Philosophical Assumptions

The historical development of concepts of causality in philosophy is described. Since the Enlightenment and the growth of science, exponents of the two most important concepts, determinism and teleology, have been in conflict. At the inception of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century this conflict was particularly intense. It was the cause of the first major schism in psychoanalysis between Jung and Freud. Psychoanalytic theorists have continued to disagree over this issue. Post-modernist philosophy has abolished all metaphysics and therefore called into question concepts of psychic causality. Parallel to, but uninfluenced by this development, Bion has developed a psychoanalytic conceptualization which may be seen as transcending causality. The clinical and theoretical implications of these developments are described. Introduction From the inception of psychoanalysis, its theorists have been struggling with the problem of psychic causality. However, the question of causality in general is one which humans have pondered since they began to reflect on existence. The conflicts about causality in psychoanalysis therefore can be understood and discussed more productively if the philosophical issues being expressed are clarified. The pre-Socratic philosophers were the first to conceptualize causality using rational speculation. Following the pre-Socratics, Plato (1974), via his concept of the forms, made a systematic attempt to formulate the essence of reality and therefore, by implication, causality. He said that physical objects in the real world were imperfect replicas of their ideal forms. For example, no triangle that we draw on a chalkboard can be absolutely perfect, however, there is a conceptually perfect form of a triangle. According to Plato, human concepts, such as justice or love, also have their ideal expressions. He called these the virtues and said that they were inherent in ideal human nature and could be actualized by the application of reason. The dialogues of Socrates were demonstrations of this process of discovering a sense of absolute truth. Although Plato did not develop a theory of causality, the development of virtue was the goal of human existence. Aristotle, Plato’s student, observed human and non-human nature directly. Examining the growth of living things, he developed a four-fold concept of causality (Aristotle 1995). The two most important categories were the efficient cause, that which pushes a process into action, and the final cause, that which explains why an entity reaches a specific state of being. For example, the final end of an acorn is an oak tree, its goal. The Greek word for final expression is telos, and the mode of conceptualizing causality in terms of telos is called teleology. Teleology was Aristotle’s reworking of Plato’s idea of the forms. In Aristotle’s schema the form was like an object’s blueprint guiding it towards its final expression. Because of chance events or impediments however, the object might never reach its ideal. Aristotle also saw animal life, including that of human beings, as having inborn goals. In the 17th century, with the beginning of the Enlightenment, there was a shift in the understanding of reason. Metaphysical speculation was no longer acceptable and a change in the interpretation of sense data occurred whereby it was shorn of its teleological associations. This empirical method led to the successes of Newton and Galileo and the rise of deterministic science. The practical successes of science led to a discrediting of teleology and limiting of its relevance to theology. The early scientific thinkers thought of the world as a machine and in this view God was identified with natural laws that moved the machinery. Efficient causality became the only legitimate mode of explanation. This type of thinking was called determinism. At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant revised the Enlightenment view on epistemological grounds, saying that knowledge of the world is limited by cognitive capacities (Kant 1965). This led him to divide the world of objects into what we could know, which he called the phenomenal world, and what we could never know, which he called the noumenal world or the thing-in-itself. Kant’s epistemological move opened the way to new formulations of teleology as his immediate philosophical successors took up his idea of a two tiered reality but criticized his formulation as being too abstract and posited a state beyond immediate experience which could be eventually realized. The Romantic philosophers, led by Schelling, said that this state could be realized through intuition, imagination and feeling (Schelling 1978). The Idealists, led by Hegel, said that mind could progressively realize itself through human historical development (Hegel 1977). According to Hegel the telos was the complete realization of all that could be known. He called this absolute mind which was by inference the mind of God. Both schools maintained that humans were not just another form of static being like physical objects, but were dynamic beings that became, albeit in different ways and with different ends. Schopenhauer, challenging Hegel’s rationalism, said that the other side of reality was the will, which was forever seeking expression (Schopenhauer 1969). He said that the will was guided in its expression by forms, similar to those described by Plato, and that the ultimate goal of human life was to escape, via asceticism, from the power of the will. Schopenhauer’s concept of the will influenced Freud in his development of the libido hypothesis. In the nineteenth century the Enlightenment emphasis on empiricism and determinism was bolstered by the success of the physical sciences. Scholars took up these methods in the new disciplines of sociology, anthropology and psychology which came to be known as the human sciences. The teleological views of the Romantics and Idealists also influenced the human sciences and by the end of the century there was an intense conflict. At stake in this were two radically different views of the nature of the human being. The determinists viewed humans as being driven by forces beyond their control to which they had to accommodate. The teleologists saw humans as having a purpose, which was some version of striving towards individual self development. This was the intellectual climate in which Freud and Jung began their investigations of neuroses and psychoses. Both men, extending the work of the French school of psychiatry led by Janet, postulated the concept of unconscious causality to explain the clinical phenomena that confronted them. Freud and