The Inside and the Outside
Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy
thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology. The questions
at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have
read the primary reading for Continuing Education Credits.
There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that
will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
From the Age of Reason there emerged a world rooted in the epistemological
expression of Descartes’ proclamation; cogito ergo sum -- I think,
therefore I am. For western culture this became ". . . the reflective
foundation of every proposition concerning man" (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 419).
From the rubble of its Roman legacy came a system of rules for scientific
inquiry. Candidates for truth had to survive a gauntlet of rational tests
in which every problem was "reduced" from the complex event to the simple.
The Universe became a billiard table of cause and effect based on a rational
structure independent of subjective beliefs.
Descartes himself was apparently obsessed with the idea that to refute
skepticism knowledge had to rest on something objective. He sought universal
criteria that would validate that which one knew to be true. Sense perception
was promptly ruled out. The logic was simple: When I see a cat, I conclude
that it exists based on visual sense perception. But when the cat walks
around the corner and I can no longer see it, this does not necessarily
mean it no longer exists. Yet from my immediate experience alone I have
no proof of this. I cannot know beyond all doubt that it still exists.
In fact, when all is said and done I can only know one thing beyond all
doubt, according to Descartes, I can only know that I myself am thinking,
and therefore I exist --that is, I think, therefore I am. And yet,
this introspective epistemology of I think, therefore I am assume
the conscious experience constitutes in itself a knowledge of consciousness.
"I am afraid, thus I know what fear is, since I have fear" (Lyotard, 1991,
p. 77):
. . . we must distinguish categorically between exterior and interior,
that is, between objective or natural science, and the subjective accessible
only through introspection. This dissociation quickly proved difficult
to follow, however, above all with the progress of psychology, for the
problem arose as to where to draw the line of demarcation . . .
(p. 77)
During the Renaissance, the proper perspective from which to view these
lines of demarcation (mirrored as always in the art of its time) was from
a fixed, objective point of view (McLuhan, 1962). One took up a position
between world-outside and world-inside, consistent with the original experience
of physical containment most routinely known to us as we move in and out
of rooms, clothes, vehicles, and numerous kinds of bounded spaces (Brooke,
1991). One could then distinguish the inside from the outside and the ontological
realities associated with each (the model shaping transference). A container
motif, this spatial definition of reality into inside and outside readily
enveloped man’s conception of self and other. It
has still to turn loose its hold. In psychoanalysis the view of psyche
as an internal event located somewhere inside the container space of the
mind still prevails. Behaviorism, on the other hand, locates the psyche
somewhere outside the container space of mind, in the synaptic events of
knee-jerk reactions (remember, the body is considered part of the external
world of things). Each claim a secret knowledge of the "true" ontological
status of our pathologies. Both are firmly entrenched in the presuppositions
of container-space.
Modern science readily warmed to Descartes’
quest to find knowledge by doubting it, even though it was not Descartes’
aim to find truths from which to deduce scientific knowledge (Cottingham,
1994). Cartesian doubt was evidently attractive to the seventeenth-century
clockmaker’s view of the natural world. Reducing the Universe to cogs and
levers perhaps soothed the confusion of a Dark-Age collective trauma. The
need emerging was for a perfectly rational text that guaranteed the world’s
presence as transparently available to an observing ego (the ego loves
things like this). As with most adolescent egos (albeit this one the collective
version), the western ego at the time could speak through its Cartesian
fixed point of observation with certainty about the world.
One might consider this need as still active in our therapy rooms. Ironically,
the position also illustrates our predisposition for turning our backs
on the world (Appignanesi & Garratt, 1995). "We can say, if we feel
the need to," wrote Mark Johnson (1987), "that we are getting better and
better descriptions of reality;"
. . . because we are now better able to predict the causal effects
of certain events. Surely, such predictive capacity assures us that we
are somehow "plugged into" the real world. But prediction is not the only
value that constrains what we take as knowledge; the prediction presupposes
a semantic network in terms of which the relevant relations of objects
and events can be understood, for purposes of prediction. So, our ability
to make correct predictions is not a proof that we have found the
unique, God’s-Eye account of reality; it only assures us that we are in
touch with reality from one possible perspective. (p. 203)
The elaborate success of this predictive capability combined with the need
to fill the void of uncertainty, concocted a strange brew of doctrines
in which the body was not an ingredient in the recipe for human reasoning.
Rationality in this soup made use of material presented to the senses but
was not itself considered an attribute of bodily substance. Mind stuff
was different from body stuff, and mind stuff was who one really was, the
core of subjective identity, spatially located within. Body stuff was part
of the outside world of objects-in-space. The world as object-of-mind eclipsed
the body as ground-of-experience and effectively separated the individual
as thinking-thing (subject)
from the world as object-of-thought. The result, remeniscient of Orphic
dectrine (see page 13) was an ontological splitting in which the true source
of experience was thought to live within the mind. The body served only
to conduct the lived truth of existence.
References
Michael Staples