Self and social political theory

The Self and social-political (history) theory The self is “human nature” insofar as we can know the self as a subject of humane study! The self as the subject of humane study is the study of our “human nature”! Introduction Perhaps, the only remaining value (or “good”) that still has general consent in our Western culture is the value or good of the “self”. Recent discussions among social-political theorist appear to support this claim concerning the importance of the self. For example, Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the limits of justice, 1982) criticizes John Rawls (A theory of justice, 1971) for holding an “insubstantial” conception of the self. The communitarian Sandel charges that John Rawls as the representative of traditional liberalism makes the self inviolable but as he does so he also makes the self invisible. That is, Sandel claims that Rawls’ concept of self has more to do with solving the philosophical problem of establishing the priority of “rights” over the “good”, than it does with a “theory of justice” in service of the needs of real individuals. Rawls proposes a concept of the self that is designed to protect it from the contingencies of its environment even as he calls into question liberalism’s very effort to protect “dignity” and “autonomy” for the self. Indeed, Sandel claims that Rawls’ concept of self is so “thin” that it is hardly worth protecting at all. Moreover, Sandel claims that Rawls’ ideal community does not penetrate the self enough to generate “social feelings” or “individual sacrifice” that the political principles of equality and mutuality seem to require. The communitarian Sandel comments that it is only when individuals define themselves in terms of the good they share are they willing to make sacrifices to keep the community going. Thus while Sandel can agree with Rawls that individuals do act in their self-interests, Sandel maintains that if the self is extended to include the good of the others, as surely both liberalism and communitarianism deem desirable, then the interests of self will also have to include others. This kind of criticism of liberalism differs from that which might have occurred in the 1960s. Back then liberals were accused of holding erroneous empirical views about the self (e.g., reducing it to possessive individualism) but today both liberals (Rawls) and communitarians (Sandel) have abstract metaphysical conceptions of the self. Thus, the communitarian Sandel has an equally abstract view of the self as does the liberalist Rawls. Alford’s purpose is to challenge this trend among social-political theorists, whether they are liberals or communitarians, towards theoretical abstractedness of the self. That is, Alford rejects the social-political theorists’ purely theoretical/metaphysical approach to the self. Along with the abstract theoretical/metaphysical views of the self that social-political theorists have proposed, social-political theorists also follow a dualism with respect to their conception of the self. Thus, the self is either (1) a socially constituted entity in that the self is conceived as possessing certain attributes that are essential to account for the principles of social order, or (2) the self is a self-constituting entity with such attributes as freedom, self-direction, agency, etc., but never both. Communitarians usually see the self as socially constituted, whereas liberals usually see the self as self-constituting. [Sandel accuses Rawls of holding incompatible images of the self, images that are both inter-subjective and individualistic (a strange accusation for surely the self could be both as Rawls claims).] In any case, the reason for this dualism in social-political theory is because the self is not valued for its own sake but is usually derived from “higher” universal principle or value (such as “rights”, “duties” “equality” etc.) that are properly the concern of social-political theory. Remarkably, this metaphysical/theoretical approach to the self by social-political theorists gets some support today from post-modern continental philosophy in its own move towards abstractness. Thus, while social-political theorists’ metaphysical conception of the self as merely a rhetorical concept employed in philosophical, legal, and political theory, continental philosophy has eliminated, or de-centered, the self altogether. On this latter view the self is merely a symptom of our inability to accept our in-authenticity in desire, ideal, or action (that is, our in-authenticity in being unable to accept our “subjectivity”). For example, Foucault and Lacan suggest that when the self is not deceiving itself, it is nothing but the assertion of the “will-to-power” (Nietzsche). My concern here is not to eliminate (deconstruct) or de-center the self, but rather to construct it in drawing on the work of Heinz Kohut and Jacques Lacan. Thus, in constructing the self I do not want to follow Nietzsche in claiming that the self is merely a wild self-assertion (to do this is to open myself to the same criticism as is directed at Foucault and Lacan). Rather I want to use the psychoanalytic ideas of Kohut and Lacan to counteract the tendency towards the abstractness in social political thought regarding the self. [One should note that this abstractness is also evidently characteristic of the “self” conceived of as object/concept in psychology – a remnant of the Enlightenment bifurcation of the self-defining subject (reason) and the subject embodied as object.] [Alford (1991) uses Kohut and Lacan to examine the views of the self in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, and Rousseau – who are all but Plato “state-of-nature” theorists and so are theoretically concerned with that state of nature which is “human nature” (see epigraph at beginning). That is, Alford wants to show that their account of the self is based on purportedly empirical yet troubling assumptions about the self. In demonstrating that these theorists build their conception of the self on troublesome empirical assumption as to the nature of human nature, Alford hopes to counteract the traditional claim that these social-political theorists/philosophers view the self as an abstract metaphysical entity (and the accompanying view that would deem their concepts of self as fraudulent when it comes to human nature).] The same point can be made by noting that in constructing the self the methods we use to explain the self are not independent of how much we value the self. If we value abstract social political principles and then derive the self from these principle as social-political theorists do, then we do not value the self for it-self (this is true as much for Sandel and Rawls). However if we value the self first of all for it-self, and not as derivative from ‘higher’ principles, then we do well to start with Kohut who is very concerned about the possibility of establishing the self as an autonomous person (recognizing that from birth onward the individual is not autonomous but dispersed in its self-objects and therefore faces the challenge of becoming autonomous). Even so as we will see that this is not easy going for if, as Lacan claims, the subjective/unconscious is a kind of “text” then it is not the self that uses language (expression) but language that uses the self (that is, Lacan de-centers the self by deriving it from the “language”). But if this is so, then there is no autonomy possible at all, since the depth of the self (subjectivity/unconscious) is always already a construction in language (the self is always lost in its signifiers). In fact, Lacan suggests that any attempt to rescue the self (outside its constituting language) is merely a project in bad faith (mauvai foi). I don’t want to follow Lacan here however. I don’t want to deconstruct the self in language/text; rather I want to construct the “real self” in deconstructing the texts (expressions) that the self (social-political theorists and philosophers) tells about its self. And I want to deconstruct or critically understand these texts and I will do so by using the writings of Charles Taylor, Heinz Kohut, and Herbert Fingarette. ___________________ Kohut, H. (1984). How does analysis cure? (A. Goldberg, Ed). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. NY: International U Press. Kohut, H. (1985). Self psychology and the humanities. (C. Strozier, Ed). NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits (A. Sheridan, Trans.). NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1968) Speech and language in psychoanalysis (A.Wildon, Ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U Press. Sandel, M. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard U Press. Walkup, J. (1987). Introduction: Special issue “Reflections on the self”. Social Research, 54, 3-9. ___________________ Social theory of the self Social political theorist of course do not deny the existence of the self, and can agree that it is valuable, but they also point out that for every claim made about the self there is always an opposite claim to be made. (That is, “psychology” is here highly unreliable.) In fact, it is very difficult to tests these counter claims: there is virtually no way to test “human nature”. But then social-political theorists go on to argue that fortunately we do not need to know much about the self, what we need to know about is institutions, traditions, etc., (collectivities). Thus, social theorists argue that we merely need a rudimentary conception of self: for example, as “stimulus-response mechanisms” that yield predictions about the economic behavior of consumers and producers; or selves as “strategic mechanisms”, “bureaucratic mechanisms”, etc. All these reductionist models are an attempt to have the kinds of selves that serve the social-political order. Historically, social-political thinkers have been always concerned with “human nature”, and from two directions. 1. The direction of Plato, namely to raise the question of the “good” and how to conceive of a society that can nurture the good in people. 2. The direction from modernity, namely to raise the question of the “bad” and how society can control the bad in people so as to make peaceful coexistence (society) possible. Today we see these alternatives as a little naïve as though there where such a thing as “human nature”. Indeed, perhaps, there is no such fixed human nature. Of course, those who hold this position do not claim that it is pointless to talk about human attributes such as desire, hubris, love, feelings, ambition, lust, greed, envy, hatred, rage, aggression, sympathy, emptiness, meaninglessness, purpose, etc. To write about the self on this view is to write of these attributes, or constellations of attributes, of the self. Since, the self may change over time and be different in different societies and cultures, we have to determine how these attributes and their constellations vary in time and over cultures. What is usually meant by the self in this context is then the pattern or constellation of attributes in a particular time and location. And of course all this may indeed be very relevant to social-political theory. For example, if hatred can be attributed to a people then this makes all the difference as to how one conceives of a political order than can control such hatred. Or, if we attributed to people a basic goodness, then presumably this could affect the manner in which we construct a social order to reflect this goodness. But note how difficult it is to “test” any, and all, such conjectures. Philosophy has historically also felt the need to conceptualize an entity called the self and it is easy to understand why. David Hume held that the self is necessary to explain how disparate impressions are held together meaningfully. Thus, his notion of self was as a bundle of perceptions (impressions) that are held together unconsciously by ‘resemblance”, “succession”, and “causation” was deemed to be the mechanical processes of association. Immanuel Kant’s reply to David Hume’s conception of the self was that if our impression were really so loosely held together, we would never have any genuine insight into the connectedness of things nor would we have any unitary consciousness. To have a unity of perception is to postulate a condition for its possibility and this condition Kant claimed was the “transcendental subject” who experiences the connectedness of life according to universal laws of understanding. Today, we see that Kant’s moved too quickly from his correct insight that the unity of consciousness requires rules of connection (identified with the self as rules of understanding) to the false conclusion that these must be transcendent reality-constitutive rules rather than say