Hello and welcome to the session, the Appendices, instructed by Reza Nagaristani. Reza, please take it away. Thank you, Zenobio. Hello, everyone. So this is our official last session. I know that we are not going to cover a few grounds that I wanted to do it. But so we are going to have a one and a half hour discord session next Friday at the same time beginning at two o'clock. It wouldn't be, it won't be recorded even though I thought that you know it should be recorded
Prasad- Precisely because i'm going to talk about the the green bomb aspect and some of that you know how you know why actually I think the project initiated by Freud is important at the end of the day. Prasad- Despite all of its flaws. Prasad- But. Prasad- Apparently it's just so. uh they i mean uh new center finds it you know uh easier for us just to do a casual discord uh session which basically we can uh you know connect via audio and video so next friday starting at two
So with that said, presentation today, I know that some people wanted to present about the Grunbaum. Yes, that's me and Will. It was going to be Alejandro as well, but as of 20 minutes ago or so, we discovered that he has an appointment that he has to go to, so he is not here. So there'll be kind of a gap between my presentation and Will's. I don't remember exactly what Will is going to do, but I'm going to basically present a collection of diagrams that I've made of Grumbam's argument up to page 186 of his critique of Freud. So I'm going to show my screen and then show this.
so um okay here we have the uh critique of the foundations of psychoanalysis and these are some diagrams of Grimbaum's critique of Freud's initial 1893 repression etiology and his uh also his critique of repression etiology's two court so he in some ways kind of uh at least in the section that I was covering Alessandro was going to do the second section um covered uh in some ways like is unclear about whether or not his critique applies just to this particular part of freud uh his kind of earlier work or whether or not it also um it's generally psychoanalysis yeah i think it's generally psychoanalysis yeah so the question is what do we observe uh and this is where uh everyone kind of agrees so we observe um that
there are symptoms, symptoms S, and then there's a period of psychoanalysis, and then there's at the end of these, the kind of building of effective, can you see my mouse by the way? Can you see where I'm pointing? Yes. Okay, so there is, towards the end of these, there is a period of building effective intensity and a building recognition of the traumatic experience, and at that point the symptom is durably removed. However, we can note that these two things, the effective intensity and the recognition of traumatic experience are both necessary to remove the uh the the symptom they both note freud and grumban both note that um in the case of a symptom where we only have the recognition the traumatic experience that relates to that symptom then we don't have the effective build-up the release the catharsis then symptom two persists and in this case and in terms of
much later freud um this would be psychoanalysis internal because it wouldn't would never finish So what does Freud infer from this collection of observations? Well he infers that there are two different kinds of suppression or suppression and repression, cognitive repression and affective suppression, and then what happens is that we have a lessening of these two over time during psychoanalysis because of the recognition of traumatic experience E1. The E1 experience is the initiatory experience that produces then the collection of symptoms that go along with that. Of course again in the kind of a failure case the same thing happens, excepting that we don't have the game, some kind of build-up of effective intensity. So
Grunbaum summarizes this, says the dramatic improvements observed after treatment were produced by none other than the cathartic lifting of the pertinent repressions. This is what Freud infrezen. There's a second hypothesis, the placebo effects hypothesis, in which a third element is added. We have symptom one, the effect of intensity, and we have recognition of traumatic experience, but crucially what we also have is the patient expectation of success. The patient believes that either they believe, or they believe that the psychoanalyst believes that they will be removed, have their symptoms removed. And then so, as Gribarab says, to this day the whole of the clinical psychoanalytic enterprise is haunted by the mortal threat and the very live possibility of placebo effect. This is the kind of the alternative interpretation. So the analysis
ends, but it ends because of the patient's expectation that it will end and that there'll be a success in arriving the symptoms. So what is Freud's counter to this? Freud counters that we can tell that there is a causal significance to these two aspects, the recognition of the traumatic experience and the effect of intensity of that recognition and the effect of all the effect of intensity that comes along with it we can tell that these are separate these are causally relevant to the initially traumatic experience and causally relevant to the removal because they happen separately so there are separable sets of experience or clusters of symptoms that are related to certain traumatic experiences in a patient with more than one traumatic experience in their life you can remove them separately and the fact that they are
separable means that they must be causally related. So then Grumband notes that there is a kind of a peculiar causal model to the way in which Freud is constructing this inference in that the initial etiology is not is only accessible because of this possibility of therapeutic removal. So I summarized it here Grumband writes it in slightly more kind of convoluted manner. The possibility of therapeutic removal of separate symptoms lets us infer that these symptoms were caused by the repression of traumatic events. That's the kind of summary. And this is the kind of the sceptical attack that Grumbam is making. If therapy could not do this, so if it could not separately and durably remove symptoms, then the repression ideology
to court is unsupported. So the question here is whether or not psych analysis can do that, or therapy can do that, without falling foul of this other alternative hypothesis, which is the placebo hypothesis. I should say that I'm more or less summarizing this in the chapter, in the order that Grumban writes about it, rather than the order that I think would be more logical. So that's just that. Okay, so sorry, go on. No, no, no, all great, magnificent. Please go on. Okay, so Freud's interpretation of the repression ideology, again we have this kind of counter which says that look we can durably remove this s1 because of something else because of its
connection to the uh dramatic experience e right so it's the fact that these lines this inference this inference this inference the fact these are all different lines of causal connection means that we can make the inference that the the symptoms are caused by some sort of traumatic event. Now Grunbaum disputes of course lots of different parts of this but these are just the ways in which he states it I'm going to very briefly read. When I'm saying Freud I'm also referring to Breuer. So thus Freud and Breuer explicitly adduced the separate therapeutic removal of particular neurotic symptoms by means of undoing repression having a thematic and associative affinity to those very symptoms as evidence for attributing the cardinal causal role
in symptom formation to the repression of traumatic events. That seems to me a very complex kind of way of saying it, but I'm putting it here just so we can refer back to the original text and make sure that I'm getting things roughly correct. So I'm not going to read the rest of those, apart from this sorry this last one, which is the attribution of therapeutic success to the undoing of repressions rather than to mere suggestion was the foundation both logically and historically for the central dynamical significance that unconscious ideation acquired in psychotic theory so this is the reason why the um the the unconscious becomes such a kind of important part and of course um as i will go on to later discuss like the method for uncovering the exact uh relationship between these things is this kind of probe of the um free association uh and the
ways in which it allows us to to identify and also um at the same time validate or authenticate the connection between the two different things i wasn't clear as i will say again later i wasn't clear whether or not that authentication was authentication from the perspective of the of the analyst that is they authenticate for themselves that they have found the right drastic event or whether or not in fact the recognition this recognition here of the dramatic experience is dependent on a kind of authentication of this initial traumatic experience by the patient themselves so the patient has to sort of rubber stamp the dramatic experience say this is the right traumatic experience yeah and it's actually yes it's it's the latter and uh this is we're basically uh both uh i mean uh not just both archer wittgenstein
and guernbaum think that uh it does not fit the criteria of what you might call re-verification in any sort of thing. It's rather a mere agreement. Yeah. Right? Agreement that, yes, the patient needs to rubber stamp it. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Good. Richard, would you be able to also read for everyone the first one, Grunbaum, in the footnotes? Yes. Without the symptom. Sorry, this is the second one. So without this symptom removal, neither the mere painfulness, so this is the other alternative, right, which I will come on to in a second.
Without this symptom removal, neither the mere painfulness of the event E, nor its temporal coincidence with S, with S's first appearance, nor yet the mere fact that the hysteric patient has repressed the trauma E could justify, even together, blaming the pathogenesis of S on the repression of E. So this is the much more nuanced, skeptical attack that Grunbaum makes of this particular repression etiology, which I'm going to come to in a second. So that food note isn't probably in the wrong place. Okay, so free association is used in therapy, so I was saying, to detect the pathogens of neuroses and to authenticate them as such by the patient. I seem to remember from reading the much later text, I think, analysis interminable interminable,
that this process of kind of rubber stamping is then kind of recognized much later as the kind of the moment of real cathartic release, sorry, the noise outside. Yeah, so this is the question, is authentication necessary for real symptoms and whose authentication? Okay, so then Grumbam goes to look much more closely at the question of symptom formation. How is it exactly that there is a process of the originary construction of these symptoms? So the repression R, he says, for Ian Freud, is causally necessary for the formation of symptom S. So it's the repression that triggers the symptoms. Now there's a kind of this other thing, a mediating thing, that comes in here which I wasn't entirely sure how to place which is this notion of the neurosis M so we have
this in the kind of slightly expanding collection of things with their own letters we have this kind of this mediating thing that hasn't appeared in any of the previous ones and I wasn't quite sure why Grumban was bringing it in at this exact moment but what it does is essentially mediate between the symptoms and the repression. So if an ongoing repression, R, is causally necessary for the pathogenesis and persistence, so it's necessary for the original, the beginning of the symptoms, sorry, no, if the repression is necessary for the beginning of neurosis, then the end of the repression also signifies the end of neurosis as well, no matter how that is. So here we have Grumbam's other critique,
which is essentially the same critique as the critique of the placebo effect, but phrased slightly differently. So he says, okay, what's really going on is that even though we are able to separate each symptom into its own collection of bundles of symptoms, and therefore say that, as Freud said earlier, I'm just going to go back to that one. So Freud says here, in this account of dejection, that the fact that S is related to dramatic experience E warrants the fact that it is the recognition of E that removes S. And the fact that S2 does the same thing but only for S2 means that there is a causal connection between the recognition and the release of Simmses.
