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Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim
383 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1992
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December 19, 2022
Wiggins's chapter "Remembering directly" led me to this anthology. It's an excellent essay, and a shame that one cannot find it anywhere, other than the hard copy of this anthology. The essays that make up this anthology vary quite a lot in quality and subject matter. Most of them seem to be draft chapters individual authors were working on, and who found a way to make their ideas connect up to something found in Wollheim. Insofar as this is the case, this anthology is useful for getting exposed to a range of different theories that 20th century analytic Anglo-American philosophers who are open to ideas in continental philosophy and psychoanalysis were preoccupied with. But if one is looking for a focused study on a specific subject matter, this anthology will be a waste of time.
I ended up flipping through it, reading a handful of essays with care, and skimming or skipping the rest. The Wiggins piece, which led me here, remains the most interesting of the essays, given my tastes. In that essay, Wiggins argues that the concept "quasi-memory" is misleading. Quasi-memory was first brought up by philosophers Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit, for the sake of addressing the worry that theories that define personal identity in terms of memory are viciously circular. On such theories, one answers the question "what makes up a particular person's identity?" by saying that personal identity is a matter of a person's persisting or continuing over time, and that a given person A is identical to someone picked up at a previous moment in time B just in case when A remembers having done something in the past, B is that person doing that thing at that past moment. This definition of personal identity seems to be circular: the case of remembering a past event, as contained in this definition, is defined in terms of personal identity.
So Shoemaker and Parfit attempt to offer another definition of memory that does not presuppose personal identity; if they can succeed at this, then theories of personal identity that define it in terms of memory need not be circular. These philosophers have argued that this folk definition of memory is dependent upon contingent, empirical circumstances of our actual world, where it always happens to be the case that whenever we remember having done something, we are the same person as that past agent. But it is conceivable that in counterfactual, possible worlds, that condition is violated; if a brain could be split as to produce two perfectly preserved duplicates, which are transplanted into two new bodies, the resultant duplicates's memories would be of that initial person's doings, not their own.
Against this, Wiggins, drawing on Gareth Evans and Richard Wollheim, argues that this definition of quasi-memory still presupposes our ordinary concept of memory, which in turn presupposes personal identity. Shoemaker's and Parfit's assumption that quasi-memory is to count as memory at all primarily rests on the fact that it would share the same sort of causal history as ordinary memory (i.e., a person's initial experience leaves 'memory traces' of some sort, or sets up psychological events, which causally lead to that person's later remembering that initial experience). So, we conceptually start off with our ordinary sense of memory, and use its standards to form the judgment that quasi-memory would be a case of memory. In order for quasi-memory to do its intended work of saving memory-based theories of personal identity, quasi-memory would have to be the more fundamental memory concept, of which ordinary memory, which involves personal identity in its definition, is derived. Wiggins challenges that relation between the two concepts; rather, it appears that ordinary memory is the more fundamental concept, and we can use it to form derivative concepts like quasi-memory.
Besides the Wiggins, I found Gardner's "The nature and source of emotion," Segal's "Acting on phantasy and acting on desire," and Cavell's "Knowing and valuing: some questions of genealogy" pretty interesting. Unfortunately all of these are written in a very sketchy fashion, but they convey overall ideas (some of which are misleading and need qualification, but all are counterintuitive, relative to analytic philosophy generally, so are interesting and thought-provoking). Gardner starts with Freud's idea that all our emotions are had in response to phantasy, rather than objective reality, and expounds a bit on this (unfortunately he doesn't define "phantasy" -- I would like to read something about this, and whether or how it connects up with Aristotle's use of that term, which I'd imagine is the most culturally influential use). Gardner suggests that emotion and some phantasy are concomitant, and our explicit attribution of beliefs and desires to ourselves and others are shaped by such emotion and phantasy -- not unlike how narratives, concepts, and other sorts of folk psychological entities are often thought of as serving as "schema," which structure our perception and thought.
Unfortunately Gardner doesn't elaborate much on this claim. I'd like to think more about it - what does it mean for emotion and phantasy to be defined in relation to one another? Do emotions shape our attribution of beliefs and desires in a way that's different than the way by which narratives shape this? Is the "schema" and shaping/structuring metaphor the right one, for thinking about the relationship between emotion and attribution of propositional states -- or is some other metaphor relatively more apt (e.g., emotions could be clay or some basic matter, from which we form or sculpt propositions)?
Segal presents Freud's idea that when we "phantasize" (defined here in a way that seems to be synonymous with having imaginings which are about what we want or wish for), this serves the psychological function of gratifying our wishes ("wish-fulfillment"). While this is a culturally prominent idea, it seems dead wrong to me. What we imagine rarely ever (if just never) aims to satisfy real life needs. If I fantasize water, I don't do this because I expect my mental imagery to quench my bodily thirst. Rather, there seems to be a primal or ur-version of practical deliberation, where we spontaneously imagine what’s pressing to our concerns. We do this not because we expect that this imagining will satisfy us, but because it might be part of a process leading to action in the world.