empirical/conventional ones. While Hume and Kant were concerned with epistemology and metaphysics, and not with social-political or psychological concerns, their two positions (empiricism and idealism/intellectualism) frame most contemporary discussions of the self. I too find myself somewhere between Hume and Kant, in that the SELF is the way we organize our desires and ideals (Hume) particularly as these pertain to how we use other people in support of our sense/direction of self (Kant). The latter way of framing the question reflects my reliance on Heinz Kohut. My sense of self does not distinguish between self, ego, “I”, me, subject, or individual, even as I recognize that these words indicate different ways of talking about the self. For example, we will see that Lacan distinguishes between ego (as defense) and subject (self), and I will distinguish between individual (given) and person (achievement). These distinctions are important but not theoretically fundamental (perhaps?). Generally, I deem the self to be the individual, subject, and object of psychological and social-political theory. But this cannot be all. For in our everyday Western sense of self we not only deem the self to be the “permanent subject of various states of consciousness/impressions” (Hume), but we also deem the self capable of giving “direction to itself and to control itself” (Kant). Even if psychoanalytical theory has shed some doubt on this capacity of self-directedness and self-control (Kohut points our how difficult these are to achieve, and Lacan denies them altogether as an illusion/self-deception, nevertheless we cannot ignore this notion of “agency” (as Taylor argues) on risk that we are no longer talking about the real self. The sociological view of the self (breadth) At the heart of the sociological view of the self is the concept of the “social self”, namely, the “ability to see oneself as one sees others”. In other words, to be able to make an object of oneself in the way that other people are “objects” to us. While this view of the self is there in all philosophy whether Hume, Adam Smith, or Kant, what sociologists have added to this conception of the social self is that the means whereby we see ourselves, the means whereby we become objects to ourselves, is through the reactions of other people to our self. It is this social self that Cooley has called the “looking-glass self”. This concept of the “looking-glass self” has three parts: 1. how we imagine how we appear to others, 2. how we imagine others judge us, and 3. pride or mortification as a consequence of how we imagine others judge us. Cooley however recognized that 2, above, is not really captured in the concept of the “looking-glass self”. That is, how we imagine other people judge us, is more a constructive process than what the concept of “looking-glass” self allows for. We can better capture point 2, above, (how we imagine other people judge us), using a metaphor of “living in each other’s minds”. Thus what makes human conduct unique is that is it oriented towards the reactions of others. It is in this potential social conflict, in which we all live the minds of others, that the “human nature” of the individual may acquire its most characteristic human trait. As Erving Goffman notes in his “dramaturgical model” (as a version of the “looking-glass self”) this living in the minds of other has a great conventionalizing effect in relating our conduct and, indeed, in our “self”, as being dependent on others. This idea that the judgments that other people make of us is the important factor in determining our sense of self, is not merely false. In fact, this is also part of the claim put forward by Lacan and Kohut. Nor is this view superficial, in the sense of lacking depth. In fact, the idea that we imagine how others judge us has a degree of depth. Rather, the problem with this sociological view is that it cannot explain the notable exception. It can explain why people conform, but it cannot explain why (say, Ghandi, or Luther) do not conform. Here we need to appeal not just to the social/others but also to the psychological/individual. Thus, if the self can be wholly explained by way of the roles the individual plays in relationship to others (e.g., husband, lover, employee, etc.), then we trivialize those who do not play their expected role. Role theory needs a theory of psychological depth. We do not only need to explain how it that by convention, through other people’s judgments, become selves, we also need to explain the nature of the role we play in relation to others, how we resist and desire others more than any convention account can tell us (properly playing the role of husband does not explain my inability to feel intimate with my spouse). At the same time, sociological theory is important for it can help to explain how the self lacks autonomy (we are chronically conforming to other peoples’ expectations) and how our role-prescribed relations with other people lack intimacy (it is not part of the role we have been assigned by others that we be intimate). Hence, sociological theory is both too strong and not strong enough to establish a self. ___________________ Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. NY: Scribner. Goffman, E. (1957) The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. McCall, G. (1977). The social looking glass: a sociological perspective on self-development. In T. Mischel (Ed.), The self: psychological and philosophical issues (274-287). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ___________________ The agency view of the self (depth) Instead of beginning with social dynamics (the self in relation to others), Charles Taylor begins with the individual’s capacity for self-reflection. Taylor distinguishes between weak and strong evaluation in self-reflection. The weak evaluator is someone who weighs his desires and evaluates how these might best be fulfilled (reason is instrumental – neutral - in adapting our desires to the world). Thus reason here takes account of the intensity, conflict among, and consequences of desires (reason as a form of “calculation” – Hobbes). An individual who can engage in such weak evaluation is said to be rational and a complete self (adaptation to social order). What such a weak evaluator lacks, Taylor claims, is depth. What gives the individual depth is the capacity to evaluate the nature of our desires in terms (not of intensity, consequences, or conflict) of “moral” categories of lower or higher, integrated or fragmented, noble or base. Taylor claims that strong evaluators have depth because the individual’s sense of self is now a function of reflection on the self in terms of (traditional) ideals. It is this capacity for reflection on our selves in terms of ideals that constitutes the individual as “agent”. To become a self, to become an individual with depth, demands the capacity for strong evaluation. It is of course part of Taylor’s thesis that this capacity for strong evaluation depends upon language/speech and hence those social and cultural orders that are the sources of our languages of strong evaluation. The decline of strong evaluation (concomitantly the decline of the self) is may be related to the decline of culture that is the source of strong evaluation. Thus Alistair MacIntyre speaks of the decline of the “narrative self” and Allan Bloom notes that the decline in virtue is related to the decline of social-cultural sources of virtue (i.e., classical literature and virtues). The depth of the self in strong evaluation is then dependent on the cultural sources available to support strong evaluation and hence depth of self. Hence, there is a close connection is this agency view of the self between the self and the way the self reasons and evaluates its inner life of desire and ideal, and culture. Now I fully concur with this view of the relation between self and culture. But I will focus instead on the manner in which our desires/ideals (having their source in tradition) divide us against our self (rather than how these sources allow the building/formation of the self). That is, I take the view that the individual is never quite master of itself (even assuming Taylor’s strong evaluation, or as we shall see Kohut’s claim for the relative autonomy of the self); that the individual self is never quite unified, whole, coherent. Indeed, it is possible to understand strong evaluations as themselves rationalizations for this absence of unity, wholeness, coherence. That is, I am sympathetic to Lacan’s claim (contra Taylor and Kohut) that the self is never (metaphysically and empirically) autonomous or coherent. In fact, it is interesting (in the context of self-deception) to speculate that strong evaluators are those who most feel the lack of autonomy/coherence/wholeness if the self. Those who are most acutely sensitive to their lack of autonomy and wholeness are those who will engage in strong evaluations, searching their traditions, to make explicit the meaning of those significances of their desires and ideals that are first of all “lived”. ___________________ Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind. NY: Simon & Schuster. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue. Notre Dame: ID U of Notre Dame Press. MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose justice? Which virtue? Notre Dame, ID Notre Dame U Press. ___________________ Interlude: tension between Charles Taylor’s agency and MacIntyre’s narrative self, and the social-political theorists’ metaphysical selves Since Sandel and Taylor are both social-political theorists (communitarians), and they admire each other, why it is that I have criticize Sandel but not Taylor? The reason is that Taylor is explicit in his recognition that social-political theory does need a substantive conception of the self (while Sandel only claims to need a theory (metaphysics) of the self in relation to his focus on moral beliefs – a position Taylor that sees as an “advance” among social-political theorists such as Rawls who are concerned with metaphysical selves. The communitarian Sandel, as I said, criticizes the liberal John Rawls. Thus, Sandel writes that there is no subject/self prior to its values, goals, desires, talents, possessions, i.e., prior to history. That is, there is no empty self – prior to the self, there is always a history (cf. W. Dilthey). This is in contrast to Rawls for whom there is a (metaphysical) self prior to history however his conception of self prior to history has more to do with Rawls’ effort to solve philosophical problems (priority of “right” over “good”) than it has to do with grounding justice in the desires/ideals of the individual. It is therefore ironic that this very thin notion of self which is intended by Rawls to protect the self from the contingencies of the world, actually calls into question the dignity and autonomy of the self. It is ironic because Rawls’ liberalism is precisely intended to protect this dignity and autonomy of the self. But then a self shorn of its interest, ends, goals, desires, relationship to others, hardly seems worth protecting (except in the survival sense). Also, Rawls’ ideal community cannot penetrate the self sufficiently to generate social feelings or make plausible self-sacrifice for others (which surely such liberal principles of equality and mutuality require). It is only if individuals evaluate themselves in terms of the goods they share with others (e.g., Taylor’s strong evaluation, or Sandel’s moral commitments) that they can make the sacrifices sufficient to make a community possible. If, as liberals like Rawls claim, individuals tend towards self-interest this interest must be evaluated in terms of goods that define and include others for only then will individual sacrifice themselves to make community possible. Sandel’s criticisms of Rawls are trenchant, and his comments about the psychological limits of individualism make good sense from a psychoanalytic standpoint. For example, he argues that in certain moral circumstances, the self may embrace more than a single human being, and conversely, that sometimes it makes sense to talk about multiple selves inhabiting a single human being as when conflicting desires seem to divided the self or when a conversion experience leads me to talk in terms of who “we were then” and who “we are now” – so that Sandel does some depth to the self. The trouble is that Sandel does not use these insights of depth to construct a self and to ask about the relation of self to others. Rather he uses his notion of self as an instance of community (i.e., the self is constituted in community/traditions and obvious these are not all of a piece). So that for Sandel (unlike Rawls) the self is socially constituted, reflecting