now what Grumban make the sort of the second iteration of the same placebo effect critique is that in the process of therapy the suggestion comes from the therapist that the therapist thinks there is a connection between S1 and E1 and E1 is in fact Grumban doesn't kind of come down particularly hard on this point either way but he suggests that in fact the traumatic experience E might be originally posed by the therapist might just not be a real event at all we don't know it's not possible to say from this now Grumbam suggests a way in which Freud can meet this critique or psychoanalysts rather obviously Freud is dead but how can Freud meet this critique in order to to get around this this critique that Grumbam is making so he says to discredit
hypothesis that the placebo effect it is essential to have comparisons with treatment outcome from suitable control group whose repressions are not lifted. So we essentially need to have two different groups, one whose impressions are lifted, one whose impressions were not lifted. Now it's not clear to me why this would actually discredit the hypothesis, simply because Grimm-Kabbaum can launch essentially the same criticisms of any such study, given the impossibility of monitoring for suggestions. So Grimm-Bahm can make the claim that if the control group is not cured and the the the the the originary group is cured, that the difference was that there was not enough suggestion for the control group essentially so i don't see how the placebo uh that's right that's how the infrastructure control group actually produces um a a resolution of this this critical and of course equally and oppositely
on the other side freud can make the same argument right so freud can just say well you know um they didn't find the right repressions they didn't find the right traumatic events in the control group and therefore what we know is the the repression ideology can essentially run in the same way. So Grimbaum's suggestion that we could, you know, get around his critique by doing control group doesn't seem to me to be particularly plausible, and he doesn't indeed pursue it any further, he just kind of, it's a throwaway line at the end of the end of a paragraph. Obviously control groups are useful in general, but it doesn't seem to me, at least, that they'd be useful for this. So what is Grimbaum's critique part two? He suggests later an alternative etiology, in which repression is not relevant for the formation of symptoms so in fact symptoms begin
because there is underlying thing anxiety that is caused by the conscious experience the traumatic e so not the repressed e and then only later does the repression and the suppression come in so we can have this different originary story um what is the relevance of this different originary story well it matters because it changes the relationship between cognitive and effective suppression So Grumbam argues that the affect attached to E can be suppressed without also being repressed. So this in fact is clear in the case of Anna O. So Anna O, the example that she gives is she sees a dog drinking from a glass of water and she feels distinctly uncomfortable. So we have the affective suppression, sorry, we don't have affective suppression, but she still doesn't recognize what this thing, what traumatic event this relates to.
to, and therefore there is still cognitive repression even though there's not affective suppression. So the cognitive restoration of the former, the forgotten E, so this this original traumatic event as a whole, does also lift the repression of the affect attached to it. So this is in some way, this simply contradicts the earlier stated evidence, if you remember, that we have at the very beginning, we have these two different situations, one in which the affective intensity was there and the symptoms were lifted and then the other one which is the effective intensity is not there symptoms are not lifted. So I don't really understand this part of the Grunbaum essay because he simply states something that is that we've agreed the observation observation is not true. He says the cognitive restoration of the forgotten E as a whole does
not also lift, sorry it does also lift the repression of the affect attached to it, while the cognitive repression of E can be lifted without undoing E's effective suppression. So Grimbrandt has an alternative, sorry, it doesn't have an alternative, I don't know why it says Grimbrandt's alternative, which is either cognitive repression or effective suppression of E, or at least one of the two is causing necessary for neurogenesis, this is the process of constructing a neurosis, rather than both and this story allows for some of the observations but not all of them again so we don't have a full alternative in the same sense as I was just describing a moment ago it doesn't allow for us to to say whether or not it doesn't allow for us to describe the conditions under which
recognition but not affective catharsis would allow for the release of symptoms so this is course something that happens in Freud as well. Freud acknowledges the various parts of this critique in 1925 account, in which he gives essentially the possibility that the personal emotional relationship between the doctor and the patient was after all therapeutically stronger than the whole cathartic process, right? So what we observe is that there are symptoms, effective intensity, recognition of thoracic experience, things go away, then the psychoanalysis ends and then after a period of time the symptoms retell. So Grunbaum has an account of this. Why is that? Well it's
because we have this suggestion and the suggestion itself starts sometime during the initial psychoanalysis. It goes on, it's kind of presumably still there in the period after the symptoms have ended during the psychoanalysis and then it just simply wanes and then when it wanes the symptom comes back. So Grunbaum's critique in summary is not that Freud failed to recognize all of the previous slides but that having recognized them freud did not then abandon the repression etiology of uh the symptoms he was talking about so he says despite the explanatory gap in freud's argument he unflinchingly plunged to the herotherapeutic view that the excavation of some repression or other would remove the pathogen of the patient's infection and this is this is he doesn't have a kind of a warrant for continuing with this kind of research project uh despite the fact that um
the kind of original the original way in which it's been formulated hasn't hasn't gone very well I should correct myself there he says that Freud does have a warrant for continuing with the research project but not a warrant for then going on to propose all the different other kinds of repression ideology that he then does later so the empirical rationale that Breuer and Freud had used for postulating the repression ideology at all was altogether undermined by just the findings that induced Freud himself to repudiate the attribution of therapeutic gain to the undoing of the repression of the occasional trawler. Again, kind of good, extremely convoluted combating sentence. The moral of Freud's therapeutic disappointments in the use of cathartic method after 1893 was nothing less than a collapse of the epoch-making 1893 argument for the repression
etiology of neurosis so Grimbrandt first have to get rid of the whole thing as he says he doesn't fault the pursuit of the research program what he does find objectionable is Freud's willingness to claim pathogenicity for ported child's repressions on evidence far less cogent than the separate symptom removals that Hoyer had some broadly reduced in 1893 so essentially we go back to this point we accept that this argument has failed this argument in which you separate out different collections of symptoms and therefore pose a distinct causal connection to some sort of traumatic event and yet Freud attempts to reconstruct it regardless even though there is not enough evidence for it uh reconstruct this repression ideology and so we can conclude uh he has embarked on retaining the repression ideology somehow as a
kind of a um a kind of a wheeled enterprise rather than a um like a well well established scientific kind of program. So whatever his own evidential or personal expectations for attaining the repression etiology, I claim it should not be regarded as generically devoid of clinical evidential supports. That's Curran Brown's conclusion to this first half of this chapter. So Ali Chantere was going to do the second half of the chapter but he's not here so I'm going to now pass it over to Will. Okay. Can you see the slideshow?
We can see the notes. I think you removed it from the screen. Oh, I see. Does that work? Yes. All right. So, yeah, I decided to read the Buddha Rask book and subsequently present on it because I thought there were a lot of morsels in here that people would want to hear about. it's not as fine-grained as the Grunbaum chapter for sure but like there's a lot of stuff so I try
to just grab things that I found relevant a lot of quotations he sort of treats it as like a he says in the preface that he's trying to grab every single instance where Wittgenstein talks about Freud and either his writings or his conversations that are transcribed so it's really kind of an An amazing research project. And Wittgenstein admits Freud's imaginative genius, but he's extremely skeptical of his conclusions and his new disciplines foundations. So while Wittgenstein has heavy self-doubt throughout his life and later in life with what he's ostensibly released on the world, kind of similarly to Freud's qualms, he's actually a bit closer to Breuer.
And so there's this quote, both by temperament and because he thought this should be the normal position of philosophy on all questions of this kind. Wittgenstein's attitude was much closer to Breuer's unproductive skepticism than to Freud's creative dogmatism. dogmatism. As we shall see, he considered Freud's approach to be much more philosophical in the pejorative sense than scientific. If we recall that Wittgenstein believed all philosophical difficulties originated in the conviction that it must be this way, although it may not be this way, and in the desire to preserve at any cost a seductive paradigm or mode of description, it is not difficult to understand what he found questionable philosophically and a fortiori scientifically in Freud's method. For him, a person who thinks there must be one correct explanation and one correct reason for the sort of phenomena treated by psychoanalysis is not
someone who is simply adopting the dominant scientific attitude, but someone who is already on the road to producing mythology. So that last sentence is kind of the key. But again, this maneuver that we've talked about from Breuer to Freud, the skeptic to someone who's trying to foundationalize first principles is kind of hearing this quote. And Buverest will say, the science that is supposed to allow this metapsychological retranscription of the paranoid systematizing some speculations of philosophy in terms of oppositions and conflicts originating in the unconscious is in fact a new mythology without knowing it. So this is kind of the opening. Uverest will argue that Freud ends up constructing a mythology
and not a science at all. One of the essential problems in Freud's case, as Wittgenstein sees it is that he is forced to resort broadly to the grammar of conscious processes to describe unconscious processes and the functioning of the unconscious mechanism he postulates, while this mechanism obeys laws that are in principle completely different. To be sure, the mythological aspect of Freud's thought does not lie in his postulating the existence of an unconscious mental mechanism meant to explain the actions of the mind, or even in his proposing a concrete model of what this kind of mechanism might be. Mythology is, as always, generated only by the superficial analogies between things that are, from the grammatical point of view, completely different. So this harkens back to what we've said in class about analogical reasoning,
where analogizing reasons with causes so as to dilute and confuse them completely is what might occur on this reading. Like we see in the Grunbaum text, it is this misplacement of reasons for causes of turning the etiology of repression into a reason that accounts for the shakiness of the Freudian edifice. And here's Wittgenstein. It is a confusion to say that a reason is a cause seen from the inside. A cause is not seen from within or from without. It is found by experiment. In enabling one to discover the reasons for laughter, psychoanalysis provides merely a representation of processes. And so Bouddha R.S., he has a whole chapter on reasons and causes, which I'll get into, but for now we can say that this confusion of the representation of processes
for the reason for the processes themselves naturally leads to mythology, or that this is the very machinery of mythologization itself, or what myth does. Something that Wittgenstein will remark on about the unconscious is that it's only a manner of speaking, and so this is kind of Uvarez glossing him. Those who identify thought with conscious thought, like the traditional philosophers, Freud, despairs of convincing, use the word conscious without antithesis, that is, in a metaphysical way. And those who claim to have discovered that there really are unconscious thoughts, like the psychoanalysts, are, in Wittgenstein's view, confusing a convention of language, which one can accept or reject with a revolutionary factual truth that cannot be gainsaid. So the unconscious as the exercising of our particular language game based on convention.