Could there be any truth to Freud's claim, or is he just crazy? It is interesting how when we fantasize about what we want or wish for, this can give us another sort of satisfaction (not the satisfaction of the real life want or wish, however). This satisfaction may be glossed as aesthetic or bittersweet in character; we get it also when we seem to feel emotions in response to engaging with artworks. There is a debate on whether our apparent emotions directed at fictional objects are real emotions or not (e.g., Kendall Walton, Richard Moran), and I'm interested in thinking about how a part of defining these apparent emotions might involve tracing their onto- and phlyogenetic history. Walton primarily focuses on looking at pretense or make-believe; but I wonder whether Freud's contextualizing such activity as fundamentally wish-fulfillment driven could be helpful in any way. Although Freud is literally wrong, maybe there could be grains of truth in this view; something Walton does not talk about, for example, is that often, make-believing as found in children usually serves to scratch some real-life itch (e.g., Freud's example of the infant hallucinating a breast).
I am also left confused about Freud's concept of ‘projection’ (which Segal focuses on, but is also dealt with by other authors of this anthology). It seems that 'projection' can mean many different things. For example, first, we can have emotionally intense past experiences, which leave residue in our psyches, so that in the present and future, these past moments serve like schema, structuring our expectations or perceptions of what's going on now. Second, we might feel or think something about ourselves, but desire to repress that, and as an outcome, come to see other people as manifesting those traits or feelings. Are these related at all? They seem totally heterogeneous, and yet both are equally called projection.
Cavell's essay focuses on presenting Freud's views on the reality principle, and she concludes with a bold statement that love/gratitude and grief/mourning are the primary engines of both epistemic truth and practical value -- in effect, truth and value are continuous with one another and find their origins in love. According to Freud, babies are solipsists. They come to recognize the distinction between their subjective reality and objective reality through experiences where they see their finitude and dependence on others, who see things differently than they do. Gratitude brings out our sense of finitude and dependence on others; and so doe grief. So both make are particularly emotionally keen manifestations of the force of objective reality. This was fun to read, but I don't see how this goes beyond the commonsense idea that in crisis or special moments, we have to face up to reality, and having responsibility for others requires greater sensitivity to the finitude, contingent character, and possible erroneous character of our subjective realities and emotions. I worry that a lot of Freud is like this; he invents fancy words for commonsense ideas, in ways that can inspire us to think misleading thoughts. For example, does recognition of the gap between one's own perception of a situation, and someone else's perception, really serve as the foundation of our sense of objective reality? Why not say that when we act in the world on the basis of perceptions, even in total solitude, we can screw up, and these errors sere as the foundation of our sense of objective reality?
I ended up flipping through it, reading a handful of essays with care, and skimming or skipping the rest. The Wiggins piece, which led me here, remains the most interesting of the essays, given my tastes. In that essay, Wiggins argues that the concept "quasi-memory" is misleading. Quasi-memory was first brought up by philosophers Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit, for the sake of addressing the worry that theories that define personal identity in terms of memory are viciously circular. On such theories, one answers the question "what makes up a particular person's identity?" by saying that personal identity is a matter of a person's persisting or continuing over time, and that a given person A is identical to someone picked up at a previous moment in time B just in case when A remembers having done something in the past, B is that person doing that thing at that past moment. This definition of personal identity seems to be circular: the case of remembering a past event, as contained in this definition, is defined in terms of personal identity.
So Shoemaker and Parfit attempt to offer another definition of memory that does not presuppose personal identity; if they can succeed at this, then theories of personal identity that define it in terms of memory need not be circular. These philosophers have argued that this folk definition of memory is dependent upon contingent, empirical circumstances of our actual world, where it always happens to be the case that whenever we remember having done something, we are the same person as that past agent. But it is conceivable that in counterfactual, possible worlds, that condition is violated; if a brain could be split as to produce two perfectly preserved duplicates, which are transplanted into two new bodies, the resultant duplicates's memories would be of that initial person's doings, not their own.
Against this, Wiggins, drawing on Gareth Evans and Richard Wollheim, argues that this definition of quasi-memory still presupposes our ordinary concept of memory, which in turn presupposes personal identity. Shoemaker's and Parfit's assumption that quasi-memory is to count as memory at all primarily rests on the fact that it would share the same sort of causal history as ordinary memory (i.e., a person's initial experience leaves 'memory traces' of some sort, or sets up psychological events, which causally lead to that person's later remembering that initial experience). So, we conceptually start off with our ordinary sense of memory, and use its standards to form the judgment that quasi-memory would be a case of memory. In order for quasi-memory to do its intended work of saving memory-based theories of personal identity, quasi-memory would have to be the more fundamental memory concept, of which ordinary memory, which involves personal identity in its definition, is derived. Wiggins challenges that relation between the two concepts; rather, it appears that ordinary memory is the more fundamental concept, and we can use it to form derivative concepts like quasi-memory.