the community, but the self can never affect the community in turn (so the self is never truly self-constituting/directing). For Sandel then the self and community are equivalent (the self is community writ small). The best evidence for this is the way Sandel’s discussion of the self deviates from Taylor’. Thus, Sandel argues that Rawls self cannot be strong evaluator but only a simple weigher. But neither can Sandel’s self unless one is prepared to identify the evaluation of the community with the individual’s evaluation - which seems to miss the point of Taylor claim concerning “strong evaluation”. After all, by identifying the self with community/tradition, Sandel is unable to accept some of Taylor’s other claims on the self, such that the self “creates significances”, “reflects on desires”, “judges itself”, and “chooses well or not”, all of which demand that the self is capable of doing something to constitute itself. Furthermore, the communitarian Sandel does not even take account of the history of the self (the self with past and future), as for example MacIntyre does do in his notion of the “narrative self”. Sandel recognizes that on his conception of the self, the self may drown in others/culture/society (in a sea of circumstances) but he does nothing to alleviate this danger to his “radically situated self”. If Rawls’ self is so abstract that it becomes invisible, Sandel’s self is an empty self in that its content is identical with the beliefs/purposes or ideals of the community. But the self cannot merely be identified with community as Sandel would have it; rather the individual must have the self-in-relation-to-others as a project (see Fingarette’s notion of “engagement”; as a project of the self). Of course, one can defend the communitarian Sandel by pointing out that he emphasizes the constitutive function of the community precisely because liberals like Rawls emphasize not the community but the inviolable but invisible self. But it is remarkable that Sandel nowhere talks about the self’s emotions, feelings, or actions; he nowhere takes account, either by acknowledging or criticizing, such common sense notions of the self as its autonomy, choice, and freedom. In fact, Sandel treats the self as an “object” (like Rawls) and never a “subject”. Yet obviously the self is both subject and object. It is not that Sandel believes that the self has no attributes or no constitutive powers of its own rather while Sandel writes about the self he is not interested in the self. Sandel is interested in solving social and political questions, for example, in showing that Rawls’ justice depends on an “inter-subjectivity” that Rawls denies (thus, treating assets as common property makes no sense unless the self is held in common with others, which Rawls’ liberalism must deny). Taylor suggests that one reason that such academic accounts of the self are frequently far removed from common experience is that such accounts are not really interested in understanding the self at all. Usually such accounts of the self are interested in explaining something else – some social/political/juridical value such as inequality, self-esteem, and entitlement and, in this context, the self is merely a dependent variable. If this is all Sandel is doing why doesn’t simply acknowledge that? Instead Sandel confuses social-political/metaphysical concepts of the self with experiential ones. But this won’t do. We cannot treat the self this way because we then risk that it is no longer the self we value. Countless political systems/nations reveal that one can esteem abstract metaphysical selves (e.g., citizens, workers, employees, consumers, comrades, friends, victims, bearers of rights; or, in psychology, we come to value cognizers, attitude changers, responders, information processing systems) while totally ignoring the interests and values of real selves. Of course, the category “real self” (the “person as rhetorical category”) is also an abstraction (as both deconstructionist and analytical philosophy remind us). Yet there are differences in degree of abstraction. However, this claim requires the rejection of the doctrine of inter-textuality (the world as text). In fact, as I will show below in my discussion of Lacan, the great enemy of mediated presence (the idea that some concepts are closer to reality than others) is unmediated presence (if our concepts cannot capture reality perfectly then one concept is as good as another). For example, when Lacan claims that unmediated presence is an impossible ideal and that therefore there is no self that is not mediated, he concludes that any text about language will do. But this conclusion does not follow. We can learn from such deconstructionists as Lacan about the impossibility of identifying meaning with being, but for that reason we need not follow his conclusion that any meaning/reading/text will do. Now why would Sandel criticize Rawls for his abstract view of the self if Sandel’s own view of the self as community writ small is equally abstract? In fact, communitarians criticize liberals for their abstract view of the self but only to substitute their own equally abstract view of the self. In fact, one can argue that Rawls (Hobbes’ state-of-nature) has set the level of analysis for this debate between liberals and communitarians, and that while they disagree with each other’s particular metaphysical assumptions of the self, they actually proceed to argue on the same level of analysis as set by Rawls (that is what must we postulate of the self before we can make a community with certain value possible?). There is another reason why communitarians at least want to keep their distance from the “self” and that is that communitarians want at all cost to avoid talking about individuals and so risk individualism. This argument is sort of like if you don’t mention the self then individualism will go away, and conversely, if we do talk about the self then we risk blessing individualism in the political realm (i.e., by talking about the self we make individualism real!!!). Communitarians are afraid to look at the individual/self lest they see nothing but greed and aggression and hate (Hobbes) - and therefore rather than do that, they prefer to approach the self indirectly by way of abstract principles (from the top down) so as to “contain/restrain” the self and make it safe for others (i.e., for society). Contemporary communitarians are very different in this sense from classical political theorist such as Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and even, or especially Rawls, in that these theorists in fact do approach the self directly seeing its desires, aggression, domineering nature etc. and then worry about designing a society (i.e., institutions) to restrain these features of our human nature. If they were not always right, they did at least confront the real self (our real “human nature”). Communitarians have a tough time doing so. MacIntyre’s “narrative self” We may ask whether MacIntyre’s historical narrative-self can fill-in the holes in Sandel’s metaphysical account of the self? He comes close, but a gap remains. As a communitarian, Sandel readily acknowledges that community depends on antecedent commitments of the self (the self as constituted by community, that is, the individual is a self precisely in committing itself to community/traditions). MacIntyre makes a similar claim and for the same reason (as Sandel does for community), namely that reason depends on antecedent commitments of the self. Thus, MacIntyre digs deeper than Sandel. There is for MacIntyre no reason without a context (and so for MacIntyre reason is not neutral calculation). For MacIntyre reason depends on the individual’s internalization or narrations of traditions. It is traditions that permit the unity of self-narrations in giving meaning and value to life, and it is within this unity of self-narrations that we then “reason”. There is no reason outside traditions - and this is a deeper and more powerful sense of self than Sandel has since for MacIntyre reason itself is reason of traditions. The virtue of MacIntyre’s account is that he demystifies the self. The self for him is not some ineffable (metaphysical) entity – but something that moderns have forgotten namely “a sense of one’s place in history” and so the self is a small part in the “great chain of being”. But where MacIntyre fails is that his account, like Sandel’s, identifies the self so closely with community/tradition that nothing much is left over (even reason/reflection is constituted in tradition). MacIntyre acknowledges that the self does not have to accept the limitations of community and that choice in reason may well move against traditions. Thus, the narrative self is able to challenge the traditions but to do so it must turn to traditions - hence inner conflict is a conflict of traditions. On this view than, the self can never ask “what ought I to do as a rational person?” rather it can only ask “what ought I to do as a participant in a tradition?” It is in a conflict of traditions that the self comes to define (reason) itself…. conflicts of the self (inner or between selves) are conflicts of traditions. All conflict whether inner or outer is one of conflict of traditions. Now in a liberal society where there is no longer a hierarchy of values (the result of amnesia for the historical of traditions, one may argue, since the self is prior to history. In other words, history is “objectified”), it is difficult to escape conflicts (since these can no longer be resolved by appeal to strong traditions). In lieu of strong traditions inner/outer conflict must be resolved by the individual by compartmentalizing his/her beliefs and attitudes. But such compartmentalization precludes any possibility of constructing a narrative unity of life. The culture is too fragmented in its values/beliefs and hence so is the individual. The question is of course whether this fragmentation of culture/traditions is not a problem for all social political ideologies (and not just for liberalism)? But presumably it is a greater problem for liberalism even as liberalism may be no more split than other traditions. MacIntyre hesitates at this point. This hesitation is important since if all traditions are indeed split, then presumably the split comes no only from without (traditions) but also from within (self). In any case, MacIntyre argues that liberalism cannot construct a narrative unity out of its cultural resources since these are too fragmented. It is then this inability to construct a narrative unity of self that then results in the compartmentalization of values/beliefs resulting in what Christopher Lash calls the “culture of narcissism” - of individualism to the core. We can see that MacIntyre’s account is an improvement over Sandel’s because MacIntyre leaves room for an active self-constituting self (selves that can strongly evaluate) who can challenge traditions (even if from within other traditions). Here we can readily agree: it is a case where metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of the self intersect: the self is not self-constituting and neither are its knowledge claims. Nevertheless, to recognize this is not yet to answer all the things we would like to know. For example, “Why are some selves better able to withstand tradition than other selves?” “Why are some traditions better able to nurture the self’s critical stance toward these traditions?” These are blatantly psychological questions in the sense that they appeal to the interaction between self and tradition that relies on a greater account of the self. How the self is able to challenge traditions is not merely a metaphysical or epistemological problem but also a psychological one. Epistemologically we challenge traditions in that reason relies on an antecedent narrative unity of self, but why do some selves challenge traditions and others don’t? MacIntyre’s account of the self is not just metaphysical self it is also psychological, but he tends to confuse the two. In fact, MacIntyre’s conception of the narrative self remains a “mirror” model in reflecting traditions. Unlike Sandel, MacIntyre can explain why the self need not drown in a sea of community/tradition (but his account always proceeds at the level of traditions, namely a complexity of traditions foster an immanent critique of traditions) as if it is traditions that were the real actors, and selves merely their carriers. MacIntyre’s narrative unity of self is more about the unity of narratives than it is about the unity of the self. MacIntyre does have a more sophisticated view of community and tradition than Sandel has (i.e., for MacIntyre these are historical), but not always a more subtle view of the self. He does recognize that the