E-Book Content
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/affectsasprocessOOOOjone
COLUMBIA COLLEGE
3 2711 00019 1016
152.4 J77a Jones,
Joseph M.
1933-
Affects as process
SEP
9. .11 MS
DEC 11 w
.--a
,
I
1 l
yf 12
f
f
4
f
i ij i
.3 1
f— L.
f
*3
Freud is contrasting his “instinctual dualism” with Jung’s “instinctual monism.” The argument, however, has deeper roots. One cannot appropriate the language of metaphysical debateterms such as monism” and “dualism”—without evoking the philo¬ sophic debates from which these terms arise. As much as he later might deny it, Freud was clearly pursuing a hidden philosophic agenda. As early as 1896, Freud had written to Fliess, “I hope you will lend me your ear for a few metapsychological questions as
well. . . As a young man I knew no longing other than for philosophi¬ cal knowledge, and now I am about to fulfill it as I move from medicine to psychology” (letter of April 2, 1896, Masson, 1985).
2.
Freud, Darwin, and Descartes
9
Metapsychology was Freud’s attempt to construct a scientific meta¬ physics. In considering Freud’s use of the terms dualist and dualism, we have to step backward in time and remind ourselves of the origins of the term in the work of Rene Descartes. In his Discourse on Method (1641), Descartes hypothesized that animals differ from man in a fundamental way; all animals have feelings (affects), but only man has the power to reason, the res cogitans. The emotions, which he called “passions,” belong to the body; as bodily phenomena, they belong to the material world, the res extensa. This philosophic point of view, known as rationalism, stresses the power of reason in understanding the world. It is also dualistic, in that it assumes that humans possess a faculty or process—the mind—that sharply differentiates them from the rest of the animal kingdom. For Descartes, the mind is something that derives from God and is central to human existence; it operates independently of the human body and is a fully different sort of entity. The body, which contains the feelings or affects, is best thought of as a kind of automaton, which can be compared to the machines made by men. Within philosophy, the relationship between the rational mind and the mechanical body was referred to as the “mind-body” problem. As Howard Gardner (1985) says:
In his discussion of ideas and the mind, sensory experience and the body, the power of language and the centrality of an organizing, doubting self, Descartes formulated an agenda that would dominate philosophical discussions and affect experimental science in the decades and centuries that followed. Furthermore, he proposed the vivid and controversial image of the mind as a rational instrument which, however, cannot be simulated by any imaginable machine— an image still debated in cognitive science today [p. 52],
The initial empirical responses by Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, the synthesis put forth by Kant, and the challenges to the Kantian synthesis were the principal milestones in the philosophic responses to Descartes. The successful assault on Cartesian dualism came, however, not from philosophy but from Darwin’s theory of evolution. On the Origin of Species (1859) was widely interpreted as indicating that man was not all that different from the other animals. Hans Jonas (1966) commented, “Thus evolutionism undid Descartes’ work more effectively than any metaphysical critique had managed to do” (p. 57).
10
I.
Is Primary Process Primary ?
The impact of Darwin’s theories on Freud forms the point of departure