rather than a wholly autonomous register. And again, the second quote, Freud imagines he is like the scientist here who has demonstrated, as scientists often do, that something he believed impossible was not only possible, but real. But according to Wittgenstein, he is really like the philosopher who, when not protesting that something is impossible, generally rushes to proclaim that an extraordinary discovery has been made. Instead, for Wittgenstein, what Freud does is essentially, he offers us good analogies. And Buverest via Wittgenstein even makes the brief but helpful distinction that Freud's analogies are not model-generating as in physics, but simply aspect seeing, like in art history or art criticism. Buverest will claim that the only use of the
vocabulary of the unconscious that is really essential is the adjectival or adverbial use, which is already broadly recognized by ordinary language. Unconscious, not the unconscious, An adjective or adverb is only a manner of speaking. Again, Hoover S, to replace vulgar energetics, here's the shift that we've talked about, with the linguistic dynamic of metaphor and metonymy, shifts with slippages of meaning, et cetera, shifts and slippages of meaning, and physical or psychological causality with a more abstract and ethereal form of structural causality brings us no closer to the level where we can really introduce notions such as intentionality and signification, properly speaking.
The next thematic, we've touched on this a bit with Reza's analogy of the rug. You have a sample size of people that are perhaps too many to fit on the rug that's in your apartment, and instead of accommodating them in all their particularity, you only just extend the rug and overgeneralize and this is kind of a general boon of philosophy always and it gets at this maneuver from broyer the skeptic to freud who seeks a kind of primary phenomenon or other phenomenon um uver s remarks that freud proceeded on this point just as goethe thought he could in dealing with the phenomenon of color having discovered particularly clear examples of dreams that could be regarded as constituting the camouflage fulfillment of a wish,
Freud postulated that the same basic phenomenon should be found in all examples of dreams. We might say in the language of Goethe that what he held against Breuer was the latter's incapacity to bow before the evidence of the first phenomenon and immediately draw from a single exemplary case or very few cases conclusions valid in all cases. So in Freud's case, wish fulfillment will be at the root of all dreams. The sole quest is to find the right interpretation for this or phenomenological wish fulfillment. Again, like we've discussed in class, Freud has a tendency to draw from case studies a dramatically overextended generalization, this being the generalizing impulse, which is really the proviso of any and all philosophy and which philosophy constantly tries to dispel. Wittgenstein thinks that Freud adopts a method
of description that is universally applicable, not because over time the facts have been shown to conform to the theory, but rather because of the initial decision to conceptualize them and describe them in this way. And he says, whenever we say that, this is Wittgenstein, that something must be the case, we are using a norm of expression. Hertz said that wherever something did not obey his laws, there must be invisible masses to account for it. The statement is not right or wrong, but may be practical or impractical. Hypotheses such as invisible masses, unconscious mental events, are norms of expression. They enter into language to enable us to say there must be causes. They are like the hypothesis that the cause is proportional to the effect. If an explosion occurs when a ball is dropped, we say that some phenomenon must have occurred to make the cause
proportional to the effect. On hunting for the phenomenon and not finding it, we say that it has merely not yet been found. We believe we are dealing with the natural law a priori, whereas we are dealing with a norm of expression that we ourselves have fixed. And so there's this conflation of a norm of expression with a generalized a priori principle in Wittgenstein's and Buberes' readings. This will lead both of them and a host of other interpreters to assert that it is the interpretation itself and reactions it evokes in the patient in the course of treatment that constitute the primary thing. So norms of interpretation are smuggled in as primal phenomena, but then disavowed through the very act of interpretation because voila, they just appear for us like magic. And here's a very rich quote from Bouveres, I think, that gets to the heart of the problem.
The fact that the subject is generally unaware of a good many of the reasons that make him act does not transform these reasons into causes, hence hypotheses. What he is unaware of in such a case are precisely reasons, not causes. In other words, Freud treats the reason for an action like a cause by supposing that it can be conjectured by a scientific sort of procedure and confirmed in the end by the acquiescence of the subject, who recognizes it as having indeed been his reason. And he treats the cause like a reason by supposing that the causes he seeks can be known in the second way, which has nothing to do with the way causal hypotheses are verified in an experimental science. science. So I don't want to drag on too much longer here. I'm realizing I've put in a lot of
quotations, but reasons and causes are intricately related yet irreducible to one another, where in Wittgensteinian parlance, the explanation by causes and the explanation by reasons correspond to two different language games and the wagers that Freud can't defend the incompatibility of these different explanations. Uverest states that the crucial point seems to be that even if the reason or motive can eventually be a cause, it cannot ever be simply a cause. I like this quote. There seems to be something intrinsic that militates against the idea that the reasons for our actions may one day be revealed as simply some possible causes among others, since this would hardly allow us to preserve the essential distinction between actions we perform and simple things that happen to us for which we disclaim agency.
I think this sounds like a location that Reza Negrestani would make himself. I imagine him just saying this when he wakes up in the morning. What I'd want to discuss more in this vein, and maybe we can today, is the notion of teleology as it relates to the order of reasons or the category of explanation of reasons and how this differs from mechanism. It's clear that in some sense Freud's confusion of reasons and causes results in a confusion of teleology and mechanism, such that like he mechanizes explanation or mechanizes reasons, he also mechanizes teleology or caricatures teleology into a mechanism. And there's a lot more to be said in this chapter about the use of the word motives, which we haven't really talked, you could maybe call
them intentions or maybe desires, but the parlance's motives here. And there's this kind of strange rapprochement I read in this chapter to Persean semiotics as Uwe Ress and some of his interlocutors are trying to illustrate how this reasons and causes dualism isn't quite working the way it might be able to if, like in Wittgenstein's terms, we should bring this to a more aesthetic register of aesthetic explanation where we're kind of closer to thirdness or Kant's third critique to the aesthetic in between. And there's even like a little portion of this chapter where I feel like you could substitute person's kind of icon index symbol, abduction,
induction, deduction. That's for another time. I've used this terminology mechanized explanation. throughout his life Freud will hold fast to his psychic determinism but this deterministic impulse to explain everything will eventually lead to a mechanization of explanation where the confusion of reasons and causes turns reasons into superstitions. Wittgenstein rather thinks that in an area like psychoanalysis to accept not knowing or not having an explanation or reason is not necessarily proof that rationality is lacking. I think that's a really nice thing to keep in mind. And back to what I was saying before about generalizing a norm of expression or a norm of interpretation, here's Bouveres once more. The principle of determinism which Freud invokes to
justify his idea that all the events of mental life mean something hasn't really much to do with determinism or even strictly speaking with psychic determinism and the kind of causality that governs it. We might call it the principle of interpretability since it means that all mental events can be interpreted in a certain way that makes them appear to have a have a meaning finality or function and finally uh to harken back to groom bounds chapter about the crutch of free associations the potential hidden placebo effect here's a last quote from wittgenstein which distills things nicely friar einfall which is free associations although the translation is a little bit it's not quite that um uh free associations and wish fulfillment there are various criteria for the right interpretation. For example, one, what the analyst says or predicts on the basis
of his previous experience, and two, what the dreamer is led to by free association. It would be interesting and important if these two generally coincided, but it would be queer to claim, as Freud seems to, that they must always coincide. And Buverest will conclude his book with this sentence. In philosophy, the need to use persuasion is not a regrettable fault, since the philosopher isn't really dealing with the science, while the mistake of psychoanalysis is essentially to believe that it is one. Its mistake is not necessarily to use persuasion the way it does, but rather to refuse to recognize that this is essentially what it is doing, and to underestimate the considerable dangers this use involves. Okay, I'm sorry that there's so many freaking block quotes, but I hope that was at least
helpful for you guys. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, you actually made my job far easier. I gather some quotes from Buveris and yes, basically I want to talk about Buveris and Archer and Kafka a little bit more today. But yes, thank you so much. And thank you, Richard. was superb presentation excellent uh before uh going forward i want to say that the the critique that gornbaum launches uh to a great part uh is not actually yes it is a critique of freud by by all definitions
but there is a motivation behind it that he's essentially uh his primary target is not freud it's uh paul ricker and uh habermas essentially and rick particularly or what you might call to be the hermeneutic uh picture of psychoanalysis We're basically the task of the interpretation of the Hermeneutic Circle is to say that, okay, Freud actually didn't do science, didn't do science, and the project of psychoanalysis shouldn't be actually understood scientifically, but rather hermeneutically.
and within the hermeneutic regime uh which about which is about meaning kinship or uh what uh grunbaum calls uh you know thematic thematic similarities or thematic connections then psychoanalysis can be shown to reign to be uh to be uh reigning supreme right it's it's a new avenue of fundamental inquiry and then guanbaum wants to do things i think kill two birds at the same time by first showing that in fact freud psychoanalysis should be taken as a scientific enterprise
precisely because it is in the search of scientific explanations and the meaning connections that they are talking about again meaning in a very model sort of way the hermeneutics it goes talking about actually doesn't fit into the causal explanation picture of psychoanalysis that Freud is keen on. Now, this is so first he tries to, you know, kind of take away the legitimacy of the hermeneutic restoration of psychoanalysis, as you know, put forward by people like Ricker and others.