self can be split by traditions and that this generates inner conflict which may result in personal growth, yet this psychology of the self is really more a history of traditions in that he takes the unity of self as reflecting the unity of traditions. In contrast, my argument is that the splitting of the self is never merely a matter of responding to traditions; it is also a way of coping with our individual desires and ideals (for and of traditions). We also split traditions even as traditions can split us. How we split traditions reflects the psychological dynamics of self, always within the context of traditions, and doing so creates other selves and different traditions. Note the political implications of such a presumed psychological account. The great divide: and the price of self-control MacIntyre claims that the great divide in social-political theory is between Taylor’s strong evaluators (Plato/Aristotle) and the weak evaluators of modern liberalism (e.g., Rawls). For strong evaluators, the role of tradition, validated by reason, is to educate the desires towards their proper aim (that is, in terms of virtues). For modern liberals/empiricists desires are simply givens and reason is a mere instrument of desire (Hume) (adaptation/narcissism) In retort, defenders of liberalism argue that modernity is not all of one piece. “Liberal traditionalism”, as it has been called, holds that liberal culture does in fact have the resources to restrain our selfish desires - desires that we must restrain if we are to have a viable polity. However, instead of looking to a specifically political force “out of themselves” to accomplish this restraint, liberals argue that a liberal society can morally rehabilitate its citizens in ways that are sufficient for self-government. Of course, liberal traditionalism recognizes that controlling individual selfishness (by way of self-control; the superego instead of the super-state) is not the same as subjecting our desires to reason/strong evaluation, and hence the liberalist claim does not really overcome the great divide. After all, there is still a world of difference between educating the desires for good/truth/beauty (as did Plato), and merely restraining the desires to allow for security and order (modern liberalism). But this precisely the point, given that both Plato and such moderns as Locke claim that a good society requires self-control, how does each transform the self in order to achieve this self-control? Is the self sacrificed or strengthened in achieving self-control? We know that as we move from Plato to the Locke, reason becomes less ambitious in what it can achieve: in Plato reason is supposed to be concerned with goodness and virtue, in Locke reason can merely attain security. The question Alford asks whether the decline of the possibilities of reason is matched by a decline in the self. Alford claims not. He claims that the self fares worse in some accounts (e.g., Hobbes) but it also fares better in other accounts. For example, Plato as we know placed the self and its desires in the center, making the “care of the self” the focus of philosophy and politics. It is Plato’s focus on the self that is of permanent value here, not his solution which was to sacrifice self-consciousness to self-knowledge (see Leo Strauss). So that Bloom was wrong when he claimed that all our modern problems are due to the failure to return to the classical concept of Plato’s psyche and its objective reason in aspiring to virtue. The solutions of Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, and Rawls are filled with problems, but they cannot simply be resolved by a simple return to Plato’s psyche. This does not mean that Plato’s solution was inferior to the modern solution. In fact, every social-political theorist of the self somehow divides the self against itself as Plato did, or else denies the difference between the self and other and so rendering the self whole by denying others as Rousseau does. Plato is brilliant in the manner in which he confronts the self and the fact that he could not solve the problem of protecting the wholeness of the self while making it safe for society say as much about the intractability of the problem posed by the self for political theory as anything else. All great political theorists directly address the desires of the self. One interesting question that Alford confronts is how traditional liberalism (Locke and Rawls) stack up against the insights of Plato and Hobbes. Liberalism traditionalism in fact blends the insights of Plato and Hobbes into an eclectic account of the self and its relationship to society. Liberalism’s account splits the self against itself in various ways in order to make the self safe for society and for itself. In doing so, it sacrifices the autonomy of the self that it sets out to protect. Plato is no exception. He is the greatest psycho-logist but his answer is not a solution. If Plato divides the self against itself (reason vs. the desires), then Hobbes unifies the self but he does so by reducing reason to desires. Both Locke and Rawls draw on Hobbes’ solution. Rousseau holds that the self need not be divided to be both whole and social, but Rousseau manages this only by denying others altogether. That is why Alford does not consider either Mill and Aristotle for while they both place the self first and valuing the political order insofar as it enriches private life, both also downplay the desires and so downplay the demonic thereby making the self on the whole much safer for the social order. In contrast, Plato regarded the desire (Eros) seriously as it tries for wholeness; in contrast, Aristotle regarded not Eros but philia… aiming far lower in attaining wholeness. But it is of course Eros that makes the self such a problem. The psychological basis of self Kohut fully recognizes the desires of the self (in trying to use others and in fact the whole world in support of itself) and then tries to find a way to resolving this so that the self may become more autonomous and less dependent on and threatening to others. Lacan suggests that this effort is merely one of self-deception. The self can never be autonomous/whole and all effort to make the self whole is an effort in bad faith. In regarding the whole (human) world as text, Lacan deconstructs the self. In my efforts to try to construct the self, I appreciate only too well that this effort is not independent of its own substantive claims about the self – and how much I value the self. Moreover, in trying to construct the self I will be shifting between theory and practice, between formula and wisdom, in the interpretation of texts about the self. The major problem with many accounts of the self is that the self is taken to be a dependent variable, namely the last thing to be explained in terms of the theorist’s favorite concepts and so the self has no reality independently of those concepts. That is why we do need theory, so that the self may be indeed conceived of as a reality independent of our favorite concepts. I will use Kohut’s object-relations theory – the way the self uses other selves and objects to support itself to maintain its sense of being a self. The advantage is that Kohut’s theory of the self generates an account of the self that stays close to experience while using theoretical concepts that are relatively less abstract than say drive theory in psychoanalysis or reification in objectivist psychology. Kohut’s theory also lends itself readily to the psychoanalytical reading of texts – of how the self uses other selves, institutions, symbols, and ideas to support itself. Psychoanalytical theories have become popular in recent years as a result of Lacan’s claim that not only the unconscious but the entire world may be read as a text (discursively). If for Lacan this has meant the deconstruction of the self in terms of the text, my concern is to construct the self in terms of its self objects (what the self does/says about itself and others). This methodological concern is tied to a substantive one, namely to formulate a realistic conception of self. Of course, it may occur to someone who has followed MacIntyre or Taylor that the self is really a historical concept and not a psychological one. Can one really ever understand the self without understanding the historical development of this concept? This is certain Michael Foucault’s claim concerning the “technologies of the self”. Taylor also makes this argument, noting that inwardness of the self and its authenticity is a strictly modern idea. Thus, Taylor critically notes that just because Plato is concerned with the “care of the self” does not mean that Plato says the self as inward; indeed to make this claim is unhistorical. But Alford argues the contrary, namely that the inner and outer oriented concepts of self (Strauss’ distinction between self-consciousness and self-knowledge) are always in competition in Plato. Similarly, John Locke’s conception of the self poses a fundamental challenge to the idea that God grants identity – hence breaking very much with tradition. Instead to posing alternative between the historical and psychological self, I argue that my psychological analysis already incorporates the historical. When we examine an author’s text about the self in terms of self-objects transference, we are already concerned with historical variation. To appreciate what someone says about the self by approaching his concept of self naively in terms of what he says about self-objects is historical and not theoretical (of course this way of proceeding, namely examining what the self says about its self-objects, is itself a theoretical perspective). In fact, the theoretical self-object approach may be understood as historically sensitive since it does merely presume on theoretical grounds alone that the self is this or that object (capitalism’s “possessive individualism”). Rather, it renders a writer’s (text’s) concept of self something to be solved in a sensitive reading of the text. Thus, we read the text in terms of “understanding” (Verstehen) where the goal is to think oneself into the concept of self held by the author/text in order to better understand it.[Note this precludes simply theoretically attributing a concept of self on the author based on both what the author says explicit about the self or in this or other writings.] The medium of self-object transference is then in theory psychological but in practice a sympathetic historical undertaking. Take the example below. Charles Taylor Taylor sees Locke as a theorist who epitomizes inwardness as an ideal of autonomous, rational self-control. But Alford sees Locke as attempting to weaken the self so as to make it dependent upon the good opinions of others. What accounts for the difference between Taylor and Alford (also with respect to Plato)? Alford claims that the difference is that Taylor spends too much time on the sources of self and not enough on the self. For example, Taylor stresses Locke’s focus on freedom, independence, and responsibility but fails to pay attention to the entity (self) that is the locus of these values. The consequence is that Taylor gives us a ‘mirror” image (see Lacan below) of the self - where the mirror image is made up of different traditions or sources of the self - even as the question remains whether the self can in fact take up those historical sources. Whether the self can in fact do so, depends as much on the self as it does on the sources. For example, Taylor wonders whether a commitment to goodness and justice can in fact be maintained if there is no belief in the external sources of goodness and justice – such as a loving God. He suggests not. High standards for goodness and justice require high historical sources. But is that so? Freud suggests that the injunction “love thy neighbor” is virtually impossible to fulfill (basically because “love” is a scarce resource). Freud may be wrong of course, but the point is that the sources of the self must be considered in terms of the role these sources can and do play in the economy of the psyche. Taylor, like all social theorists, makes certain assumptions of how the self uses these sources, e.g., strong evaluation, but he general simply assumes that the self is equivalent to its sources. In one place Taylor does try to be more specific as to how external sources can be appropriated by the self. Thus he argues that (1) political extremism may be a response to the meaninglessness of life and not just due to impoverished material conditions, (2) that meaninglessness is often accompanied by a sense of guilt (why?), and thus that (3) many young people respond to ideologies of polarization (extremism) by projecting guilty feelings (guilt induced impulses such as rage) outward and