Besides the Wiggins, I found Gardner's "The nature and source of emotion," Segal's "Acting on phantasy and acting on desire," and Cavell's "Knowing and valuing: some questions of genealogy" pretty interesting. Unfortunately all of these are written in a very sketchy fashion, but they convey overall ideas (some of which are misleading and need qualification, but all are counterintuitive, relative to analytic philosophy generally, so are interesting and thought-provoking). Gardner starts with Freud's idea that all our emotions are had in response to phantasy, rather than objective reality, and expounds a bit on this (unfortunately he doesn't define "phantasy" -- I would like to read something about this, and whether or how it connects up with Aristotle's use of that term, which I'd imagine is the most culturally influential use). Gardner suggests that emotion and some phantasy are concomitant, and our explicit attribution of beliefs and desires to ourselves and others are shaped by such emotion and phantasy -- not unlike how narratives, concepts, and other sorts of folk psychological entities are often thought of as serving as "schema," which structure our perception and thought.
Unfortunately Gardner doesn't elaborate much on this claim. I'd like to think more about it - what does it mean for emotion and phantasy to be defined in relation to one another? Do emotions shape our attribution of beliefs and desires in a way that's different than the way by which narratives shape this? Is the "schema" and shaping/structuring metaphor the right one, for thinking about the relationship between emotion and attribution of propositional states -- or is some other metaphor relatively more apt (e.g., emotions could be clay or some basic matter, from which we form or sculpt propositions)?
Segal presents Freud's idea that when we "phantasize" (defined here in a way that seems to be synonymous with having imaginings which are about what we want or wish for), this serves the psychological function of gratifying our wishes ("wish-fulfillment"). While this is a culturally prominent idea, it seems dead wrong to me. What we imagine rarely ever (if just never) aims to satisfy real life needs. If I fantasize water, I don't do this because I expect my mental imagery to quench my bodily thirst. Rather, there seems to be a primal or ur-version of practical deliberation, where we spontaneously imagine what’s pressing to our concerns. We do this not because we expect that this imagining will satisfy us, but because it might be part of a process leading to action in the world.
Could there be any truth to Freud's claim, or is he just crazy? It is interesting how when we fantasize about what we want or wish for, this can give us another sort of satisfaction (not the satisfaction of the real life want or wish, however). This satisfaction may be glossed as aesthetic or bittersweet in character; we get it also when we seem to feel emotions in response to engaging with artworks. There is a debate on whether our apparent emotions directed at fictional objects are real emotions or not (e.g., Kendall Walton, Richard Moran), and I'm interested in thinking about how a part of defining these apparent emotions might involve tracing their onto- and phlyogenetic history. Walton primarily focuses on looking at pretense or make-believe; but I wonder whether Freud's contextualizing such activity as fundamentally wish-fulfillment driven could be helpful in any way. Although Freud is literally wrong, maybe there could be grains of truth in this view; something Walton does not talk about, for example, is that often, make-believing as found in children usually serves to scratch some real-life itch (e.g., Freud's example of the infant hallucinating a breast).
I am also left confused about Freud's concept of ‘projection’ (which Segal focuses on, but is also dealt with by other authors of this anthology). It seems that 'projection' can mean many different things. For example, first, we can have emotionally intense past experiences, which leave residue in our psyches, so that in the present and future, these past moments serve like schema, structuring our expectations or perceptions of what's going on now. Second, we might feel or think something about ourselves, but desire to repress that, and as an outcome, come to see other people as manifesting those traits or feelings. Are these related at all? They seem totally heterogeneous, and yet both are equally called projection.
Cavell's essay focuses on presenting Freud's views on the reality principle, and she concludes with a bold statement that love/gratitude and grief/mourning are the primary engines of both epistemic truth and practical value -- in effect, truth and value are continuous with one another and find their origins in love. According to Freud, babies are solipsists. They come to recognize the distinction between their subjective reality and objective reality through experiences where they see their finitude and dependence on others, who see things differently than they do. Gratitude brings out our sense of finitude and dependence on others; and so doe grief. So both make are particularly emotionally keen manifestations of the force of objective reality. This was fun to read, but I don't see how this goes beyond the commonsense idea that in crisis or special moments, we have to face up to reality, and having responsibility for others requires greater sensitivity to the finitude, contingent character, and possible erroneous character of our subjective realities and emotions. I worry that a lot of Freud is like this; he invents fancy words for commonsense ideas, in ways that can inspire us to think misleading thoughts. For example, does recognition of the gap between one's own perception of a situation, and someone else's perception, really serve as the foundation of our sense of objective reality? Why not say that when we act in the world on the basis of perceptions, even in total solitude, we can screw up, and these errors sere as the foundation of our sense of objective reality?
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