Second, doing the ultimate coup de grace of the project by taking it seriously on a scientific basis, showing that the way that Freud makes a so-called causal connection between symptom S1 S1 and traumatic experience E1 is at all not a causal connection. Even though it begins to see it in terms of causal connection, it is a causal connection only in a limited sense of being a necessary causal relation.
But not in the way that Freud thinks that it is a sufficient causal connection for E giving rise to S, the symptom, right? Or, in fact, the same other causal connections that you basically drew through the transference between how the theopatic practice, so on and so forth. He shows that the sort of causal connection that is at the stake in how Freud maps this out is, again, based on thematic affinity. and the thematic affinity as i will argue uh either later today at the end of the session or next uh
through on this word thing as i said is uh merely shows as some sort of causal necessity which cannot fit neatly if at all in the picture of freud and how he makes a connection between a pathogen and etiological symptoms of a particular type so this is this is the background or the context in which Grönbaum is actually launching this critique which I think is important to know
But again, as I mentioned, Grumbahm goes further to show that, yes, he already talked about nitty-gritty and stuff with regard to the charts that you made, but he wants to actually ultimately come down to even a more, what you might call to be, a sharper critique whereby he can talk about that the sort of causal relations are being derived from you know affinities you know thematic affinities like
you know Anna O's the dog licking the glass and then discuss an aversion toward water and vomiting is called vomiting, or the rat man, you know, the biting of the patient, then the punitive punishment by the father, then developing a rat obsession with the oriental punishment of, you know, sending a rat up someone's anus, and so on and so forth, that he wants to show that these thematic affinities, they don't have a causal relevancy, but they are not causally explanatory in any sort of scientific sense. And that's when Freud's project starts to
collapse quite severely based on its own ambitions or over ambitions. I will get into this and how Gumbom wants to do this surgical strike. Okay, questions and thoughts for great presenters. I have one kind of question kind of on the theme of both critiques. Both Grunbaum and Wittgenstein, when they're talking about Freud, take real issue with this idea of
the inability to establish real cause and effect relationships through psychoanalytic theory. And I was curious if they can establish causal, you see, maybe for Grunbaum, as Will said, it's actually a more nuanced, you know, kind of a more detailed account of what is actually wrong. It's not as if psychoanalysis doesn't make a causal relevant. rather that this causal relevancy that it establishes and actually naturally comes from some of these sorts of stuff that the case studies it does it's not sufficient to establish
a causal nexus a namely a causal explanatory uh framework between uh what you might call to be uh thematic affinities between early traumatic experiences and basically thematic affinities between symptoms that later arise in adulthood. So it's about the sufficiency. Freud insists on the sufficiency, because otherwise, as Grunbaum says, then if there is no sufficiency,
you can actually see it in other sorts of context, which makes the whole project a happenstance, so to speak. Yeah. What I wanted to ask you about is kind of like one thing I was thinking about when reading Grunbaum is how He talks about how like the idea of, and I think Richard brought this up in his presentation, like, like you get to a point where you can, you can't even really distinguish what the symptom is that you're, you're testing for or against. And if that's the case, if there's not even a really good way to establish what the intended goal of psychoanalysis is on the patient, is it possible that maybe they misunderstood the project of psychoanalysis as something that is supposed to, like, generate?
probably so and that was something that i said to uh kirsten that it seems that uh the main uh thing that wittgenstein and boveries actually talk about the main really the flaw here is that this insistence uh constant insistent insistence on uh the scientific status of psychoanalysis right and the scientific status and whitken science says and bouveries talks about you know that there's a difference between science and philosophy you know science has an empirical method of control right and philosophy has an image imaginative uh system uh construction of
a system of notations through which it can talk in a different way about familiar uh sort of phenomena in a different way, in a different way, as we talked about it in a makeshift manner, right, as a manner of speaking, right, and that's exactly what Janet identifies, the unconscious is a manner of speaking about some other sort of stuff that we are familiar with, but now we are actually trying to accentuate it by a makeshift concept, right? And that's what philosophers do. But rather Freud actually gets really angry at Janet precisely because he says that no, the unconscious is not a manner of speaking about familiar phenomena, but rather
is a completely new class of events and processes, which we have discovered, and fall under the criteria of scientific method. And then this is what we can assign and says that, look, this is the moment that we confuse you know the boundaries or blur the boundaries between an imaginative imaginative construction of a system of notations and empirical control set up within which you
Dr. G R R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N G R I N at this point precisely as a as a repercussion uh of freud's insistence on science as opposed to philosophy or a great philosophical project and or multimodal philosophical project because
of its multimodality that psychoanalysis superb as a philosophical project precisely because you can actually relate to politics, to capital, to the critique of capitalism. That the reason, if it was on the philosophical side, it would be magnificent. And Freud could do so much more. But the fact that it is really kept under that criteria of scientific accuracy and scientific extrudency, that's how it falls apart. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. More and more questions for presenters and.
Reza, I kind of just, brief question not to take it too far afield but i keep thinking of this sort of moment the hermeneutic moment recur and trying to save psychoanalysis by making proving its hermeneutic potential and then this kind of not dissimilar moment of like deleuze in the logic of sense talking about quasi causality as this kind of all right you know i'm curious of what you think of like if this foundation of causality is unfounded is that gesture of trying to invent a concept of causality kind of a similar thing yeah yeah i think so precisely because then uh you can uh you can relegate it to a certain sort of rationalist metaphysics when i'm saying rationalist metaphysics
the the rationalist qualification of here i don't mean rationalist in the sense that we mean rationalism rationalist metaphysics of exactly the same type of classius or people before kant that modern philosophy was invented to actually put an end to the quasi causality and quasi-concept quasi-metaphysical concepts of rational metaphysics yes there are there are they have they have absolutely a rationalist metaphysical input particularly you know of the german uh rationalist metaphysics precisely because at that moment uh
then you can't say that, you know, that you can actually avoid two bad, what you might call to be a reaction. One, that, you know, we are not talking really about causality. They will say that, no, we are actually talking about causality. But then you might further go, well, if you are talking about causality, then are we talking about you know the sort of causes that we actually ascribe to material uh domain uh and can be tracked by the empirical method and under empirical control say that no that that no we are not talking about that you know we are talking about this sort of third agenda but that third agenda is purely metaphysical
then it wouldn't then it again comes back to the hermeneutic circle and all the confusion that he can create but that freud was adamant that is not really meaning relations these things these are fundamentally causal relations in the scientific sense Okay, if you guys don't have any questions or anything, let's have a break. I need to have some water, it's so hot here. And then I start. Okay.
Yes, I think that Eduardo is quite actually, yes, pointing to a very good, you know, kind of like the why actually it's interesting. Rumball really does a great job. He absolutely rejects a kind of coparian savage critique of psychoanalysis as pure pseudoscience. he actually wants a actually so that all all the grounds uh all the concepts and uh you know even
methodology are uh you know on paper they're all scientific but now the thing is that it just yeah it just starts to the more you treat it as real science then the rifts start to emerge Let me know when you are ready.