fighting these impulses out there so thereby creating a sense of purity by in opposing the forces of darkness. The problem, claims Taylor, is that even strong external sources (such as Christian agape) may lose their impact by those selves that are afflicted with meaninglessness, so that these sources now become merely one more weapon (psychological defense) against an implacable opposition. [Lacan argue against Kohut that there just isn’t enough empathy/love in the world for “transmuting internalization” and, hence, even relative autonomy of self is impossible.] Alford comments that it is precisely here where genuine social-psychological analysis must begin: where ideological forces and the desires/needs of the self interact. Regrettably, it is here where Taylor ends (as is typical of most social political theory and the history of ideas). This is very unfortunate especially if Lacan is correct, namely that it is not just young people but all people who are confronted by meaninglessness and so will use political ideologies as defenses against the “hole”/”lack” in themselves. We cannot ignore this possibility. We cannot in other words consider only the sources of the self apart from also considering the self who lives these sources in some way in the world. Heinz Kohut and the project of self-autonomy Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue (E. O’Neill) reflecting Taylor’s “sources” The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. Interior to the subject it is only a privileged symptom. It is the human symptom par excellence. It is the mental malady of man (J. Lacan) countering “transparency” Kohut is a revolutionary: abandoning Freud’s drive theory (the centrality of the Oedipal complex and the structural theory of id, ego, and superego) in favor of a theory of self psychology. Kohut begins his reformulation of psychoanalysis as self-theory with a new theory of narcissism. That is, he begins wit a new concept of transference he called narcissistic transference, or later, self-object transference. In psychoanalysis, transference refers to the patient’s emotional reaction to the analyst as if the analyst were not merely the analyst but an important person in the patient’s past such as father, mother whom the patient both loves and hates. So that long-repressed emotional reactions to significant others are “transferred” to the analyst. This transference involves the displacement of affect from one relationship to another in which the analyst comes to represent, or contain, the idea of another. The transferences may be positive or negative, depending on whether affectionate or hostile feelings are elicited by the analyst. Some psychoanalysts maintain that “cure” in psychoanalysis ends transference, but Kohut maintains that it is only the quality of the transference that changes in cure. That is, Kohut maintains that all our relationships with others, from birth to death, are transference relationships – transference relationships are the universal medium for all human relationships. Thus, all human relationships are at bottom narcissistic and, hence, maturity would require us to give up the narcissistic nature of these relationships. The reason for this claim derives from Kohut’s experience as an analyst. He found that the patients not merely regarded him as an archaic father or mother figure, but as a part of the patient’s self, as though as an analysts he was an alienated part of the patient’s own self. Sometimes the analyst was treated as an object that contained all the patient’s hopes and aspirations, the avatar of the patient’s deepest ideals, at other times he was treated as if he had no value at all. Kohut called both these reactions on the part of the patient, “idealizing self-object transference”. Kohut also discovered another form of transference when the analyst was treated not as a person in his own right but merely as a mirror to mirror the patient’s desires and grandiosity. He called this “mirroring self-object transference”. Here is where the role of the analyst was apparently no more than to confirm the greatness and perfection of the patient. When this confirmation did not occur, the patient took flight into rage. It is like the patient says “if you do not mirror me, or empathize with me, then I feel as if I am about to fall apart and that scares me to death, and therefore, I feel enraged at you”. Not only does the patient feel rage in not being confirmed by the analyst, but the analyst’s refusal to do so makes the analysts seem even more powerful/whole and hence elicits resentment and envy on the patient’s part such that the patient wants to destroy the analyst. Kohut calls this rage, narcissistic rage, namely the rage felt when another does not confirm me (does not perform his function as a “self-object” whose purpose is to merge (confirm) with the self of the patient and so support the patient’s narcissistic ideals. Obviously both kinds of transferences are narcissistic. One is the counterpart to the other. In idealizing self-object transference the patient puts all his ideals and desires into the analyst as a self-object with which he then seeks to merge I order to share in its perfection. In mirroring self-object transference, the patient puts all that is good and worthwhile in the self and then demands of the analyst that he confirm this by merging with the patient. Now Kohut does not argue that self-object transferences are either immature or pathological, they are he says at the center of emotional life from birth to death. What changes over the lifespan is not that we use self-object transferences but how we use them. Do we seek to merge completely with our ideal self-objects so that there is nothing left of the self? Or do we learn to choose and use ideal self-objects I support of our own chosen projects? Do we require constant mirroring of others to feel whole and coherent, or can we delay the mirroring and accept only those mirrors that correspond to our ideals? What is pathological in this “developmental line of self-object relations” (Ernst Wolf) is when the persistence of self-object transferences where the self-object is not recognized as whole - the object’s good and bad parts being split off and treated as objects in themselves - and where transference becomes a total merger with the self-object. It is unfortunate that Kohut tries to theoretically distinguish these two kinds of transference as idealizing and narcissistic (mirroring) transferences because both kinds of transferences are really counterparts of each other. That is, they have a common core in the ideal of perfection conceived of as a perfect narcissistic equilibrium or harmony between self and world. This ideal of perfection is omni-whole, or omnipotent, and not yet split into beauty, morality, strength, goodness, etc. So it is not their respective content that is important, as desires or ideals, but the roles these transferences play in psychic economy: are they mature or immature (narcissistic)? From this perspective, ideals are objectified desires, and our concern is not so much their common origin, but the degree to which the idealized desire serves as a narcissistic prop (is overly contaminated with desire) so that power (desire) and goodness (ideal) can become one. Rather than seeing desires versus ideals, we might distinguish between subject- and object-bound narcissism where in case of object-bound narcissism the question is whether the idealized object can be valued in terms other than those that enhance the subject’s power and perfection (desire). Can the object (other) set limits on the subject? Kohut’s theoretical structural model of the self is a formalization of these transference relationships (experience) which means that theory remains close to experience. The model is therefore articulated out of experience. Diagrammatically the self model is a follows: Ideals (which are known by idealizing self-object transference) # Mediated by a tension arc of abilities, skills, & talents # Desire/ambition (which are known by mirroring self-object transference) . So we may say that the self is concerned with how our skills and abilities connect who we want to be with who we think we should be. Implied here is that the self is an initiator/agent, as well the self is a project in that we use our skills and talents to come closer to how we want to be defined as how we believe we should be. In Kohut’s view analysis cures through “transmuting internalization” in which the analyst’s empathic response to the patient helps the patient to internalize the analyst’s empathic response as a part of himself. This is what occurs in transference. The analyst’s response need not be perfect (otherwise the patient would remain in narcissistic equilibrium never needing to take over the self-object function for himself) but optimally frustrating. So that the analyst who is originally an external self-object now, through the analyst’s empathy, becomes the patient’s internal self-object and so part of the patient’s psychic structure with the result that the patient is able to do for himself what previous he depended for on external self-objects. Kohut claims that we never fully internalize self-objects and hence we never are entirely autonomous. The developmental line Development is characterized not by the abandonment of the need for self-objects but by a transformation of them. As we mature we no longer depends on one particular person but come to depend on a range of others. We also come to reply on cultural symbols and beliefs as alternatives to people. That is, as the self matures a variety of relationship and symbols come to take over the functions of the originally concrete archaic self-object. However, it has been argued that this development line trivializes Kohut’s claim that autonomy is impossible. But I would argue that the developmental line not so much trivializes, as it distinguishes too sharply between archaic and mature self-object transferences. Thus, one can have very immature relationship with cultural objects and increasing the number of one’s relationships is hardly a sign of maturity. It is not substitution but the degree to which the other as self-object is treated as a whole that is the standards of maturity. For example, when the patient begins to value the self-object for itself and not just the psychological function it performs in mirroring the patient we have a degree of maturity. Here narcissism and love object are intertwined in seeing the other both as a mirroring self-object and as an object in its own right. Thus, one reason is hurts so much when we lose someone we love is that that person is uniquely irreplaceable and not merely a mirroring self-object. There is in fact a problematic tendency in self psychology as when Wolf claims that the entire world can becomes a self-object – as when mature selflessness is an expansion of the self so as to take in the entire world as self-object. But this is the tendency to deny otherness of the other in order to achievement autonomy of the self by absorbing the other. This is when transmuting internalization becomes instead transmuting absorption, and what is supposed to be a state of maturity becomes the quintessential narcissistic fantasy, namely the entire world becomes self-object – an extension of the self. Of course, it is just the opposite, namely the insight that the entire world need not become self-object in order to achieve autonomy that is the essence of maturity. Some have suggested that this problematic tendency in self theory is due to the origins of Kohut’s self theory in his theory of narcissism. That is, Kohut’s self psychology must transform all psychological life into an instance of narcissism in order to explain it. However one could also see this as Kohut’s effort to perform an inherently difficult balancing act in acknowledging the limits of autonomy (we are always lost in transferences) while appreciating that many people experience themselves as autonomous centers of initiatives. We may ask with Lacan if this experience is in fact a defense. No, but relative autonomy does rest upon the ability to use others as self-objects by way of transmuting internalization. However, that transmuting internalization is not benign but an aggressive act is insufficiently stressed by Kohut. It involves consuming the other, using the other, metabolizing the other so that the other becomes part of the self. Of course, the other is not really consumed, but rather ignored except as a source of support for the self. So that the uniqueness of the other’s otherness is not acknowledged (except insofar as it is internalized). As we have seen this stress on narcissism develops in tandem with object love, nevertheless, Kohut gives little attention to love in his