judgment. To think of the act of judgment itself simply as a passive vector result of multiple forces is to misunderstand the psychological in terms of the physical. The idea of a receptive moment at the heart of every psychic act does not reduce activity to passivity. The person in the act of decision has the power to actively consider the variety of motives and the valency of their objects and to choose in the light of memory and anticipation. On the other hand, to think of such a choice as somehow necessarily an escape from an assumption of psychic determinism is also to allow for no difference of regions and to assume that determinism means inevitably only passivity. Within a broad assumption of determinism, how a psychological event is determined differs from how a biological or a physical event is determined. How a psychological event at one level of development is determined differs from how a psychological event at another level of development is determined. To understand these differences is to understand the structure and dynamics of the separate regions and levels.
The Superego Psychology of Freedom: Freedom For The I of fulfillment (which could be thought of as an ego nucleus or a grade within the ego) is the forerunner of the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
101
benevolent superego. The object of fulfillment (in primitive mentation, the undifferentiated I/object of fulfillment)being already with the anticipated object-gives existence from the beginning its futural caste under the sign of the superego. This would in no way diminish the critical importance of the step in superego consolidation correlative with resolution of the oedipal phase and its recapitulation at a higher level in adolescence. Nor would the emphasis on the archaic nature of the benevolent superego in any way subtract from the equally archaic and equally fundamental nature of superego forerunners as defense evoked by delay. The heightening of the threshold of need in response to absence of the object is one aspect of the response to delay. It can be interpreted as the internalization of a no and as one form of representation of the object. In Rapaport's phrasing (Miller, 1967), "Structure building is an identification already; it represents the absent object." Another aspect of response to delay is the formation of an image of the object as anticipated on the basis of a prior experience of satisfaction. The latter can be interpreted as the internalization of a yes, which institutes trust and, of course, also is a representation of the object. Freedom is structured both by the no- by the defenses and the more flexible controls that evolve from them-and also by the yes, by trust. (Freedom is not simply a matter of freedom from frustration. A no can be benevolent and actuating and a yes-in the case of parental overindulgence or of superego corruption-can be malevolent and deactuating.) Loewald (1962) has written of degrees of internalization. Aspects of the relationship with the object that are internalized as superego elements can be further internalized as core aspects of the ego. But the fate of the superego as a structure is neither to be discarded nor to be merged with the ego, but to remain as that internalized but still projected gradient within the I toward which I live as toward my future; it is the embodiment of ideals and values claimed as my own, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
102
JOSEPH H. SMITH
but still heard also as partaking of a parental voice in the context of an original parental presence. Claimed as one's own must be understood as a manifestation of autonomy through which certain values of the parents have been claimed and others disclaimed. T o that extent, superego elements achieve an impersonal, depersonified stability. One could think of two meanings or directions of "degree of internalization." One would refer to a superego element becoming an aspect of the ego core. The other would refer to claiming as one's own a parental value. This would be a greater degree of internalization but within the superego core. My point is that this latter process of internalization, claiming, and depersonification is never without remainder and that the remainder may be subject to characteristic transformations of its own. The individual remains an intentional, object-oriented creature living toward a future and toward new objects shaped in some degree by his past. The ultimate fate of original experience with the absent object may be a tendency, possibly even a universal conscious or unconscious actuality to posit, in Ricoeur's (1950, pp. 3233) terms, "a presence which constantly precedes my own power of self-affirmation, even when the latter always seems to be on the verge of engulfing it." The superego is heard and felt, not only as the voice of claimed, internalized, depersonified values, but also as the voice and presence of the object, in whatever form, that I anticipate and that I experience as anticipating me. Rapaport (1959, pp. 464-465) in speaking of morality, religious feelings, and the superego mentioned that "What we learn as we mature, or in analysis, is not that the whole world is rational . . . what we learn is to accept that there is within us something utterly irrational. One comes to accept that there is something in us which requires such things, and one yields to it to a great extent, and generally one feels happy to yield to it." In contrast to earlier dependency on parental approval, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
103
we ordinarily stress the impersonal nature of the established superego. But impersonal in this sense need not imply dispassionate. Ricoeur's way of phrasing what he would consider the ultimate transfiguration of primitive trust, cited above, no doubt seems foreign to most of us. However, the task of comprehending phenomena to which our superego concept refers was, prior to analysis, the province of philosophers and theologians, and we may still benefit and our superego concept may be enriched by attending to their insights. One dimension of what we mean by superego depersonification was expressed, for instance, by Kierkegaard (1851, p. 158) as follows: " . . the race, or a considerable number of individuals within the race, have outgrown the childish notion that another person can represent the unconditional fo; them and in their stead. Very well; but for all that, the unconditional does not cease to be necessary. Rather it is the more necessary the more the individual outgrows childish dependence upon other men. Hence 'the individual' himself must relate himself to the unconditional. "
.