okay so uh As I said, Freud famously wanted for psychoanalysis to be a science and not a philosophy. He adamantly refuses to treat psychoanalytical concepts as philosophical concepts. And for him, his battle, at least with philosophy, revolves around the central concept of the
unconscious. Because philosophers can never grasp the reality of the unconscious. And that's essentially the market still limit of philosophy. And not only demarcates the limit of philosophy, but it is also what you might call to be highlights the project of psychoanalysis as something beyond philosophy in the domain of science it is no longer so not only it basically inferiorizes you know the position of philosophy
by going beyond it and above it but also in that respect it's it secures psychoanalysis as an independent you know research and research program and discipline for it famously in resisting to psychoanalysis in 1925 says that what then can a philosopher say to a theory which like psychoanalysis asserts that on the contrary what is mental is in itself unconscious and that being conscious is only a quality which may or may not accrue to a particular mental act and the
the withholding of which may perhaps alter that act in no other respect. Now, as Burris and Archer, many people have pointed out and we have seen it in a couple of the sessions that we had, sessions that we had, it seems that Freud is one of the reasons that Freud's concept of the unconscious is on a shaky ground, precisely because his approach or his understanding
of consciousness is woefully inadequate freud in that sense uh doesn't see consciousness as anything uh you know more sophisticated than what you might call to be a kind of upgraded version of descartes you know uh and as bouveries has suggested uh it looks as if that precisely it is precisely because of his inadequate uh understanding of consciousness is is highly you know conservative
and classic traditionalist understanding of consciousness it feels uh you know the the urgency of uh essentially uh uh counterposit a new concept which is the unconscious right unconscious as a name so and there is quite an ample evidence uh throughout freud works when he talks about consciousness
uh it simply means uh what we today call phenomenal self-consciousness or phenomenal self-model like quite metzingerian uh the way that metzinger you know calls that uh and and criticize that that model of consciousness um for example in uh in uh in his work with uh brewer um he uh they they say that uh we call those ideas conscious which are which we are aware of there exist in human beings
the strange the strange fact of self-consciousness we are able to view and observe as though they were objects right ideas that emerge in us and succeed one another we describe as conscious those ideas which we observe as active in us or which we should observe if we attended to them now if you read between the lines here it looks that freud and brewer are holding onto
a notion of consciousness that is built upon immediate access the immediacy of experiences right immediate access to the content of mental states right so the implicit keywords here that are not there uh not at least not in the code but upon which this code has been constructed you can say that one is direct access two that consciousness is basically understood and formulated in terms of direct access
to immediacy of experiences and three what you might call to be transparency of contents of experiences and then if we look into uh you know anything that is more modern philosophically uh as opposed to you know kind of upgraded uh cartesianism the cartesian view of consciousness we see that uh the view of consciousness doesn't actually hold any of these three keywords in fact these are repudiated as uh what you might call to be relics or antiques of pre-critical philosophy
which is toppled by people like kent and later by philosophy of mind but it seems that even though freud and i mentioned kent here it should be said that freud definitely has read kent right uh and uh but it seems that he's actually not interested in Kant's account of experience as being mediated, indirect, conscious experiences being mediated, indirect, and the contents are not contents of experience, but the judgments that make, that adjudicate the content.
right uh being constructed uh through that transcendental uh you know architectonic he's not apparently interested in that it's just really under basically wants to use kant as a kind of uh again as a point of analogy uh that uh vindicates uh how he approaches uh consciousness uh of mental processes as unconscious in themselves right so for it then goes on uh comparing uh consciousness of mental processes as unconscious
in themselves with consciousness as perception of the external world to sense organs and explicitly consciousness as perception of the external world through sense organs. Any familiarity with Kant, even at the most basic level, shows that this is not how Kant actually sees perception. That's it. The sense organs merely play a necessary role for perception,
but not a sufficient one. That ultimately, perception as Kant had it is a perceptual judgment. knowing what a judgment is for Kant and hence it falls right under the heading of transcendental deduction so Freud says with regard to Kant just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psychoanalysis bids us not to set the conscious
perception in the place of the unconscious mental processes which is its object. The mental, like physical is not necessarily in reality just what it appears appears to us to be so i repeated the mental like a physical is not necessarily in reality just what it appears to us to be it is however satisfactory to find that the correction of inner perception does not present with difficulties so great as that of outer perception, that the inner object is less hard to discern truly than is the outside world.
Now, there is already a couple of wishy-washy stuff going on here. And basically in this logical reasoning that he makes with this alleged Kant of his, I'm saying alleged Kant of his because this is not really purely Kant, is that he seems to really confuse the basic of Kantianism. there is such a thing as difference between an act and an object, right?
And which basically counts, so the confusion between act and an object, you know, for example, perceiving and the perceived, the conceiving and the conceived is at the root of maladies of philosophy, right? And it seems that Freud really here uses two cents of consciousness in a bulky way that he really, you know, loses the distinction between consciousness as an act and consciousness as an object.
He uses them interchangeably and they cannot be interchanged, you see? The same thing with perception of Kant, of perception of the thing in itself, right? So that's one of the things that is going on in this quotation by Freud. Then Freud claims that for a mental object, the fact of being perceived is almost as contingent and secondary. this is really important for a mental object the fact of being perceived is almost as
contingent and secondary as it is for physical one it says it is in the last resort a question of a perception which which must be either affirmed or denied and the act of perception itself tells us nothing of the reason why a thing is or is not perceived as buveris you know um has pointed out uh you know that uh that if unconscious mental processes you know we're simply unperceived we're simply unperceived you know
as in contrast to the processes which are perceived there wouldn't be the unconscious then wouldn't be anything as special in the freudian sense of how he deploys the concept of the unconscious right and we do actually uh always uh i mean in any sort of without even psychoanalysis we can always say that you know that there is a great part of uh and this is like a philosophy of mind from generations uh a long history that we say that we always say that you know that there are
many uh you know uh what you might call to be unconscious mental processes that we are not conscious of right but they don't have the same input saying something like that is not exactly what freud does freud wants something more from the unconscious and what is actually that he wants from it that's the most important thing he he just doesn't want this kind of uh you know modest and uh essentially obvious and trivial uh fact that you know we are basically uh our things are unperceived there's nothing special about it there are things that are not we are not conscious of
we don't know about it we are i'm sorry i use know about it but this is something that i want we are not conscious of uh he wants actually to say something else he wants to identify he wants to put a new identify the unconscious as a preventive counterpart of consciousness meaning that consciousness is not value neutral it is not simply something of which we don't have we are not conscious of but rather it is that which prevents
consciousness right it becomes a preventive measure and freud uses the famous example to his students that i mentioned earlier in previous sessions of two uh chambers one is completely dark and the other one uh is nebulously dark and at the end of the second chamber at the corner there stands a spectator in the shadows right and then he asks his students you know what is the unconscious here in this uh you know uh
image and people say that well you know it's the first chamber you know the dark room right well the dark room is basically what we are not conscious of so big big deal there is no big deal about it you know unperceived so many things that we are not uh perceiving oh uh i'm not perceiving the electromagnetic uh you know uh basically uh flows in my computer right um but no he says to his students that the first chamber the the dark one is not the unconscious the unconscious is the gatekeeper or the daemon that prevents the flow
from both ways from the first chamber to the second chamber and from the second chamber from the chamber to the first one so this is obviously completely uh you know uh is that a stark uh contrast with the idea of uh uh unconscious in the most you know ordinary familiar sense that we haven't zero basically uh criticism against right it's a different source of thing and what critics want to argue is that the
this unconscious that freud tries to peddle is uh quite vague confusing at the at and at closer inspection uh you know uh um not only flawed it's just um false, false on so many grounds. Before I move forward, questions and stuff. I'm going to say the various lines of criticism.
Yeah, I have one quick question. You were mentioning how in Freud there's this confusion between objects that we're conscious of and conscious processes. Would you say that, is there another distinction between objects that we are not conscious of and unconscious processes? Can you repeat the second part of it? like you you were talking about this dualism between like the object and act for a kind of consciousness duality duality duality duality exists for unconscious for the unconscious and unconscious processes would you say or is it different no different uh no i mean act an object
essentially when we are talking about consciousness so there is an act of consciousness an act of consciousness is different from its object yeah right uh essentially the idea of what we are unconscious as simply what we are unconscious of fits in the picture of consciousness as an act an object quite perfectly right right but the unconscious the unconscious in the freudian sense is is that dividing is essentially becomes both an both act and an object and the object of the consciousness right so it's it's the unconscious
becomes not only the consciousness yes precisely because of the nature of it the act of consciousness becomes the object of unconscious acts because the unconscious here has a certain sort of agency. Right, because the unconscious refers not only to those objects which we're not conscious of, but also the act of excluding them from. Yes, yes, yes. So then that's, again, one of the lines of criticism that it could be all good and great if Freud had kind of, you know, So philosophically, I put it in a certain sort of way, you know, word it correctly, rather than introduce the unconscious as a noun, as a thing, as a preventive measure against the works against the back of consciousness, right?
that would be fine but the way that he formulates it he risks uh the unconscious he basically risks it and falls into it that the unconscious becomes a certain sort of agential in an indirect way an agential factor right but that agential factor that then creates a contradiction in terms how How can it be agential? Because agential is of an act of consciousness. And that creates what usually is called homonoculus fallacy. There is a little man inside the unconscious that sinisterly acts against the consciousness. So it has its own ulterior agentical motivations.
You don't think you could interpret it. Which basically it means that you create consciousness at a black box level and call it the unconscious. But you don't think you could just, instead of resorting to this homunculus idea, just expand your idea of what consciousness is and the way it affects itself? Yes, that would be, yes, yes, that would be, yes. But then, yes, that would be completely, as I said, if he had worded correctly instead of formulated correctly, instead of positing, we can say that. Yes, we can say that. And this is something that I will definitely bring on, something that I have been working on for a while.
We can see this comparison between this and the thesis of real subsumptions of capitalism, right? So real subsumption of capitalism is essentially something of the unconscious, right, that works against, you know, social relations. Social relations are being prevented, switched, modified at whim by, you know, the subsumption of them under, you know, labor relations, productive relations of production, you know, modes of production.