focus on self-object transferences. Now this has as its de facto consequence that the otherness of the other is conceptualized and valued strictly in terms o how it serves my end. The end of the other is irrelevant. This is evidently aggressive and it is on this aggressiveness that Kohut then builds his autonomy of the self, leaving the other as it were a foreign (alienated) body. The important question then arises whether this makes Kohut’s theory of the self an instance of “wild self-assertion (Theodor Adorno); that is, an act of the ego against all others in order to preserve its own subjectivity. The answer here is both yes and no. To see this we will have to examine Lacan. Narcissistic rage is obviously aggression in response to threats to the grandiose self and the omnipotent other (self-object). Kohut did not originate this idea but the more the grandiose self is un-integrated into the mature self by way of a vertical split (see below), the more the individual will respond with narcissistic rage when his/her fantasies of perfection and omnipotence are challenged by reality. The key characteristic of narcissistic rage is its cold, calculating, relentless, and unforgiving character. It is quite the opposite of wild regressive, explosive and uncontrolled anger which often overwhelms the ego. Narcissistic rage puts the ego in the service of avenging narcissistic humiliation. The source of this rage is the unconscious experience of the entire world as an extension of one’s own self – and so this rage has as its purpose to confirm one’s perfection and grandiosity. Narcissistic rage denies separation and denies otherness and when separation and otherness impinge on the grandiose and perfect self, rage is the result. This is why this rage is so unforgiving and relentless; it is aimed not at real people but at the world that fails to cooperate with one’s fantasies. Narcissistic rage is a kind of emotional disorder and best conceived of as existing on a continuum from slight annoyance as when someone fails to reciprocate our greeting or fails to laugh at our joke to the ominous derangement of the furor of the catatonic and the paranoid. All the points on this continuum are related (all are reactions to narcissistic injury) to the loss of self-esteem, the threat to cohesion of self that this poses even if only for a moment. It is of course questionably whether we want to consider slight irritation and monomania of a Captain Ahab as both instances of narcissistic rage. In fact, it has been argued by Alford that the very rationality of narcissistic rage may be disguised as tough-minded realism, rational self-interest, advocacy of order and punishment, etc. especially when this narcissistic rage is institutionalized in those institutions of organized reason such as bureaucracies. Hence it will be important to examine every rationalization/idealization of aggression, suspecting that it might be for good reasons but not real reasons – the real reasons being the narcissistic rage. Splitting and repression Splitting is a puzzling concept in Kohut but also in psychoanalysis generally. Freud is not entirely clear on the distinction between repression and splitting. Repression refers to the ego’s removal from consciousness of an unwanted impulse and the derivative of that impulse in memory. Ego and id are thereby opposed. Freud never developed a corresponding theory of splitting. In his later writings, Freud writes that the ego could hold two consciousnesses/contrary beliefs (see Fingarette). This is not repression but a division of the conscious ego holding the beliefs apart. What Kohut calls the vertical split in the self is similar to Freud idea of splitting of the ego, where as Kohut’s horizontal split refers to repression. In contrast to other psychoanalytical thinkers for whom splitting is due to the intensity of desire relative to the fragility of the ego (see e.g., Klein, Horney, and Sullivan), for Kohut splitting is due to faulty empathy. That which is not empathically responded to in the ego goes underground and becomes split off where it waits to be recognized. But this split off part of the ego does not wait silently rather it operates on its own independently of the rest of the self. This is then called “psychopathology”. For the split-off part of the self (which cannot be taken into the self empathically) seeks its own satisfaction in archaic self-objects. As in narcissistic rage, the more mature parts of the self end up rationalizing this effort by the split off parts that seek satisfaction in archaic self-objects rather than trying to control it. Thus, the vertical split is within a pole of the self, in which faulty empathy leads either the pole of desire or ideal to be divided against itself. Now Kohut argues that it is the archaic, split-off parts of the self that are most heavily involved in self-object transferences. Thus, in case where the analyst is the merger-object (positive transferences), therapy requires not only rejection of the patient’s archaic desires but their empathic acceptance of those desires so that they may be called forth from their hiding and integrated in to the mature self. Kohut pays less attention to the fact that the analyst may come to contain rejected or split-off and projected-outward parts of the patient’s self, parts filled with envy, hatred, and rage, and when the analyst is devalued (negative transference). But obviously a complete analysis requires that the analyst analyzes not merely archaic desire for merger but also the rejected parts of the self that are driven underground and projected outward. Following the development time-line (see above), we might infer that the non-integrated self-object can become a defense object by containing all the good or bad parts of the self, and so reinforcing splitting by holding these good and bad parts even further apart (by having projected them outwards). This might occur using symbolic objects but also abstract ones like the metaphysical self. Thus, this might be called the abstract self-object as defense object in which abstraction serves eliminate all those experiential aspects of the self that would deny the ideal (see in Plato and Rawls). We must ask ourselves whenever we think we see self-object transference, what exactly is occurring here? Is the self-object transference being used to reinforce the cohesion of the self or is it being used to split the self in order to mitigate internal conflict by projecting the bad parts of the self into others (i.e., projective identification). In projective identification we make the other a container for parts of the self – and hence it is the opposite of self-object transference. In self-object transference we use others to support ourselves, but in projective identification we use others as containers for parts of ourselves which we cannot accept. In fact, self-object transference and projective identification are but different ways of looking at the same process. The condition of using the other as a self-object is to see the other as a container of parts of ourselves (albeit alienated parts that we do not or cannot acknowledge) in the first place. One puts parts of oneself into the other (projective identification) and then bring these back by way of self-object transference. This reciprocity is implicit in the definition of self-object transference as a phenomenon concerned with the idea of the other. The idea, of course, comes not from the other but from the self. Projective identification serves several functions. (1) It may reinforce self-splitting, or (2) more positively it may stabilize and familiarizes the other so that he/she becomes more like us. In doing so, we coordinate our actions and expectation with others. If I project a part of myself into you, and you do the same with me, and it is the same part, then we can readily coordinate our actions. We expect the same thing from each other and our expectation are fulfilled. Mutual endowment we might call as in social psychology. This is the primary mechanism by which most groups are coordinated. When projective identification is too extensive we of course debilitate the self. But it can also enrich the self, allowing us to feel part of each other’s lives. It is something like this that Sandel is aiming for in his idealization of the socially constitutes self. Sandel is not mistaken here. Rather what he lacks is what so many social theorists lack, namely an appreciation of the subtlety and complexity of the issues involved. How much of the self is projected into others? How extensively? Can these parts be reclaimed? What remains? Answers to these questions make all the difference between a totalitarian regime, an authoritarian one, a liberal regime and a communitarian one. It is questions such as these that have in fact been asked about social contract. Who contracts with whom? What is given up and what is retained? Can the contract be rescinded? Is it worth the cost? Generally asked about individual rights, these questions apply with equal importance to the self possessing such rights. How much we value the rights of the self is not separate from how much we value the self. Self-object transference and the reading of texts: INTERLUDE Putting self-object transference at the center of psychoanalysis we add depth to our understanding. The surface here runs very deep. What most of us want is to recognize ourselves for who we are so that we may come to know ourselves. Self-objects are about how we use others to support ourselves and there are a myriad of ways of doing so. This is depth. Moreover, putting self-object transference at the center of psychoanalysis has the advantage when we try to read texts (which usually do not contain free associations or dreams). The key issue is at the surface: how does the self use others, as self-objects? One could read text as self-objects which is an ambitious task. Or one could in looking for self-objects in the text, draw conclusions about the self not merely from what the author says about the self but also from what the author says about others, people, things, objects, and ideas. Plato’s polis, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Locke’s property are all self-objects in this sense. Thus, the focus on self-object transferences allows one to learn about the self by reading from right to left as it were as well as from left to right; that is, drawing conclusion about the self by examining the self’s self-objects. Jacques Lacan Both Lacan and Kohut are concerned with the way we use others to support ourselves. Yet Kohut never cites Lacan, and is not a successor to Lacan in any sense, yet there is continuity between Lacan’s work on the mirror stage and Kohut’s mirroring self-object transference. Lacan is primarily regarded as the theorist who transformed psychoanalysis into a form of language analysis – that is, he holds that the free associations of the unconscious are always mimicked in speech thereby demonstrating the limits of rational argument. However, I hold to the view that Lacan’s “linear” thesis is the more important part of his work – the claim that the self does not exists except as a symptom. It is a brilliant thesis that must be confronted because it would deny the very possibility of a self. One of Lacan’s most influential works remains his (1936-1949) work on the mirror stage of development. Running from about 6 months to two years, in the mirror stage the young child begins to recognize him self (moi) in the mirror. [The lipstick experiment in which the child’s nose is smeared with lipstick and he is placed before the mirror, it is presumed that if he is embarrassed he recognizes himself, seems to confirm the timing of this stage.] The child is impressed by the wholeness of the image, the appearance of the boundaries, form, and control seen in the mirror. Yet this wholeness is really an illusion. The child has none of these things. Sometimes he even confuses his own image with that of his mother who is holding the mirror in front of the child. Moreover, the image is not even a promissory note for the child will never be whole; the child will always be less than his image in the mirror. Thus, the child mastery lies in the mirror image, but not in his movements in himself. Lacan notes that this lack in the child compared to the “self” in the mirror image is an alienation which is then compensated for in another imaginary space of the mirror, parents, or others. Now the mirror stage need not be an actual mirror; it may just as well be what Kohut calls the mirroring response of the parents that confirm the child’s grandiose, narcissistic sense of self as whole and perfect. It is the parents’ response to the child as if the child were a coherent self that teaches the child that he is coherent