Jung initially insisted that psychoanalysis was a physical science. Freud proposed libido, an efficient cause, as the determinant of all psychic phenomena. Freud’s adherence to determinism, however, led Jung to discover its limits, and to propose teleological explanations for mental life. Their respective inabilities to tolerate deterministic and teleological explanations were a major determinant of their eventual break. Later, Bion can be seen as transcending the issue of causality altogether by proposing a non-metaphysical view of psychoanalysis. The work of the Freudians Freud’s theory went through many modifications. He had two main models of the mind. In the first model which was the most deterministic, he thought of consciousness as being impelled by the unconscious sexual instinct which he called libido. In this, the topographical model (Freud 1900), he asserted that if libidinal expression was inhibited intrapsychically, it would be discharged as anxiety. By the time of his second, the structural model (Freud 1923), he had added aggression as a second instinct (Freud 1920). In this model, instinctual expression was brought under control by the super-ego, the repository of cultural attitudes. In 1926 he said that anxiety was the response of the ego, under the hegemony of the superego, to the pressure of instinctual demands for expression (Freud 1926). In the single instinct model, libido, via the process Freud called sublimation, was channeled into culturally acceptable forms of expression (Freud 1905). In his final dual instinct theory a more complex view of sublimation was developed in which aggressive and sexual drives amalgamated to form more complex modes of expression (Freud 1923). Although all these models were deterministic there was a teleological element implied in the concept of sublimation in that its activity, by implication, led to an increasingly more mature ego. More teleological still were Freud’s concepts of identification as an outcome of the Oedipal conflict, and of secondary narcissism which lead to the desire to live up to the goals of the ego ideal. However, for Freud, there was no final resolution of inner strife. There was no synthesis of opposites in a higher unity. Freud was firmly opposed to all teleological concepts of God. He maintained that there was no divine reason, plan, or purpose in nature. Nor was there a lasting order in human nature. Freud’s most deterministic thinking occurred in the early part of his career and this aspect of his thinking was challenged by some of his followers. Jung was the most famous schismatic colleague. Others such as Rank (Rank 1929), who developed some of the first ideas on object relations, and Ferenczi (1955), who stressed the importance of the therapeutic elements in the analytic relationship, differed from Freud but stayed in the psychoanalytic fold. The differences were framed in terms of disagreements on the primacy of libido as a motivating for e, but looking back we can see the arguments as being challenges, via teleology, to the hegemony of determinism. Abraham, one of Freud’s closest early collaborators, is considered as the unwitting father of object relations theory (Meltzer 1971). He proposed the idea of conflict between modes of expression around erogenous zones (Abraham 1979). These ideas were taken up by Melanie Klein, his student and analysand, in whose work teleological elements can be seen in her ideas concerning the attainment of more stable whole object relations (Klein 1975). She did, however, retain Freud’s determinism in her own concept of instincts. Simultaneously, Fairbairn was also developing concepts of mental splitting. In contrast to Klein, he abandoned the concept of libido and developed a completely teleological theory in which the telos was the re-established unity of the self (Fairbairn 1952). Fairbairn did have to return to determinism in that he proposed a primary drive to attach to objects. Hartmann’s development of ego psychology where the emphasis was on adaptation to the environment, while being more teleological than Freud’s theory, retained the instinct theory and therefore a strong element of determinism (Hartmann 1939). Ironically, Anna Freud’s idea of developmental lines (Freud, A. 1966), a form of teleology, led to the most explicitly teleological psychoanalytic theory when Heinz Kohut proposed a developmental line for the self. He initially had a dual-track theory of self and instinctual development, but he eventually abandoned the latter to propose a model which was teleological in its focus on self development as a goal of analysis (Kohut 1971). The interpersonal analysts also partly broke with Freud over the de-emphasis on instincts. Frieda Fromm-Reichman (1950), Harry Stack Sullivan (1953), and Karen Horney (1939) were the best known members of this group. Horney, in particular, was very explicit in her endorsement of teleology. Given the opportunity, she said, the human being would develop his/her full potential or real self. She said that the discovery of one’s real self leads to a healthy integration which is experienced as a sense of wholeness. Horney believed that the purpose of insight was to free the self to resume its growth. The work of the Jungians Jung (Jung 1912a) first broke with Freud by enlarging the concept of libido from a purely sexual force to heterogeneity of all possible psychic forces. He retained the term libido which, as Jung chose to define it, was similar to Schopenhauer’s will. Jung’s period of more global determinism was short lived however, because in his paper ‘On psychic energy’, first conceived in 1913 but not published until 1928, he made a much more radical break with Freud by proposing that the psychic causality is primarily teleological (Jung 1928a). Jung, through his experiments with the word association test, had already developed the idea that the unconscious was composed of multiple units of subjectivity, which he called complexes (Jung 1912b). He said that these complexes were affectladen representations of self and object in relationship. They had been split off from consciousness, which he called the ego complex, due to adaptation to the social environment. Jung said that analysis was initiated when the attitude of the unconscious, more specifically that of a split-off complex, was brought into a conscious relationship with the attitude of consciousness, the ego complex. Analysis then proceeded via the integration of these opposing attitudes to form a more adaptive attitude. This new attitude, and an accompanying new epistemology was the telos. Jung called this process individuation and compared it to the incarnation of God’s purpose (Jung