(Askay2011)
What were the most fundamental presuppositions of Freudian metapsychology and why were they problematic?
1. Freud assumed that only “objective” things exist. Here Freud fell prey to a presupposition that extended throughout almost the entire Western philosophical tradition, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The focus was on beings to be investigated. It was as a result of Descartes powerful influence on modem thinking that this approach became especially dominant. Freud’s metapsychology simply reduced human beings to nothing more than just objects of investigation. Heidegger’s refrain was that human beings are not objects to be analyzed via scientific methods; to hold the contrary is to miss the very being of humans.
2. Freud advocated Cartesian dualism: only two kinds of things exist—the psychical (mind) and the material (body). But if one makes the division between the human mind and body, there is no reasonable way to explain how mind and body interact. Freud was thus forced to contrive a theory to account for their connection: his theory of instincts. The instincts were responsible for the development of mental processes and images. However, according to Heidegger, this was simply to beg the question of the connection between these two realms by merely verbally moving back and forth between psychical and material descriptions of the instincts. No compelling description of the connection between mind and body was ever offered by Freud.
3. Freud asserted that the instincts, Eros and Thanatos, are the ultimate causes of all activity. Hence, he advocated a strict determinism, and thus concluded that free will is an illusion. For example, referring to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday life, Heidegger noted that Freud held that even parapraxes (e. g. , ostensible “slips of the tongue,” bungled actions, and so forth) have identifiable causal forces. Heidegger rejected the idea that cause and effect determines human conduct; again, this would be to reduce humans to mere objects. Instead, he argued that there is a much deeper notion of “freedom” which makes possible the very freedom Freud denied. Not only did Heidegger think that Freud was wrong here, but he held that he was wrong for the wrong reason. Freud was merely denying a preconceived notion of freedom that is represented in the natural sciences as a non-causal occurrence. But such a narrow conception of freedom preconceives freedom as a property of humans, and then obstinately refuses to see any other way of understanding freedom. A more ontologically appropriate way to envision freedom was to regard humans as “open for being claimed by the presence of something. ”It is the realm in which we live our lives through our openness; causal chains are irrelevant to such a conception of freedom.
4. Freud uncritically adopted the Cartesian subject/object epistemological relation. That is, knowing subjects are related to externally related objects in the world. For Heidegger, such a model misrepresents how we actually are in the world—that we more primordially relate to the world as a unified field of meaning.
From these four fundamental presuppositions, Freud then proceeded to contrive various ideas concerning the nature of “psychical” reality—mind— as distinct from the external world. The odd thing, Heidegger noted, is that psychoanalysis inquired “about processes and about changes in the psychical, but not about what the psychical is.” As a scientist, Freud was required to offer a clear explanation of just exactly what he meant by the mind as a mechanical thing. This he neglected to accomplish.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that Freud held certain Kantian-like presuppositions: (1) the real natures of the independently existing world and the underlying psychical processes are ultimately unknowable; (2) the ego knows only a phenomenal world; and (3) space and time are forms of thought. From a Heideggerian perspective these all failed because they too were predicated on a contrived subject/object dichotomy and a thing-ontological model. One cannot propose divisions between self and external world or mind and body, claim that both the external world and internal self are unknowable, and yet at the same time insist that this is an adequate explanation of human reality. In other words, given these presuppositions, how can anyone know anything? The mind cannot know a separate body, and neither the mind nor the body can know a separate world, nor can the ego know the inner mysteries of itself, much less an external world completely apart from its existence. From a Heideggerian standpoint, these were merely gratuitous hypotheses that exacerbated the situation by further distorting our understanding of what it means to be a human being.
Freud made other assumptions regarding the function of the psychical and physical processes as well. He assumed: (a) that both (psychical and somatic) domains operated in the same mechanical way;(b) that everything was ultimately grounded in the somatic forces;(c) that both are involved in a continuous nexus of causal relations. Hence, everything is necessarily subjectable to reductionistic scientistic analysis. Yet, Heidegger pointed out that Freud’s metapsychology failed on scientific grounds, for it neglected to satisfy its own methodological criteria. Freud resorted to unverifiable presuppositions and non-empirical concepts (e. g. , the unconscious, the instincts, “mythical drives,” and so forth). He also failed to offer—as a genuine natural scientist must—an adequate account of the relationship between mind and body, and the transformation of ideas and meanings into bodily processes.
Heidegger was particularly offended by Freud’s position that everything that exists is measurable. Or to put it contra-positively, if something cannot be measured then it does not exist. Heidegger claimed that science insists on taking exclusively that which is measurable and quantifiable into account. By doing so, it disregards all other possible characteristic features of human existence. This is to preclude the recognition of other dimensions of human existence that are not susceptible to measurement: for example, the presencing of being, freedom, the “clearing,” and so forth. If the physiological level were the basis of human existence, then there would be “sorrow molecules” or “farewell molecules” in tears. Yet, Heidegger insisted: “you can never actually measure tears. If you try to measure them, you measure a fluid and drops at the most, but not tears. ”
Furthermore, Freud postulated the complete explainability of psychical life in causal terms. His problem was that since no “uninterrupted explainability” appeared in consciousness, Freud found it necessary to: “invent ‘the unconscious. ’” According to Heidegger, Freud conceived of the mind as a container,or “a little black box” that is composed of conscious and unconscious processes, powered by a form of energy that is analogous to and reciprocally transformable with physical energy; and is ultimately derivable from bodily or organic processes. Hence, even within the mind, Freud made a division between the knower and the unknown knower. The internal mind cannot even know itself. This introduced the “fatal distinction” between the conscious and the unconscious. It was to resort to the hypothesis of “unconscious purposes” as explanations for human motivation.
One of Heidegger’s primary criticisms of the unconscious was to point out that Freud conflated “cause” and “motive” in his metapsychology. The two are not the same:“Motive is a reason, and this involves the fact that it is known and represented as such in contrast to a cause which merely acts on its own. ”Our response to the presence of something is our motive. Given this distinction, it is crucial to see that “Something unconscious cannot be a ‘reason for’ (i. e. , a motive) because such a ‘reason for’ presupposes conscious awareness. Therefore, the unconscious is unintelligible. ”Freud’s idea of “unconscious intentions” was a pure hypothesis that failed to help us understand any phenomena any better than we could without it—that is, it was dispensable. Instead, Heidegger insisted that acts of forgetting, for example, could be more appropriately explained phenomenologically. They merely indicated that something was no longer considered thematically (i. e. , one simply no longer paid explicit attention to its meaning, or chose not to think about it).
All of Freud’s theory was riddled with misconceptions and complications. Essentially, they represented nothing more than a desperate attempt by human beings to find a deeper meaning (i. e. , a theory of human nature) through which to ground their existence. Yet for Heidegger there is no such ground to human existence. All we are is just a groundless abyss—the nothing. By seeking to provide a ground for human existence, such contrived theories as Freud’s wind up losing our very humanity.
In the end, Heidegger took his most serious global criticism of Freud to be that he was simply oblivious to the question of what it means to be (i. e. , to an understanding of being). Hence he failed to ascertain the true ontological characteristics of human beings. Yet, it was these very characteristics that made any theoretical account (including Freud’s) possible in the first place. More specifically, Heidegger claimed that Freud simply failed to see “the clearing,”that each of us always already finds ourselves situated in a unified field of meaning—our Being-in-the-world. In light of this, Freud’s theory becomes even more problematic, when one realizes that one cannot construct the significance/meaningfulness of Being-in-the-world from such psychical acts as wishing, urges, propensities, and so forth. Rather, our Being-in-the-world is always already presupposed.