by way of transmuting internalization in which the appropriate parental mirroring is internalized in the child as part of himself. Thus, the child comes to feel whole precisely because the child internalizes the parents’ response to the child as if the child were whole. It is precisely this concept that Lacan challenges. Lacan claims that the coherence and control that the child feels when looking in the mirror, or the mirrors that are others, are never internalized but always remains alienated in the other. In this sense, the image of wholeness is an illusion (metaconnaissance) for it can never be one’s own but belongs always to others. For Lacan the self-as-object always remains other (Autre). Thus, while Lacan agrees with Kohut that we always need self-objects (“autonomy is impossible”), Lacan disagrees with Kohut that we can ever effectively use self-objects to support ourselves. When the self-object/image is used to support ourselves, Lacan argues, we are always involved in bad faith. Rather, than internalizing the self-object in support of ourselves (by way of transmuting internalization), we alienate parts of ourselves in the other. Thus, we projective identify with others/image, putting part of ourselves in them, only to never get that part back again. We remain dispersed in the other, and so are never whole. Here is the source of a fundamental lack (manqué) in human existence, a lack that is never overcome, for it represents the distance between what we desire (ourselves to be) and what we are, a distance represented in the insuperable gulf between the self-object and the self, between the mirror image and reality. It is this distance that gives rise to rage and desire. Lacan is therefore in agreement with Kohut on several important points. (1) Rage and desire are not biological givens. They are responses to lack in human existence. But unlike Kohut, Lacan makes this lack permanent – it is an ontological condition reflected in the distance between subjective experience pulled every which way by our desires, and the image of wholeness, power, and control that the subject sees in the mirror. Lacan suggest in fact that it is precisely this distance that results in rage. We are envious of the wholeness and perfection of the image in the mirror. So that our rage and unbridled desire (against and for others) is the result of the envy we feel with an image of wholeness of ourselves that is and will always be alienated – and this envy is reinforced by the apparent wholeness of others (who are able to hold up the image of ourselves as always more than we are). Therefore, (2) Lacan argues like Kohut that the distance between the child’s ideal image and the child’s actual experience as fragmented by desire, results in a sadistic attack by the child on his/her own body (masochism). In response to this sadistic (masochism) attack, the child responds in kind with narcissistic rage towards others. Hence, aggression towards others is the correlative tension of the narcissistic structure in the “coming-into-being” of the subject. Now if this is our ontological state of being (divided) what is the task of the analyst? The analyst takes the role of the insufficiently empathic mother or the insufficiently idealizable father, in providing the emotional responsiveness and support of the self that the mother and father did not. For Kohut the analyst’s empathic responsiveness consists in a willingness to accept the patient’s archaic and split-off grandiosity, as well as the patient’s need to merge with an ideal so that the patient can internalize these and so grow into a relative autonomy. For Lacan however he sees the analyst more like a tough father who simply says to the patient “grow up”. You cannot overcome your lack, and if you spend your entire life trying to do so, you will live an inauthentic, miserable, symptom-plagued existence. If you accept your lack, you can experience a certain authenticity, and occasionally joy. Your desires need not tear you apart and you can learn to organize your menu. To do so will require that you acknowledge that you do not exist as a subject (you are in a position of the dead). The quest for authenticity is here useless and disingenuous: frantic work, wild self-assertion, perpetual immersion in relationships, more study courses, etc., none of these are solutions and none can overcome the lack in our being. So that for Lacan therapy can do no more than change neurotic misery into an ordinary common happiness. Language and self Just as language may hide our thoughts, the ego (striving for ego) is a refusal to recognize reality. For Lacan the error of Freud and all analysts is to confuse the subject (self) with the ego. The subject is for Lacan an attribute of the unconscious which is organized like language – a chain of signifiers each of which signifies desire. The subject/self is on this view not the locus of the dynamic unconscious (mediating unconscious and reality/conscience) but another signified, another object of desire, one that is eternally frustrated to be a self in the mirror. Thus, the subject/self will always function like a signified (i.e., a sign representing desire). Thus, the subject/self is secondary in relation to the signifier (desire) while signification has a life of its own. Language as the realm of the signifier can represent this lack in our being subject but it can never cure it. [Note here that “desire” is itself the object of desire/signified – so that in language we strive not only to be ego, but we also strive to be the object of self/desire. We are then entirely constituted in the language of signifiers (doesn’t this return us to the metaphysical self as a derivative of language/tradition/society/culture?] Here Kohut and Lacan differ decisively. Kohut holds that empathy can transcend the limits of language, reaching out to support the self, even to become part of the self and so by-passing language and in the end becoming ineffable. While Lacan recognizes that such experiences as joy (jouissance) and anticipated dying do transcend language, he nevertheless holds that the subject/self can never be reached or experienced in any way except in language. Because the unconscious is always already structured in language, it can be reached only in language, a fact that allows us to understand the unconsciousness but never as it were touch it. The same is true for the subject/self; it too can be understood but never touched. For Lacan being a self is dependent upon the use of the speech term “I”. But just as the term “I” is a shifter belonging to no one, so being a subject/self is not a transcendent reality – the subject/self belongs to language. So that for Lacan the notion of agency, of being a center of initiative, of primary significances, is an illusion of language. Now it is ironic that we overcome this illusion precisely to the extend that we are prepared to lose ourselves in language, becoming an “I” only in our speech practices (conversation). I do not use language, rather language uses me. I identify myself in language but only by losing myself in language like an object. Authenticity/integrity is a matter of accepting this. As a result of Lacan’s post-structuralist views, his writings have a dry, arid, intellectual quality (unlike most psychoanalysts who talk of feelings and emotions), and there is no difference between people and texts. Both people and texts are to be deciphered and decoded. Neither texts nor people are to be understood at an emotional level wherein language is conceived of as merely the vehicle of understanding. Instead, Lacan claims that language is the medium (not the vehicle) and hence, for example, understanding emotions is the understanding the (emotion) text. As Alford comments, Lacan’s focus on subject/self as text seems quite suitable if we are going to develop a psychoanalytical theory suitable for understanding actual texts (what people say about themselves and others). Yet one can argue that this approach to the self/subject as text is itself overly intellectual (schizoid) in which the cognitive transforms the desires into sentences. In fact, Lacan’s opposition to any kind of humanism is so fierce that his textual thesis begins to look very mechanical as if language lived itself in people and the reverse is not at all true. But my concern is not to turn people into sentences/text (and understand these texts) but to understand people in and through the texts they offer about themselves using self-objects transference as a guide in reading their texts from right to left and from left (self-objects) to right (self). This will require that I reject post-structuralist claims, most notably that of inter-textuality, namely that texts are only about texts. Some texts are “about” real selves albeit only mediately (in text). For Lacan, the subject/self is a human symptom par excellence; it is a mental malady of human nature. This is so because it is a symptom derived from language – and only human have language. On this view all talk of self in self-theory is but reification, a delusion of the mirror phase. So that every time I look into myself and find a self, I have only found another defense against the lack, a rationalization protecting me from the truth that there is only lack or desire for, above all else, a self. One can argue that Lacan is simply taking the Freudian revolution (the second narcissistic injury that man is not the center of the cosmos) one step further. Thus, Freud held that we are not masters of ourselves but dominated by libidinal impulses of the unconscious. Freud held that perhaps a few individual can and do transcend this domination by the desires: “where id was ego shall be”. But Lacan argues that this phrase has been used to misinterpret Freud. Lacan reads Freud as follows: “There were id was just now, where it will be for a while, between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, “I” can come into being and disappear from what I say”. Thus, Lacan holds that we only become authentic to the extent that we abandon the illusory attempt at control, namely the attempt to be more than a desiring and lacking subject. Thus, it is not the replacement of id by ego but the existence of ego, “I”, within the id. In this way Lacan claims to have returned psychoanalysis to Freud (taken it out of the hands of ego-psychology). In one sense Lacan is correct. Freud’s early work did stress the defensive role of the ego. The ego organizes the defenses against remembering the past. This leads to more organized repression by the ego – against fantasies and other possible threats. This is indeed an adaptive function even as it seems misleading to suggest that the ego is then autonomous, self-controlling and self-directing (and this is surely the difference between Freud and the ego-psychologists such as Hartmann and Erikson). Lacan points out that Americans have missed Freud’s emphasis on the ego’s fictional, alienating, and distorting role. While Lacanians recognize the adaptive role of the ego and even grant the ego some considerable autonomy, they also remind us that the ego is primarily a defensive, protecting (against inner and outer reality) and not an adaptive mechanism. Mediated presence But we might argue that Lacan here swallows Kohut whole. What is left of the self if Lacan is correct? After all, one cannot cure a symptom at best a symptom merely passes away. But this is not quite correct. To see this requires that discuss the philosophical motivation for Lacan’s denial of the presence of subject/self. It also requires that we distinguish between subject and ego. We can understand the difference between Lacan and Kohut better if we ask the following question: if the self were to exists what would it be like for Lacan? This hypothetical self would be a complete coincidence between desire and the self that desires. In other words, the self would be completely transparent to itself. Perfect consciousness! Here thought and action, insight and achievement, will and capability, actual and ideal would be ONE. It is this perfect self that is the enemy of the real self, of course. We are never so transparent to ourselves, except in those metaphysical selves postulated by social-political theorists which I have rejected above. But the self is always split by its desires; the self is rarely transparent to itself. But this does not mean that there is no self or that the self is never present to itself. Lacan commits here a giant synecdoche (“to take up” the genus for the species), in which absolute unmediated presence is confused with “presence”. Lacan basically argues if absolute unmediated presence is not possible, then there is no presence of self at all. That is, Lacan sets enormous standards (unmediated transparency) but accepts too