When dialectical thinking becomes necessary: an example
In his essay, “A note on ‘soul’, ‘man’, anthropology and psychology”, Marco Heleno Barreto writes that "sometimes (nay, very often) we tend to hide from ourselves the obvious necessary presence of a human agent in order to perform the making of psychology, as if bringing any sign of human presence into our understanding of psychology-making would ipso facto throw us back into the personalistic notion of psychology, ego-psychology."
This is a conundrum that comes up often in our ISPDI discussions and surely in our own wrestling with these notions. How does the actual, empirical human "I" relate to the practice of psychological thinking, when we know from Giegerich that this practice is precisely a "non-I" discipline, in which ego is as if dead? How do we take responsibility for our interpretive activity ("Hic!") while ensuring that it represents what we would call the phenomenon thinking itself out through us?
This is just the kind of apparent duality that stops our thinking up short. Yet we readily accept that a "human agent" named Wolfgang Giegerich has indeed performed in his writings "the making of psychology". So we do actually recognize a reality that exceeds the terms of either/or thinking, yet that is not merely something other than its two apparent options; and we know intuitively that any complete sense of this reality will somehow require both truths to be fully actualized: it must be acknowledged as being 100% Wolfgang Giegerich doing his thinking and his writing, and 100% the phenomenon thinking itself out through him. The two somehow dissolve into each other through the production of a single psychological interpretation.
We still have trouble articulating how this can be the case, however, and even more challenging is how to conceptualize such an approach for ourselves, in our own thinking. This manifests in the kind of thing Marco describes: that "we tend to hide from ourselves" – that is, bracket out of our thinking – one side of the conflict, focusing instead on a catch-phrase like "letting the phenomenon think itself out through us" without a clear grasp of just what this means in reality, just what it entails for the activity of psychological thinking.
I'm not proposing an answer to this particular question here, merely using this as an example of the sort of phenomenon that calls for dialectical thinking. Its two sides must be thought together, and this entails that our thinking transform itself, becoming dialectical in order to be true to the reality it seeks to articulate. Whatever this might mean in practice, such must be our goal, must represent the form toward which our thinking strives.
This may seem daunting or confusing, but if we go back to what is before us and acknowledge that it does in fact embody these two sides (e.g., that Giegerich does indeed make psychology by letting the phenomena think themselves out through his writing), then we have a chance at clarifying this living reality through our conceptual efforts, at developing a structural understanding of a reality in motion – including how to repeat it in our own efforts.
Hi Harald! Thanks for your reply. Let me see ...
First, you write, that "we could perform philosophy understood as looking at such things from the Archimedean point of view. But this is exactly what we don’t want. We are not doing philosophy but psychology. The Human is part of the phenomenon." Well, a big YES to that! I've been thinking a lot about the essential difference between philosophy and psychology, and of course it is clearly (true) psychology's commitment to "Archimedeanlessness". Philosophy, in common with any natural science and despite its own inner struggles with this very fact, is committed to understanding reality "as it is", in its is-ness. And this has the inescapable tendency to turn "being" into an object for a subject – despite Hegel's unparalleled lesson in the inadequacy of such a formulation, and despite Heidegger and others who have since worked (with mixed success, I'd say) to complicate the notion of "being" itself.
Here we're faced with another interesting relationship that can profitably be theorized in dialectical terms, although in practice it requires a commitment to one side or the other: philosophy or psychology. (As Giegerich has specified, this doesn't apply to empirical persons, who may obviously be interested in both fields, but only comes into play in the actual practice of each respective discipline.) This is not so self-evident in our own efforts in pdi, though, because following Giegerich, we use philosophical terms quite freely. But I think it's essential in working with his ideas to wrestle with this very slippery task, and he himself doesn't make it much easier. There's a lot of discussion to be had on this question!
Now, I myself would suggest that even a clear distinction between philosophy and psychology isn't quite the last word, either. I don't know of any philosopher who has proposed as much, but I can't help but think that a truly complete phenomenology would represent, in legitimately philosophical terms, the position of psychology – because only in psychology is the phenomenon ("that which appears") conceived in its wholeness as that which appears to us and that which appears as us. This is the kind of staggering insight that a book like The Historical Emergence of the "I" articulates. This is the total Archimedeanlessness of psychology, but its implications for philosophy are unexplored.
As you say, all cultural phenomena (including us doing this) require the existence of human beings. So yes indeed, as you end your post, dialectical thinking is ALWAYS necessary when we're trying to comprehend the structure of any such phenomenon in its wholeness. Giegerich wouldn't disagree with this, either. His point about certain phenomena and not others being "soul phenomena" or having "soul dignity" is about something different, but it presumes the former point, which is that we're always "in" what he calls "general soul" or consciousness, mindedness. Specific soul phenomena emerge out of and happen "on top of" this underlying reality, as it were. It's like general soul is the ocean and specific soul refers to the particular currents (and furthermore, the former only exists in the form of the latter).
Regarding dreams, I concur with all your points. To me, the phenomenon of the dream is paradigmatic for psychology for a number of reasons: because of the pure internal dialectic of the dream itself (the dream "I" and the dream's events constitute each other absolutely); because the dream's recall adds still another level of dialectical complexity (the remembered dream in relation to its waking articulation); and because the interpretation of the dream adds still another layer (the articulated dream in relation to the empirical person of the dreamer). There's still another dimension, too, which is the interpretation of the interpretation, that is, the critical analysis of the underlying theory of one's practice of dream interpretation itself (as in Giegerich's analyses of "the neurosis of psychology"). It's like a Russian nesting doll of dialectical relationships! And that surely does necessitate a dialectical approach, an approach "in motion" but one that nevertheless demands an exceedingly precise delineation of the specific matter "in the vessel". As Hillman wrote: "If dreams are the teachers of the waking-ego, this duplicity is the essential instruction they impart" (The Dream and the Underworld, 127).
I appreciate your comments and hope this speaks to them a bit. I'm always open to these discussions!
Best!