The Self Between

The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France is the name of the book I just finished reading. It's by Eugene Webb, whom I have elsewhere referred to as "Kierkegirard" when I wrote about another book of his called Philosophers of Consciousness. In that earlier book he did a masterful job of summarizing and integrating the work of such philosophers as Eric Voeglin, Bernard Lonergan, Michael Polanyi, and especially Girard and Kierkegaard, both of whom Webb recommends (as I see it) as thinkers offering the possibility of a new view consciousness because of the attention paid by each to the demands of desire upon it.

In The Self Between he takes this thesis a little further in his study of the role of sacrifice in the development of consciousness and the way it can both bind and liberate desire. The binding and liberation of desire would seem a natural subject for psychology, so it is certainly a natural progression that Webb would take up this subject in his next book, as indeed he has here. The difficulty with this progression is that the study of psychology (even when taken together with her chubby sister, sociology, as the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian perceptively recommends) leads back to a reconsideration of the acting, thinking individual. As Webb himself notes in the last chapter:

What sort of functioning and consciousness, then, would be involved in the constitution of such an existential subject? To address this question fuly wold mean not only ot go beyond the psychological explorations considered in the present book but to commence a whole new one. As it is, however, this was the focus of my previous book, Philosophers of Consciousness, so I will limit myself to summarizing briefly some of the ideas on this topic discussed there...

If this progression summons the image of a snake swallowing its own tail, this is due to the interdependent bonds formed between philosophy and psychology/sociology in the constant search for transcendent and elusive ideals such as truth and "reality". A study of the dynamics involved in this constant search is invaluable.

Among the French thinkers taken up in The Self Between are François Roustang, Marie Balmary, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and of course Jean-Michel Oughourlian. The first three are known for their critiques of Freud (and Lacan, his heir in the French tradition of psychoanalysis), while Oughourlian is most recognized for developing of the concept of the interdividual (a theory of psychology, in his own words, "unencumbered by any sort of biologism"), as well as his co-authoship of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World with Girard.

And somehow it always seems to get back to the Great Dane. I'll leave the last words to Professor Webb, from Chapter 7: From Psychology to Philosophy of Consciousness:

Commenting on the symbolism of the sacrificial knife that Solmon calls for to cut the child in two, [Balmary] says that it differentiates and separates the doubles as it cuts through the ties with which the false mother had tried to bind the child to her. A true mother, she says, is one "who loves her child more than what ties the child to her. . . . the word of truth comes from the mother who agrees to let the knife pass between her child and herself" (p.98), just as Abraham attains to tue fatherhood when he is able to make a sacrifice of his intended sacrifice of Isaac and therby also becomes a true "I" in relation to a true "thou."

Whether such self-transcendence and sacrifice lead to death or to life, to the end of possibilities or to an opening toward unlimited possibilities, however, is not a question for psychology or finally even for philosophy. This is a question that calls not for an opinion but for a commitment - for dedication and a willingness to risk the meaning of one's life for the sake of something unknown. It is a question that leads beyond all abstraction and all theory into what Erikson called "basic trust" and Kierkegaard "faith."