Now, if that is the case, then here we see that if, in the case of Freud, this position of the unconscious as a thing that acts against and behind the consciousness, And if he wants to make a comparison here with the thesis of real subsumption, then it seems that real subsumption unknowingly ascribe an agency to capitalism. capitalism. And isn't it the whole idea that Marx starts to refute that ascribing agency to capitalism is the pinnacle of anti-communist sentiments, right? It is the pinnacle of capitalist
thinking, bourgeoisie mode of thinking. Right, right. Like, it kind of reminds me of like, like Postone's reading of Capitalism Geist or something like that. Yes, yes. I mean, this is just actually quite interesting that, as I said that, you know, getting this Freudian stuff, philosophically, Freud would have a fit about this. fit about this, but really transpose them within their own certain constraints, seeing that how these concepts actually create difficulties because there are, you know, equivalent classes
of the same concepts in such thesis, you know, real subsumption thesis, how they actually create difficulties for the sort of, you know, what you might call to be real subsumption defenders, right? Like, you know, Kamat or other people, Ronsetel and these sorts of people. Someone wanted to ask something, I think it was. But I was precisely going to ask you about Sonheto. And you already mentioned him. So I imagine that would be your critique for the idea of the real abstraction then. Because it gives agency to capital in a way.
Yes, yes, yes. This is one way to go around it is by really elaborating that, yes, that it really ultimately imputes agency to capitalism. and we know that you know attributing agency uh to a uh you know a system of processes uh has you know consequences as results as as repercussions. And it's those repercussions of imputing agency
to capitalism that are actually quite at odds with the Marxist critique. Sorry for this up tangent thing, but something that you need to bring next session we are kind of you know unpack stuff a little bit more thoughts any thoughts or should i actually move forward yes arvon i don't know if you can hear me because my microphone isn't working properly We can.
OK, great. I want to ask a question about the relationship between a causal link and an agency. For example, if I say that in a better experiment, there is a causal link between two particles, it doesn't mean that change in one particle is the agent of change in the other particle, right? the nexus of causal links that are connected. But why can't we say the same thing about the unconscious part, if there's such a thing, the unconscious part of the mental state or mental content or whatever that is?
Unconscious in what sense? Unconscious in what sense? Unconscious in the not being conscious of or unconscious in Freudian sense? unconscious in the sense that uh for in the audiences for example in the rat man he is unconscious of the of the role that that he he says his father plays in his obsession right he doesn't know he doesn't know that he doesn't have the knowledge he doesn't have the right right but but that comes back to a different sort of avenue that is it really a causal connection And that's why I actually going to talk about Grunbaum, that is actually not a causal nexus.
It has a causal relevancy that is necessary, but it's not sufficient to explain, causally explained, thus and so symptoms or repressive symptoms. Right? That is unfortunately the problem here. Can you explain a bit more for English like me, what do you mean by sufficient? When you say sufficient, do you mean that as long as you have this problem, you have the effort?
No, no, no, no, no. Grunbaum has, just let me, very quick, but I will talk about it next session. No, Grunbaum actually makes an example. Like, for example, you have, you know, his main, basically, example is just someone who has gone on a beach, a spectator, and sees, you know, basically a pattern of prints. that are like human footprint, right? And he says that, well, you know, someone has walked here, right? Now, this is what we call a causal relevance, right? It's unnecessary.
But what actually he is, you know, really the implicit thing here is that it's the, what you might call to be implicit assumption of a human presence on the beach because you know by any sort of probability measure there might be actually a way that this pattern can be made right it's a human presence that curtail that probability to a set of a specific results and then Grumbau makes two forms of uh basically example one is that for example someone who goes during a waking experience today, goes to Frank Lloyd Wright's famous building,
and goes, and this person has never seen any picture of Frank Lloyd Wright's building, doesn't even know what this is, never seen anything like that, right, just goes, and this is like Frank Lloyd Wright building and then goes at night and have a dream of Frank Lloyd Wright building right so this is you can say this is basically Grunbaum's it's just like a kind of way to talk about basically this causal relevancy here in a strong sense that would say that yes This is cause of relevancy. But he wants to actually move further with that,
showing that the second case, which I'm going to talk about, is not that different from the first case of Frank Lloyd White. By showing that, you know, there is someone who happens to every day that he walks, he goes into a building and explores it. That's his adventure in, you know, morning adventure of looking at buildings, houses, going inside them, looking at them. And it happens quite often, every day. And then it has a dream of a house, right? Then how are you going to talk about the causal relevancy here
of a specific building as opposed to other sorts of building, right? The case that I again, as I said, brief without interrupting the course of the unconscious, he wants to say that for this to happen, you need to create two classes, two classes, or two sub, sorry, two sub classes of what you might call to be houses or waking experience of houses, such that, for example, you attribute certain sort of intensity to this as a causal factor to this house having created this sort of certain dreams as opposed to other happenstances of just any sort of house right uh it says that you can't do this
you can't do this uh essentially this uh the line of reasoning uh in the context of dream, runs as follows for Grunbaum, that a state of type X may be necessary, condition for the occurrence of some other sort of a state Y, for example. Although X, you can say, is not causally relevant to Y within the pertinent reference class, right? For example, in our case, a reference class of houses. Now, if x is to be causally relevant to y
in a reference class C, then x must partition, according to Grombaum, x must partition C into two subclasses in which the probabilities or incidence of why are different from one another. This partitioning to subclasses is what you might call to be transition from necessary to sufficiency. And Guombaum wants to ultimately argue that it doesn't really happen in the case of Freud. This is the brief statement that causal necessity
is not the same as causal sufficiency and when we are talking about cause in a scientific sense and what freud actually tries to create and he says that because uh you know when we are talking about wolfman ratman and all he says that you know the other sort of happenstances are out of the window you know that is the real pathogen and that's the logical cause for excellence meaning that he says that it is that for example episode has causal sufficiency but that causes efficiency doesn't really uh substantiate precisely because he hasn't partitioned see that
that subclass of references to to attribute some probability which is necessary for causal explanation but this is a again very brief i know very brief uh you know account of this i will go over this in far more details but yes let's get back to the uh the unconscious before i forget uh what was going to say um Yeah, so coming back to that idea of, you know, two chambers and the gatekeeper, Damon,
is the unconscious. What it actually shows in this example that Freud makes, quite telling of how he thinks about consciousness actually. You know that essentially consciousness has a specific locale right remember it's that aspect lonely little spectator at the corner of the second chamber and that's how he sees consciousness you know as having uh you know uh a specific locale in which objects may or may not be subject, you know, to the gaze of witnessing consciousness.
And that's really a questionable and problematic account of consciousness. Then another point that needs to be taken into consideration is the line that Bouverie's and we have Wilkenstein unfolds, which is essentially the grammar of the unconscious,
right the grammar of the unconscious the states and processes uh ultimately according to freud is actually should be treated differently not treated differently but is by all accounts different from the grammar of conscious estates and processes but then as we have seen that this grammar can only be couched in terms the grammar of the former can be couched in terms of the grammar of
the latter the grammar of the unconscious ultimately what freud does doing nothing other than couching it in terms of the grammar of the consciousness and this is what bouverie says that one of the essential problems in freud's case as wittgenstein sees it is that he's forced to resort broadly the grammar of conscious processes to describe unconscious processes and the functioning of the unconscious mechanism he postulate while this mechanism obeys laws that are in principle completely different
this is again coming back to you know i think that the residue of uh brain mind dualism that you know still Freud within the context of which Freud is still working. Why I'm saying that it's not a dual it's a dualism it's the negative you know sense of dualism i mean just having two terms doesn't uh you know risk the charge of dualism or dualistic attitude it's when it becomes a negative charge an objection an objectionable thing is when two terms are put together
and you don't really make the connections between the two according their own essentially specific laws or principles you don't make the connections but rather describing one of the phenomenon as strictly one one of the side one of the terms as strictly in terms of the other term right while still holding that the other term you know uh is under the spell
or follows a different sort or class of laws or principles it's kind of like a brain mind one And again, let me, this is again from Jacques Louveries, that he says that, as Wittgenstein says, in grammar, there are no small differences. The difficulty of Freud's position might be summed up then in the two following propositions.
One, the mental is intrinsically unconscious and consciousness adds nothing essential to it. we have seen it you know in that particularly in that uh those uh you know quotes uh where freud was talking about cans and the contingent nature of you know consciousness right uh contingent and secondary nature of consciousness and two however for reasons that are equally intrinsic it can be conceptualized and described only from a point of view that remains fundamentally that of consciousness it's easy to describe the unconscious and to follow its development
if it is approached from the direction of its relation to the conscious with which it has so much in common on the other hand there still seems no possibility of approaching from the direction of physical events so that is bound to remain a matter of psychological study and those of you read uh court kofka's uh you know uh the structure of the unconscious uh kofka actually uh makes a relevant point uh here he says when one found when one found it
necessary to go beyond consciousness in the description and exploration of mind one imagined the non-conscious parts of mind to be fundamentally alike to the conscious one fundamentally alike that is in its aspects or properties with the exception of being conscious Therefore, the so called elements of mind were thought to exist in two forms, the conscious and the unconscious. It is really interesting that. Sorry, where was that quote for again. It's the essay that I posted on discord by Kurt Kafka is called the structure of the
unconscious. I started some stuff. So the, you know, so essentially the most important part of this is that that the non-conscious parts of mind you know are fundamentally alike to the conscious one pieces one two and fundamentally like meaning in in terms of you know aspects of properties two
two again which is the part of contradiction here is that they are fundamentally alike except that they are not conscious plus the fact that the unconscious processes then can only be described in terms of conscious processes and events. So, if we are merely going with the first one, which, you know, the conscious and non-conscious parts of mind
are fundamentally alike, it seems that there is no revolution in freud's uh projects of psychoanalysis you know unconscious desire is exactly like conscious desire except that it's not conscious in the trivial sense that we are not conscious of it Right. But Freud, as I said, doesn't want to say that. He wants to say that it is not conscious, not in the sense that we are not conscious of, but rather in the sense that it obeys laws and principles.