little (therefore there is no self at all). Now why would Lacan set such a high standard for the existence of self? Here we need to examine a piece of philosophy. From Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Western thought has expressed the desire for a union of absolute lucidity (meaning) and undeniable substantiality (being): the desire for “thinglike thereness” and “thoughtlike transparency”. This would be absolute presence, namely the coincidence of being and meaning. But as being or presence moves to transparency (lucidity) it also moves from being towards the less substantial meaning/idea. As presence or being becomes more substantial it becomes less transparent. Thus the actual/real cannot be both absolutely general (lucid) and utterly particular (substantial). This demand for absolute lucidity is a response (see Descartes) to the false subject-object bifurcation of the Enlightenment wherein the substantial meaningless object must be, but can never be, fully captured in the subject’s meaning/laws. But the Enlightenment’s metaphysical bifurcation between subject and object which we can never overcome (as Lacan rightly sees) does not therefore mean that there is no presence (of self) whatever, and therefore whatever we claim to know/understand (in saying/text) is merely a product of language/speech. Lacan, following Derrida, goes even beyond the Husserlian aspiration to absolute presence, in claiming that meaning and presence, both, are the effect of language. This claim reflects the ancient worry about agency, namely that even in our voluntary (rational) actions we are not in complete control of what these actions mean. We cannot be transparent to our selves (coincidence of meaning and being), and therefore the self has no being (except in our speech – or meaning). Evidently, this move in philosophy gives rise to the notion of mediated presences or degree of self-presence, coming to self presence, etc., in talking about wholeness, transparency, unity, self-consciousness, self-control as aspects of presence of real selves, not metaphysical ones (such as the one Lacan and others are fighting). In this case we can put Lacan and Kohut together on a continuum. They are commensurable, talking about the same thing, namely the self (even as Lacan and Kohut constitute the self differently), even as their answers differ. Both Lacan and Kohut are concerned with how the self uses others in support of the self. But for Lacan the self-object remains always radically other (transmuting internalization is an illusion) as there is not enough empathy for internalization to take place and overcome the lack in the self. On the other hand, for Kohut it is precisely empathy (beyond language) that allows transmuting internalization and the promise of a relative autonomy of self instead of losing the self in others (primitive). In fact, once we refuse Lacan’s his shifting between metaphysical and real selves (his absolute relativism), we see that Lacan’s insight that there is no self is in fact a courageous effort by a reflective human being. Lacan can then be seen to pursue to highest value of truth even when it hurts. This may be an instance of a noble self, a tragic self (Lacan), but nonetheless a real self. However, it has been argued that Lacan’s whole style of writing (characterized as precious and obscure) stands as barrier to this conclusion that there are real selves. Lacan in his writing seeks to mimic the free play of the unconscious (following trains of associations rather than rational linear arguments) and this suggest that he denies altogether a coherent, unitary subject/self, suggesting instead a subject identical with the unconscious (which is of course structured in language). But in retort one can argue that Lacan’s style of writing about the (lack of) self is in fact a literary device …. But this just makes the point, namely there is a real difference between writing and the unconscious, or the self, between the text and the self. We can make much the same point if we distinguish more fully between subject and ego. The subject is the one who desires itself and who can fulfill this desires only by going outside of itself in finding itself in another’s desire for it. By going outside, however, the subject alienates itself, finding itself only in another’s desire for it. The subject as it were desires a desire, and ends up understanding itself as it imagines the object of its desire imagine it to be (the child desires itself to be its mother’s phallus). In this sense the subject is not; it is a lack, need, emptiness, negativity, want, and manqué). We can then see that the ego is a defense against this endless desire. In this sense Lacan is correct: namely the ego, as defense in stopping the endlessness of desire, is always a resistance to personal growth. But how could the subject grow if the subject is a lack? The subject/self grows by accepting/acknowledging its desires; by accepting its lack and by not spending a lifetime defending against it. This does not mean that one ceases to pursue desires –one cannot in any case. Nor can desires be replaced with ideals as if ideals were sufficient to stop our desires (aren’t our ideals also desired?). Rather, in acknowledging desires, distinguishing them from ideals, aiming to have one’s ideals give form to the expression of one’s desires, recognizing that even should we fulfill this ideal, we will always be subject to desire. In all this there is a self hidden somewhere, a self that is able to appropriate its own experiences (Locke, rather than Hume for whom the self is a mere bundle of experiences). De-centering Kohut using Lacan In fact, Kohut and Lacan are saying very different things. Yet they may be compared and contrasted. It makes sense to use Lacan to de-center Kohut because they are writing about very different entities. But if we assume that Lacan is writing about real (not metaphysical) selves, as Kohut is, how can we use Lacan to reinterpret Kohut? Lacan makes us consider otherness (of others and the world) more seriously than Kohut would have us do. The whole world, contrary to Ernst Wolf, cannot be a self-object. Not merely is this theoretical conceit, it serves to defend the self against its own incompleteness. From Lacan’s perspective, this is not only true of archaic self-object transferences, it is also that the self will alienate itself in the self-object, thereby seeing itself as the object of the self-object’s desire. Thus, the self can become a defense-object against seeing the self for what it is. What Lacan allows us to do is to appreciate, much more so than Kohut, the otherness of the other and so we must confront the lack in ourselves, the splits in ourselves. Presumably to do so is personal, moral and intellectual, honesty – a Faustian will-to-truth. Moreover, the other cannot set limits on the subject/self (required if ideals are to constrain desires) if the other is not seen as separate (if the other of ideal is simply a projected self-object then it cannot sets limits on desire since it is an expression of desire). But it is not merely for the sake of one’s own authenticity that we should appreciate the otherness of the other, but also because to see others are merely self-objects is to deny the uniqueness of the other as well. In this regard Plato and Kohut are very much alike. Both see love relations in self-object terms, and this involves considerable aggression against the other (see Phaedrus). Does this mean that all self-objects relations are aggressive? Yes, but then so are virtually all relations. To live is to live aggressively. But to the degree that self-object relations are tempered and integrated with an appreciation of their otherness, this aggression need not be destructive. Just as with presence of the self is a matter of degree, so aggression is a matter of degree. There is no reason to become analytically paralyzed in the presence of aggression; whether it is really bad depends on the balance of forces so to speak (acknowledging the other as independent of oneself and acknowledging oneself as aggressive). Another point that Lacan makes is that there is no enough empathy in the world to overcome the lack in one-self. But even if there were, transmuting internalization could not appropriate this empathy. The lack in ourselves stems not from the failure of others’ insufficient empathy (though important) but rather from the intensity of our own desires to be absolutely present to ourselves (totally transparent). Here we may well follow Lacan and collapse metaphysics, ontology, and psychology. The self does demand impossibly high standards for its oneness, for its presence, in almost every part of life. Where Lacan goes wrong is in transforming desires of the self into a standard by which philosophy or psychoanalysis is to be evaluated. [For example, we do not take the fulfillment of the boy’s desire for his mother to be the standard for the successful resolution of the Oedipal complex, surely. Nor should we adopt absolute presence as a standard of the real self even though the standard of absolute presence as the criterion of the real self, both reflect real desires.] Lacan comes closer to an important truth here than Kohut. We do desire the self far more than we are and ever will be the self. Kohut’s self-psychology risks in-authenticity if it is understood as suggesting that empathy can give us what we desire. On the contrary, our desire to be one with ourselves is so great that it will never be satisfied. So that the lack in human existence is not just a measure of failed empathy, it is also a measure of the intensity of our desires. Of course, we can ask if the desire for absolute presence is not itself an archaic narcissistic ideal? Perhaps, but we must be careful not to use the ideal of maturity (Lacan) to deny contradictions of existence. Lacan and politics The political implications of Lacan are almost unimaginable. Would Lacan see every revolution, every protest, as an escape from the emptiness of the self? Or would Lacan take an existentialist position, namely that the only standard is authenticity, and that any action be judged as not (1) an escape from the emptiness of self (defense), or (2) an attempt to create a self (inauthentic), but rather as an expression the self lives in the domain of the id? Probably the latter existentialist position is more likely what Lacan would adopt. Yet there is for all of Lacan’s skepticism regarding action, more activity in his self than there is in Kohut’s self. Kohut conceptualizes the self as an entity that responds to the (lack of) empathy of others. That is, the self is conceived almost entirely in terms of where it can find support in others (the others that are the mirror of the self). In contrast, Lacan’s subject makes, breaks, and creates worlds, anything to assure himself of his existence, anything to avoid confronting the lack within, and anything to try to overcome it. Lacan seems closer here than Kohut to the real self. What we may ask are the implications of Lacan for human reason? Unlike Kohut, Lacan does not make the mistake of equating reason with the adaptive functions of the ego. On the contrary, Lacan recognizes this as bad faith, as an attempt to escape from our own lack. Ego-mastery of the environment is always for Lacan illusory – always looking for but never finding the mirror of wholeness and unity. If reason is ultimately the expression of the whole self with all its desires, then what Kohut calls narcissistic rage may also be expressed in, and not merely through, reason. What I mean here is that narcissistic rage at a world that fails to confirm one’s wholeness and unity may be expressed not merely in the end products of reason (e.g., clearing forests, subordinating other species, waging war, etc.) but may be found in reasoning itself. This is what we mean by instrumental reason (Frankfurt school critical theory) which apprehends the entire world in terms of how it can be manipulated and controlled. This is the world as prey (Adorno). Example (from Martha Nussbaum): Creon’s temper builds cities (Antigone). That is, the wording of this ode, suggests that it is violent rage at our own vulnerability that is the motivation for the strategy of building a safe city. Progress then begins to look like revenge. Or as Nietzsche said it: To imagine another more valuable world is an expression of hatred for this world which makes us suffer. The “resentiment” of metaphysicians is here creative. But of course it is not merely instrumental reason that is an expression of hatred. Idealism may also be such an expression. Idealism is rage at a world too sparse to be dominated, too recalcitrant to serve as a mirror and as desperately needed self-object. This may be seen in Plato.