How can we reconcile the psychoanalytical and the reflexive? One way is to deny there’s a tension and the work of someone like Ian Craib illustrates how this can be so, excavating reflexivity as a site of fantasy that is itself acted on reflexively. We find the image of a powerful and boundless self intoxicating but sustaining it necessitates reflexivity in defence of this object. Rather than scrutinising our assumption that life should be without disappointment (Craib’s catch all term for the negative emotions which inevitably emerge from our engagements with a recalcitrant reality) we move into the next job, the next partner, the next home in the earnest hope that this time we can elude the mess of life which has followed us up till now. In this case, reflexivity misidentifies itself, mistaking a fallible and constrained capacity to calibrate our becoming in the world for a powerful and boundless capacity to build the life we aspire to. There is no tension between the psychoanalytical and the reflexive because we can’t understand one without the other.
However what about our super ego? What about injunction we feel to behave a certain way and meet specific standards? I think someone like Adam Phillips can be read in a similar way to Craib, concerned with the space of freedom which is closed down through our misidentification of these demands; a freedom which can only be embraced by recognising our own limitations. But what about the pleasure we find in subordinating ourselves to these injunctions? This is something Žižek discusses on pg 195-196 of Like A Thief In Broad Daylight:
This, then, is what makes millions of us seek refuge in our opiums: not just new poverty and lack of prospects, but unbearable superego pressure in its two aspects –the pressure to succeed professionally and the pressure to enjoy life fully in all its intensity. Perhaps this second aspect is even more unsettling: what remains of our life when our retreat into private pleasure itself becomes the stuff of brutal injunction?
From a realist perspective on reflexivity (Archer, Donati, Sayer et al) these pressures arise from our concerns. It’s because facets of our world matter to us, unavoidably moving us to action, that the question of which action becomes so thorny and difficult. This pressure comes from a relation of concern to the world, even if this is inflected through the cultural coding which is situationally available to us. However for a figure like Žižek this would seem like an escape from the real issue, a lofty rationalisation which obscures the obsene core of ‘what matters to us’ . Even if we see ‘servitude to a cause’ (a phrase he uses later in the book) as a psychoanalytical reading of a reflexive commitment, there nonetheless seems to be a profound tension here.
Can these perspectives be reconciled? Is it possible to accept the existence of cultural injunctions which capture us on a psychic level while recognising the capacities of agents to (fallibly!) calibrate the relationship between themselves and their world? I suspect is isn’t and I’m not sure what this means for my broader interest in recognising the reflexive and the psychoanalytical.
Mark Carrigan 