which are fundamentally are different than the laws of consciousness is obeying or following while at the same time maintaining that descriptive level we can suspend the fact that they are obeying different principles unconscious you know events and
processes obey different laws and rather describing them as if as if by our logical reasoning as if they could be described in terms of conscious processes and events and then you see this is the this is really the curse of as if reasoning I know that you know I previously I have you know talked about particularly the the book of uh Hans Weyhenger the philosophy of as if which is actually a very good one in terms
of constraints of as if thinking uh but ultimately I have noticed that despite the greatest caution in terms of when it comes to as if thinking, as if we could describe unconscious in Freudian sense, in terms of conscious processes, ultimately leads to what Kant himself committed after he admonished those who mistake as if judgments with constitutive judgments as if as if of a nominon becomes
thus thus old the as if judgment becomes ultimately the constitutive judgment the same thing here the as if judgment of the unconscious description of the unconscious in terms of conscious processes and events becomes a constitutive judgment about the nature of the unconscious laws, events and processes. So, of course, I can easily skip the next line of the
The next line of criticism, which against the idea of the unconscious in a Freudian sense, you know, because I just go, you know, just skim through it, but I think that Will, you know, covered it up, you know, that's the idea of Wittgenstein, when he, you know, talks about the confusion between reasons and causes, right? which I don't think that is confusion. It's not a confusion as if Freud does by mistake.
I would say that it's a confusion at a different level. It's a fundamental confusion in the sense that he's not confusing it. It's just like when a philosopher sometimes confuses concepts, right? It is actually a confusion by virtue of how Freud has set up his own theory that all the reasons ultimately become causes. That's a genealogical critique that reasons ultimately causes. That's what, you know, basically Foucault's genealogical critique, understanding of Freud as giving a genealogical critique about reason.
So this is part, essential part and character and the consequence of Freud's own theory. It's not as if he's really like a bad philosopher, confuses reason and causes, but rather he has, you know, architected his theory in a way that this comes naturally, this confusion. One second, I need some more water. Thank you.
Sorry. So, we can assign, you know, yeah, you know, the confusion of reason and causes coming back to the main point uh so that wittgenstein actually talks about this and sees it and you know manifesting in different uh you know uh context in freud's theory for example he talks wittgenstein talks about you know a joke right uh or a lyric poem you know uh you know what is
the nature of a joke what is the nature of a of a poem of a lyrical poem and uh you know uh it seems that uh you know when uh we uh say that you know uh in a regular setup uh you know we uh often uh essentially say that you know If something that is not obviously laughable, and we ask, what is a joke? And someone says, oh, this, and then we start laughing.
So there is a certain sort of agreement that is being established. This agreement is not really a cause. right well freud for example in his theory of jokes and the idea of subconscious he actually wants to say that you know for for these sorts of situations when you know of certain sort of jokes or episodes of laughter uh there is you know uh uh you know a kind of a desire uh to conceal something a desire to slander someone uh and this desire is what it manifests itself
in the joke and this this concealed desire which basically understood as the cause right and And the moment that the analyst says that, well, you know, goes through the whole work and says that, well, you know, this was the concealed desire. He hasn't, this was the concealed basically desire, named the cause of why you laughed here during this particular episode. He says that basically this is the cause, right? But actually it's not a cause.
because as we've got assigned talks about it, it doesn't fall in the picture of causation. It's actually an aesthetic agreement that we established that the patient and the analyst establish, you know, quite like, you know, when interpretation of a, I don't know, of a lyrical poem. If they do agree, that becomes the interpretation that they both share, but they don't call it a cause.
Whereas Freud gives this impression and specifically emphasizes this, that it's just precisely because it's now being in agreement, through consensus, decided that this concealed desire led to the laughter, for this hysterical laughter, then this is the cause but that is not how but that's the point agreement doesn't establish a cause mere agreement absolutely does not establish a cause no it's a normative reason that you establish
I mean, this is what Witkanev's line says, being clear why you laugh is not being clear about a cause. If it were, then agreement to the analysis given of the joke as explaining why you laugh would not be a means of detecting it. Right? The success of the analysis is supposed to be shown by the person's agreement. There is nothing corresponding to this in sciences. Of course, we can give causes for our laughter,
but whether those are in fact the causes is not shown by the person's agreeing that they are. And this is in contrast with the cause that is found experimentally. But as we see it in Freud, the psychoanalytic way of finding why a person laughs is somehow analogous to an aesthetic investigation. Because the correctness of an aesthetic investigation must be agreement of the person to whom the analysis is given. So ultimately, the difference between reason and cause
can be formulated in terms of investigation of a reason demand necessitates as an essential parts of one's agreement with it right by contrast the investigation of a cause is carried out experimentally you know and so what patient agrees to can't be a hypothesis as to the cause of his laughter You know, you can't really, the analyst and the patient, simply just because the patient agrees to the claim of analyst, that doesn't really essentially can be understood as a hypothesis about the cause of the patient's laughter.
but merely at the best at best merely at best as a reason why the patient laughed and reason again at this point is it is that you know uh is at the level of normative consensus agreement. And of course, anything that Freud says that these are,
Foyd would say, well, you know, this session with the patient was conducted in terms of scientific experiments as an experimental nature. But it seems that really, this is not really experimentation in any sort of scientific sense. precisely because experimentation and hypothesis when we are you know trying to gauge or you know kind of
the test hypothesis the sort of experimentation that goes into it requires empirical control an empirical control that leads to a verification that is not merely established as an agreement So in that sense, you can say that, you know,
And psychoanalysis essentially tries to give a picture of cause that is either given from within by way of introspection, like self-analysis of an analyst, or from without. analyst relationship. But the thing is that a cause is not like something like that in any sort of scientific way.
And ultimately, it seems that psychoanalysis is not giving a picture of cause or in that sense, the cause of hysterical laughter, but merely a rep gives, provides merely a representation of processes upon which we can agree on or not. These are two different sorts of things. A cause of a process and representation of process
as a matter of agreement or disagreement, which is basically belongs to the domain of reasons. and you can extend this you know so we really uh freud doesn't have experimental ways of verification for causes experiments what he calls experiments which are basically uh uh you know the patient
analyst uh you know uh interactions um there are not experiment in the scientific sense of verification but rather experiments as i mentioned earlier in establishing reasons within which only representation descriptive representation of processes is given and being agreed right now you can extend this again to uh Freud's propositions about the unconscious.
They are following the same sort of, they can be understood in the same way. That's the reason that the unconscious propositions, the analyst on propositions with regard to the unconscious make sense in freud's theory is not because they have been verified experimentally but rather by the virtue of this fact alone that the criteria of verification for them has already been established in the theory itself off. So the job has already been done before even the whole interaction and the experiment
initiates. Experiments simply put a what you might call to be a belated rubber stamp on it talks brief questions i think i missed the last part the experimentation does not happen in freud's analogical thinking. Experimentation, not in the sense that Freud wants to use this term in order to say that these are experimentations that verify propositions with regard to the nature
of the unconscious. No, precisely because these experiments, as we have seen it, only deal with representational processes and agreements, reasons namely. For them, you know, to be able, so essentially then, hence, they can't, at the level of agreement, they can't really verify the hypothesis. The only way that they, according to Freud, these experiments verify or test the hypothesis of the unconscious is precisely not because of the nature of these experiments as such, but rather the theoretical background upon
which they are built. Namely, the criteria of verification is already there in the theory against the background of which the you know the agreements the so-called alleged experiments are being done so this means that he has dogmatic metaphysics instead of experimentation he has it he has it is as a i wouldn't say metaphysical but but he has a theoretical dogmatism yes that the theory ultimately trumps the method, right? As opposed to method verifying the, you know,
basically the weight of theory. Yeah, maybe that's because Freud wants just to experiment upon his theories and he doesn't care about patient. Yes, or it's just he essentially wants to vindicate. That has already been the source of basically vindication or verification, has already been verified. As I said, the experiment is merely rubber stamping what has already been decided. Yeah, it's strange that it's very interesting that it happens just on the level of representation.