Conclusion
The psychoanalyst must account for the development of human autonomy within the assumption of a thoroughgoing psychological determinism. It is a hard and often-avoided paradox that the assumption of psychic determinism, while challenging any easy assumption of freedom, at the same time claims intelligibility for all behavior and thus leaves open the possibility of defining and accounting for human freedom. The alternative to avoiding the paradox is perhaps not that it should be overcome or resolved, but that it should be accepted and entered into as the necessary context for the thinking of freedom. Avoiding the paradox would be to assume that behavior is to some extent determined and to some extent not determined. Accepting the paradox is to acquiesce on the Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
104
JOSEPH H. SMITH
assumption that no aspect of behavior is undetermined, yet also to acknowledge that the basic purpose of therapy is to actuate and to enhance the capacity to choose. Development proceeds from passive behavior with minimal or no knowledge of motives, means, or goals, toward an enlarged understanding of motives and an enlarged range of means and goals to be considered. Choice in this latter, more complex worldthough still determined, according to the psychoanalytic assumption-is neither narrowly blind nor passively experienced. What is influential in human behavior is probably more an envisioned future than a remembered past. While it is true that the envisioned future is shaped by the past, it is not a perfect replica of the past, which means there is leeway for self-initiated change. This leeway transcends the determinism that is proper to the realm of inanimate objects, but is an essential aspect of psychic determinism. In this consideration of freedom I have moved from ego to superego psychology, and I have associated freedom from with the former and freedom for with the latter. I am uncertain how valid this is. Surely there are ego functions that are freedom for or freedom to-to remember, to move, to think, etc. Perhaps the whole gamut of acts that mark our freedom could be considered ego functions. However, I have opted to follow Waelder (1936) in seeing the superego as the uniquely human structure, related to the long dependency period-the gradual and unique way of differentiation; the means of decentering in which a world of temporal dimensions opens up and thus the presupposition of specifically human ego functions. Language, for example, is an ego function, but is inconceivable outside the opening of a world mediated by the superego. I have tried to convey the idea of dimensions of freedom which open up with developmental levels and to formulate such a sequence within an assumption of psychic determinism. In so doing, I have not rejected the point of Spinoza and of Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
105
Hampshire (1951)- as I understand them- that the degree of freedom of the self is a function of knowledge of the self. However, I have tried to add to that an emphasis on the benevolent aspect of the superego and on trust as a necessary context of freedom at every stage of development. Freedom is not merely a function of the self-knowledge we already have, but also a way of being toward the future and toward that which we do not yet know. Finally, I have tried to present a psychoanalytic concept of freedom that is both compatible with an assumption of psychic determinism and that also has a chance of compatibility with the poetics of the will which Ricoeur has yet to write.
Summary Human freedom, understood as a power to actuate and be actuated in directions that promise the deepest synthesis of basic needs and ideals, has been considered in the light of the concept of autonomy, of Rapaport's activity-passivity formulation, and of Paul Ricoeur's reflection on the voluntary and the involuntary. Under the heading of the ego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom from, nonperemptory activity (e.g., free attending of the infant or free play of the child) was contrasted with the peremptory moment of crisis with the aim of showing how each shapes the other. Under the superego psychology of freedom, understood primarily as freedom for, an emphasis was given to the benevolent aspect of primitive superego elements and their eventual depersonified guiding function. REFERENCES Cassirer, E. (1936), Deterrninrirn and Indeterminism in Modern Physics. Tr. 0.Theodor Benfey with an introduction by Henry Margenau. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956.
