Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”
3.3 Narrativist Therapies and the Ontology of Presence
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This reduction of the other to oneself entails a considerable danger: confusing one’s own consciousness with the self-consciousness of the other. By preserving autonomy as its core foundation, neurophenomenology envisages—or, rather, is forced to establish—intersubjective validation as a means of mediation between the subjective and the objective perspective. It is here that the notion of empathy derived from Husserlian phenomenology comes into play, as both a conceptual requirement and a methodological guideline: the second-person position, which takes shape through a shared, disciplined experiential praxis. Nowhere is the kind of empathic resonance which Husserl described as “taking another’s place in one’s imagination”
(“sich Hineinphantasieren”) better realized than in the laboratory.14 With regard to this “egoistic” position of Fichte’s subject, on 28 October 1794 Schiller wrote to Goethe:
According to some verbal communications of Fichte, for he had not yet come to the point in his book, the I is the creator of its own images, and all reality is in the I itself. The world is but a ball which the I has thrown up, and catches again by reflection. (quoted in GA 49 1991 pag. 161)
Practical action, the inalterable and underivable facticity envisaged as the extreme limit which cannot be questioned any further—the limit to (self-referential) reflection itself—is a fact of the I for Fichte and of biological organization for Varela. As Kiesel emphasizes, “The self-positing absolute I of Fichte still does not feel its thrownness, it rather posits and ‘throws the world’” (p. 64, 2008). From the perspective of Varela’s biology as well, we might argue that the organism preserves its autonomous stability by referring the perturbations coming from the world back to itself in meaningful terms (self-reference), thereby bringing forth the world.
One version of this conception of the self, which apparently has nothing to do with the tradition we have been outlining, but rather purports to be making a break with the ontology on which it rests, is the perspective developed within the field of language studies and discursive practices, and which has engendered a current known as social constructivism. This current serves as a point of reference for the various forms of psychotherapy that are brought together under the label of narra- tive therapies and which to different extents and with various nuances all roughly share the same mantra: “you are not the problem, the problem is the problem” (Boje D.M. 1999–2005). In other words, insofar as the problem which the patient is expe- riencing has been dialogically and relationally built with others within a society, and within a context of organizations and family structures, it may be deconstructed and re-authored by pulling down its language scaffolding (White and Epston 1990;
Anderson 1997; Berg and de Shazer 1993). Harrè sums it up as follows: “An indi- vidual emerges through the processes of social interaction, not as a relatively fixed end product but as one who is constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive practices in which they participate. Accordingly, who one is, is always an open question with a shifting answer depending upon the positions made available within one’s own and others’ discursive practices and within those practices, the stories through which we make sense of our own and others’ lives” (p. 45 Davies and Harré 1990).
Within this context, the constantly emerging, and in each instance determinable, self becomes a sentence element, a subject of assertion within the context of an ongoing dialogue. The ever-existing possibility of determination of the subject is realized through linguistic action, via participation in a form of dialogue, whose development is related to the constant social construction and reconstruction of the linguistic action of each of the participants. From this perspective, the linguistic subject can no longer be ontologically conceived as a substance which endures unchanged while its properties undergo transformation. The subject of the sentence is instead constantly determined through what is predicated of it in the sentence itself. It is evident, therefore, that a predicate must not necessarily have a substance as its foundation. This determines a significant extension of the concept of subject from the ontological sphere to the logical-grammatical one: a thing’s properties become the subject’s predicates.15
When something is asserted about something else, what endures is not necessarily an immutable substrate, understood as the ontological basis of all possible transforma- tions; rather, a foundation is to be sought in the reference of what is being asserted (predication) to that something as such (the subject). The subject of an assertion may, for instance, be change itself, without the subject “change” thereby implying the endurance of something that remains the same in an ontological sense. The subject of the sentence—the foundation of every predicate—is grasped as that which is spoken of and which in each case is determined in a sentence, i.e., as a subject understood as a linguistic element that takes shape in a sentence in relation to its predicative deter- minations, which emerge through a dialogue between different speakers. This way of
15 Fichte’s subject has already undergone this extension, which began with Kant.
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framing the problem of the self is the basic assumption underlying narrativist psycho- therapies. Narrativists can therefore argue that people have multiple identities and that their identities are shaped and reshaped in social interaction.
In this case too, however, as in the case of the biological and philosophical- transcendental approaches, what is overlooked is precisely the ancient ontology governing these perspectives, in the belief of having resolved and dissolved the substantialistic formulation of the problem of the subject through an emphasis on the impermanent, constantly emerging and multiple aspect of the self.
What remains unquestioned is the principle governing the constant process of emergence of the self in its various articulations, namely, the very ontology which had prevented Fichte from grasping the fact that his absolute I throws the world like a ball, only to catch it again as it bounces back, so as to always perceive itself as the same. Differently from Fichte’s case, as in a team match, the ball here reaches the player in ever-new game situations, and in each case, the player repositions himself in relation to the match he is engaged in, and which throws the ball back to him, so that he ultimately forgets that he himself—a person in flesh and blood—is actually on the playground!
Once again, then, the crucial question of the nature of the subject dwindles into obscurity. It slips under the radar precisely because of the failure to grasp the key point of ancient ontology, whereby every possibility of determination—every pos- sible form of emergence, every linguistic position of the self in conversation—is understood in the light of time, conceived as present time: as a coming into presence and withdrawing from it, as the constant resolving and consuming of events under the observer’s gaze.
What remains unthought—while being implicitly adopted—is Aristotle’s way of conceiving the motility of life in the light of the paradigm of production, by tracing every “not yet” back to an enduring presence: that enduring present which makes an object available, manipulable, and theoretically graspable. Just as in the case of a table, whose actuality—in the process of production—always lies in the presence of its appearance, the motility of life is grasped from this perspective as perfect pres- ence, insofar as it is accomplished in its predicative determination at every moment.
Harlene Anderson (2003) writes: “The person and self, including development and human agency, are viewed as interdependent, communal, and dialogic entities and processes rather than as isolated autonomous interior ones” (pag. 184).
Movement is thus associated with dialogically and relationally constructed presence, while life itself—which supports and constantly regenerates it—is lost behind words, narratives, and meta-narratives. Certainly, against the view, one might conclude—to borrow a statement by a Chinese critic quoted by Hadot (p. 152, 2008)—that “anything that can be enunciated lacks importance.” What remains concealed, and therefore eludes investigation, is the fact that the person and self, before constituting itself through lin- guistic practices, progressively takes form via the praxis of existence as a selfhood that renews its incompleteness through its always-to-be- established relation with the world, without which any linguistic configuration would remain up in the air.16
16 On the other hand, understanding this ever-incomplete structure of selfhood as a self-reference means grasping it as an I-pole, which certainly has nothing to do with Heidegger’s notion of experience as always being mine.
3 “Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”
If the time of life is traced back to the present time, the condition of instability and incompleteness, which characterizes the being-there of man over the course of his existence, can only attain completion with death: for it is only with death that the presence becomes complete, as a whole which no longer lacks anything. Death is what enables one to account for life, which only appears truly complete with its end—like the table, which subsists in itself, in the full presence of itself, only once it has been fashioned. Human perfection, conceived on the basis of the ontological categories of practical experience, is realized according to the same movement which governs the process of production, i.e., as a presence constantly moving toward the completeness of the finished product. And when the presence attains this fullness, when it no longer lacks anything, at that very moment, perfection vanishes and ceases to exist.
3.4 The Transcendental Body of Medicine and Psychology