And I think it's an interesting topic to explore the analogy of the right analogy of psychoanalysis and artistic endeavors. Yes, yes, definitely. So yes, good point, very good point. Okay, so there is this Wittgenstein passage in Blue Book that I would like to read. It says that it might be found practical to call a certain state of decay in a tooth, not accompanied by what we commonly call toothache unconscious toothache unconscious toothache and to use it in such a case the expression we
have a tooth we have a toothache but don't know it it's just in this sense the psychoanalysis talks of unconscious thoughts acts of volition etc now is it wrong in this sense to say that i have a toothache but don't know it there is nothing wrong about it as it's just a new terminology and cat and can at any time be translated into ordinary language on the other hand this statement clearly uses the word to know in a new way
So in this sense, unconscious toothache, you know, once you establish the conventions of using this term, is not really a mistake. You might think that there is a, particularly when you translate it, you can actually see fundamentally plausible, right? But then, this is exactly, again, not what Freud wants. Freud wants unconscious toothache. Right.
essentially being under different sort of criteria, you know, that a conscious toothache is operating. right this is why freud never used uh instead of this is where and will was talking about that when he even when he says unconscious desires the unconscious desires uh is that um you know they have a different sort of uh principles they have a different sort of
characteristic fundamental difference uh from the from the you know conscious uh basically thoughts or mental events uh so this is why that freud uh used the word the unconscious rather than simply saying that well you know that there are these these are desires uh that are you know in a more you know regular ordinary sense can be qualified as unconscious right unconscious as an adjective or as an adverb i unconsciously did this that is completely right
but Freud wants to attribute to this a power a power that can never be couched by virtue of its laws as mere some sort of you know I basically laughed unconsciously right it doesn't want it says that there is actually a a distinct force that the unconscious drives you to laugh in this way and not other ways the hysteria yonic laughter
so So coming back to this idea that, you know, so Yes, there is no need to give, you know, a special existence or postulate a special existence or give it a specific locale,
local uh uh special existence for the unconscious or give the unconscious a specific locales where the reasons are you know actively actively uh this is really actually that important when when reasons are actively hiding themselves or the unconscious causes desires are actively uh hiding themselves there's no reason to postulate such a thing right well of course freud wants to emphasize that yes we have to do this but then
and we say that it basically uh becomes very problematic for wittgenstein and you know uh worries is actually you can say uh you know all you need is to use the vocabulary of the unconscious that is really essential by virtue of being ejectable or adverbial use which is broadly you know recognized by ordinary language and in that sense but in that sense when when we are saying that I did unconsciously or the unconscious toothache, this sort of
stuff, then they don't have that sort of forceful activity, drive-life activity that Freud associates with unconscious as if it was being a noun. archard actually makes a good point here in in his book uh uh consciousness and the unconscious he says where the freudians are mistaken according to such a conception is when they speak of an unconscious mind to which elements like those in question belong and obviously oh sorry i
I skipped one line where the Freudians are mistaken, according to such a conception is when they speak of an unconscious mind to which elements like those in question belong. And when they employ a causal language to explain their relation to current behavior, they obviously believe that it is necessary to introduce quite gratuitously a dubious entity called the unconscious. When all that is required is the adjectival and adverbial use of unconscious to qualify the mental element used in explanations of behavior in the common meaning of the term.
The coherent use of the adjective unconscious does not necessitate the introduction of the noun, which in itself raises serious and perhaps insoluble, insolvable philosophical problems. This is page 125 in consciousness and the unconscious. As I said, it's on the archive.org. You can just create a free account and borrow it, or just order a used copy, but I saw that used copies were expensive. So here, as Arthur, you know, points out the inconvenience of a conception of this kind
in the Freudian idea of the unconscious as a noun, is that it seems unable to ultimately account for the essential difference or distinction that must be made between that which is simply elided from the field of consciousness and that which is repressed. that the the the repercussions the negative effect of it is that leads to the illusion uh you know between that which is simply from the field of conscious
that that which uh basically escaped escaped the field of consciousness and that which is escaped from the field of consciousness precisely because it is repressed and actively unconscious Now, there's something strange happening here if you think about this. That this whole fuss about the unconscious tries to show tries to show that when we are talking about, for example,
unconscious desires, they cannot be known, right? In the sense of to be conscious of, to know that something is the case. Essentially, what Freud ultimately, in a sneaky way, tries to do here is to say that you can't actually know these sorts of stuff by the same sort of basically methods of knowledge. But rather, a new form of knowledge or knowing
ought to be established for this class of events and processes, which is called psychoanalysis. So it is not as if psychoanalysis also tries to belittles philosophy by saying that I am above philosophy, but also tries to trivialize knowledge in order to establish for itself the reputation of discovery of a new form of knowledge that cannot be attained by regular ones.
Okay. I think that we need to go with two, three questions, and that's it. Discord, next Friday, just one or two just simple things to finish the unconscious, and then we go to the causal one. again, very briefly, and then open it up to the discussion, and particularly some of the stuff that I'm interested in, like in the philosophical deployment of Freud's theory, as if it was a philosophy, which is basically a heresy
to Freud, and also to see that the kind of equivalent of some of these concepts in you know in you know in the critique of capitalism agency so on so forth any short short question brief questions like if no one else has something i have something i've just been kind of stewing on for a second
about uh here's like an as if analogical reasoning thing i was reading a etienne balavar's latest book and he had a footnote about how consciousness i mean this descends from the word con in latin conscientia and how it was only with like spinoza and then especially with khan's critical turn that this got sort of dirempted into consciousness in this like you were saying this active sense versus one in a more objective sense, or maybe a more ethical one of your conscience for your fellow human beings, which is consciousness of your act. I was just thinking about how it's almost as if Freud's introduction of the unconscious is,
whereas Kant's was a critical move, Freud is kind of sneaking in this conflation of act and object and almost re-establishing this like this dilution in this like this concept of conscientia or um yes yes uh any any can you just this is a very good point do you have any more thoughts on this yeah i um i don't know that's really really embryonic but i um i'm just trying to picture because i'm thinking about how you know he's he's smuggling in this cartesian framework that's like enhanced uh i don't know i mean you were talking about how you can have a
dualism but it's it's the it's the worst kind of dualism when you don't realize that you're doing it and so he's he's not realizing how the unconscious binds itself up in this double bind with consciousness so that there's not this um this tractable difference between the act and the object um and so it's almost this this kind of strange you kind of open up the floodgates of pre-critical like rationalist metaphysics back in um i don't know super loose thought but um no that's really good some i i yeah i will definitely think about it but i mean definitely post something on discord uh if you have more thoughts on this it's actually a very good one
okay more more questions thoughts comments The bane of one of the things that I want to say that, you know, we talked about this methodological, you know, you know, was it the logical solipsism right also works by way of our logical reason really one of the things that strange about our logical reasoning is that if you actually uh well there are so many objections to our logical reasoning uh in the case of
when it comes particularly to the idea of consciousness and on uh and in this source of context uh experience and uh so on and so forth uh there are many ways that you can patch it up so it you know uh to kind of give it a kind of a what you might call to be a emperor's uh semblance of new clothes uh but ultimately it leads to a a situation uh of uh of pure agnosticism in the sense that the argument from our logical reasoning in these avenues can neither be verified nor be refuted and that that is really the cares you know uh the same thing with with with regard
to the consciousness unconscious with regard to verification of uh you know uh uh experiences uh as being all the same and meaning that we all have certain sorts of things. Hence, the whole idea that's the idea of methodological solipsism that ultimately leads to to a quagmire wherein what is what was bad becomes worse.
What couldn't simply be verified now becomes what cannot be refuted either. Aaron, you want to say something? Oh, yeah, Ehsan. Go on. Ehsan, what happened to you? Sorry. I was thinking following what you said, but about unconscious pain and what is when you are conscious of it is uh like pinpoint if you can't pinpoint the source
of your pain but first first let me first let me bring the attention to this fact that the person who is actually asking this question is a dentist so the the toothache problem is actually very close to him okay go on sorry go on sorry i lost my my train of thought okay uh think about this because i had some patients different patients uh sometimes they pinpoint some places they have pain when I check it they don't have anything but they can like they swear they have like
the pain in the certain part of their face or like burning feeling but at the same time many of it they say like in or facial pain they say they usually say this is because of the stress they give them some gopapentans or different like medications but what is it when you are actually conscious of your pain is it like that you actually know what is wrong with you or if you can't pinpoint this certain pain it is unconscious yes i mean so actually wilkinson talks about this that you know, for example, something that something is happening in the nerve ends that doesn't
create a pain. It says that, can we say that it's an unconscious pain? Yes, but then you are really precisely because we are here at the, you know, he has already said that, you know, this sort of stuff, these terminologies are rather representations of processes rather than causes, right? but but then it says at the level of representation it might work but there are you are squeezing the concept here you're uh and that's why the concept doesn't fit and sounds odd that how can i have a goddamn real pain um because of the nerve and but i'm not feeling the pain so um what if uh and the
reverse happens like if some part of you like like i'm referring to like dentistry i know you you will laugh at me but the toothache if the tooth is dead and you think it's okay is it the reverse of it the reverse of the like uh unconscious pain now you think unconsciously that you are healthy but even though yes yes yes yes yes it's a different category yes it's a different category of young people. Both sides of it. Is it possible how is it stretching it? Yes. Essentially like Metzinger's deviant from a logical models. You lose a limb and you think that you still have it.
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Oh, one thing that you said, you know, this kind of ghost pains. And I wanted to say something to Richard that ultimately, and this is what Grumbahum wants to establish, is that this whole, you know, because he wants to say that, you know, the causal connection or the causal nexus between symptom S1 and traumatic experience e1 uh doesn't substantiate the criteria of it to be a call explanatory cause a causal explanation and he says that in in that sense i mean precisely
because there are many situations and i would talk about this that uh there is something that precedes placebo effect and that's placebo affect the placebo effect can actually be more important here in terms of when we are saying that you know these are certain sort of uh basically causes uh for example in ana o that or or ratman that lead to basically recapitulating behaviors which are neurotic and you know repressive.
If we accept this placebo effect or and does it like open the door to pseudoscience to connect itself to science the actual the part of the placebo effect of it? Yep precisely yes yes precisely because for placebo effects then you have to create system of notations without the criteria of uh adjudicating them or verifying them yeah thank you thank you okay dear friends uh it's time uh zenovio has to go uh i need to go um take care have a great
weekend and next Friday discord 2 and then we will have unlimited basically time because no one is recording it anyway take care ciao thank you thank you bye-bye