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
106
JOSEPH H. SMITH
Erikson, E. H. (1961). Psychological reality and historical actuality. In: Inright and Responsibility. New York: Norton. 1964, pp. 159-215. Freud, S. (1905), Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Standard Edition, 8. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. Hampshire. S. (1951), Spinoza. Baltimore: Penguin Books. (1975). Freedom of the Individual. London: Chatto & Windus. Holt, R. S. (1967a), Ego autonomy re-evaluated. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:481503. (1967b), On freedom, autonomy and the redirection of psychoanalytic theory. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:524-536. Kierkegaard, S. (1851), The Point of Viewfor My Work as an Author. Harper Torchbooks. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Loewald, H. W. (1962), Internalization, separation, mourning, and the superego. Psychoanal. Quart., 31:483-504. -(197la), Some considerations on repetition and repetition compulsion. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 52:59-66. (1971b), On motivation and instinct theory. The Psychoanalq.tic Study of the Child, 26:91-128. New York: Quadrangle. Miller, S. C. (1962), Ego autonomy in sensory deprivation, isolation, and stress. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 43:l-20. -(1967). Commentary on Holt (1967). Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:503. Rapaport, D. (1951). The conceptual model of psychoanalysis. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, 1967. pp. 405-431. -(1953), Some metapsychological considerations concerning activity and passivity. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books. 1967, pp. 530-567 (see also p. 739). (1957a), Letter: response to Robert W. White's review of Heinz L. and Rowena R. Ansbacher's T h e Individual Psychology of A b e d Adler. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, 1967, pp. 682-684. -(1957b), T h e theoryof ego autonomy: A generalization. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, pp. 722-744. -(1959). Seminars on Elementary Metapsychology, mimeographed transcripts, ed. S. C. Miller, Vol. I, 11, and 111. -(1960). O n the psychoanalytic theory of motivation. In: The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. M . Gill. New York/London: Basic Books, pp. 853-915. Ricoeur, P. (1950), Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated and with an Introduction by E. Kohak. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1966. (1960a). Fallible Man. Translated by C. Kelbley. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965. -(1960b), The Symbolism of Evil. New York: Harper & Row. Beacon Paperback, 1969. (1969). The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. D. Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1974, pp. 468-496. -(1970), Freud and Philosophy: An &say on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
-
-
-
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN FREEDOM
107
(1976a). Psychoanalysis and the work of art. In: Psychiatry and the Humanities, ed. J . H. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 3-33. (1976b). The question of proof in psychoanalysis, plenary address at the May, 1976 meet in^ of the Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. ~ u b i n s t i i nB. , B. (1963, On the problemof ego autonomy. Internat. J. Psychiat., 3:506-512. Schafer, R. (1975), Action: Its place in psychoanalytic interpretation and theory. The Annual of Psychoanaly$rj, 1:159-196. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. Smith. J. H. (1976), Language and the genealogy of the absent object. In: Psychiatry and the Humanities, 1:145-170. New Haven: Yale University Press. (1977). The pleasure principle. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 58:l-10. Waelder, R. (1936). The principle of multiple function: Observations on overdetermination. Psychoanal. Quart., 5:45-62. Also in: Observation, Theory, Application, ed. S . A. Cuttman. New York: International Universities Press, 1976. pp. 68-83. White, R. W. (1963), Ego and Reality in Psychoanalytic Theory: A Proposal Regarding Independent Ego Energies [Psychological Issues, Monogr. 111. New York: International Universities Press. Wolff, P. (1959), Observations on Newborn Infants. Psychosom. Med., 21: 110-118. 4705 Locut Hill Court Befhesda, Maryland 2001 4
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on March 20, 2016
