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The estimable Adam Phillips on the (ultimately constructive) tension between psychoanalysis and (especially American) pragmatism…

When Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism. How one feels about Rorty’s eloquent, deliberate and subtle brashness depends on one’s education and sensibility, on one’s cultural preferences and prejudices, and indeed on one’s politics. There may be a significant difference between getting the life I want and getting the life ‘we’ might want, between a certain kind of possessive, acquisitive individualism and a collective political project (the phrase ‘the life I want’ also implies a stability and a degree of certainty in myself; the idea of the life I want fixes the flux of myself). And there are also, by the same token, interesting difficulties in using Rorty’s pragmatist definition of truth in relation to psychoanalysis, which in a quite different way claims to have an interest in truth and in the lives people claim that they want. Rorty’s description of truth here, read in a psychoanalytic context, couldn’t easily be squared with, say, Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, which, in the useful words of Slavoj Žižek, clearly seeks a different version of truth. Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, Žižek writes, ‘is not the patient’s wellbeing, successful social life or personal fulfilment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary co-ordinates and deadlocks of his or her desire’. It doesn’t sound as though helping the patient get the life he wants is among Lacan’s priorities (and ‘deadlocks’, of course, aren’t Rorty’s thing). This can’t help but make us wonder whether, or in what sense, Freud’s psychoanalysis has got anything to do with getting the life you want; and if it doesn’t, what it might be to do with. Freud does, after all, put wishing at the centre of his theory, but only to radically temper it; as if to say, what you think you want is where the problems start. And yet wanting is what, for both psychoanalysis and American pragmatism, there is, in William James’s words, ‘to be going on from’. Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters, and also that wanting has become the thing we most want to know about, as though now we are simply our wants.

It is easy to forget that all accounts of the goals of psychoanalysis are prescriptions presented as descriptions. In the guise of telling us what the goal of psychoanalysis is – what the concept of cure is, what a successful treatment entails – theorists are simply giving us their own account of what they take a good life to be and what they assume a person wants (a person who walks into an analyst’s office walks into a vocabulary, and a vocabulary is always a vocabulary of wants). Psychoanalysts, to their credit, have been more than willing to tell us what the good is that we should seek; though not quite so willing to open up their proposed goods for discussion, or indeed to suggest that their proposed goods might be experiments in living and not absolute values. For Freud, the goal is recovering the capacity to love and work, or, rather more grimly, to turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. For Lacan it is ‘not giving ground relative to one’s desire’; for Klein it is reaching the Depressive Position; for Winnicott it is about enabling the patient to play and to surprise themselves; for Ferenczi the patient is not cured through free association, but cured when he can free associate, and so on and on and on. All the interesting psychoanalytic theorists are telling us what, in their view, constitutes a good life. Old-fashioned psychoanalysis always had a known destination.

What the Rortyan pragmatist wants us to ask is whether and in what way, say, Lacanian psychoanalysis helps us to get the life we want, understood in terms of the good we have been encouraged to seek. It does not need us to ask whether Lacanian theory and practice is in any sense true. Pragmatism wants us to ask, what is the life we want – or think we want? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want? (According to Michel Serres, the only modern question is: what is it you don’t want to know about yourself?) Psychoanalysis wants us to ask – against the grain of traditional philosophy – why do we obscure the good that we seek? Pragmatism takes for granted that the good we seek is what we want and asks us how we are going to go about getting it. Indeed, pragmatism tells us that we are good at knowing what we want and good at letting our wants change. In an implicit critique of, among other things, American pragmatism, Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of Authenticity, defines his notion of a moral ideal: ‘I mean a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be where “better” and “higher” are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.’ Rorty’s work always runs the risk of seeming to promote a kind of capricious, impulsive egotism.

Clearly psychoanalysis and American pragmatism are uneasy bedfellows; they fall out over the phrase ‘knowing what you want’…

Read on to Phillips’ unpacking of that tension, and for his “resolution”: “On Getting the Life You Want,” from @lrb.co.uk‬.

(Image above: source)

* Donald Barthelme, Snow White

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As we decipher desire, we might send experimental birthday greetings to Stanley Milgram; he was born on this date in 1933. A social psychologist, he is best known for his obedience experiment conducted at Yale University in 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects (asked to administer painful electric shocks to “learners” they believed they were supervising) would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Among the most controversial of all psychology studies ever published, the experiment has been repeated many times around the globe, and with fairly consistent results; but its interpretations have been in dispute from the start.

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