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The bookstore as mirror

It is always a small pleasure to visit the local bookstore in another city. I cherish the illusion that the books at offer is a mirror of the local issues. An illusion, because if you enter the selexyzzzzzz bookstore Kooyker in Leiden and take a glance at the shelves ‘philosophy’ on the first floor, you’ll soon descend the stairs again, deeply disappointed. The offer of two whole shelves is mainly of works in popular philosophy, with an occasional original work from the canon, usually only in Dutch translation, and a unsaleable leftover from a local philosophy course. (Fortunately, visiting Burgersdijk brings some relief, but here also the philosophy ‘division’ is reduced and condemned to a small corner). That in the local philosophy institute the dogma “one should read in the original language” reigns (rightly so, but I am trained there), you would never have guessed.

Parisian psychoanalysis

With this method, in advance falcified and declared an illusion, I entered the Paris bookshops Gilbert Joseph/Jeune. The supply ‘philosophy’ is very good, obviously everything only in French translation, even the English books. Surprisingly, however, the equally large supply ‘psychoanalysis’ and, no, not as another name for psychology, but next to it, apart from psychology. They seemed to have all the work of Freud (again, obviously only in French) and that is quite a bit: the collected works in German is 19 volumes. Close second was the French Freud-but-then-else Lacan, the rest of the names were unknown to me. It is surprising, because in the Netherlands we haven’t heard of psychoanalysis for a long time. Occasionally you hear, in a ‘hit tv series from America’, say that someone is anal about something. This apparently very vulgar comment is a reference to the ‘anal phase’  which Freud distinguished in child development: namely, the phase in which the child discovers that it can exercise control over its stool.

From the French psychoanalytic point of view, our psychiatry is based on the Anglo-American cognitive neuropsychology, with its known basis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Stubborn as they are, the French make their own categories, for example with autism. But are they right? Is it true what Freud and Lacan say? They have not solved the main problem of Freud, probably the reason for the disappearance of psychoanalysis here: the problem of his method, which is mainly: the problem of the lack of any method. They still rely on anecdotal cases, examples from mythology and literature, they refuse to give criteria for recovery, etc. (See the blog of Filip Buekens for witty examples) Do they perform better than the Americans? Did they cure schizophrenics, psychotics and people with autism? No, probably not, because you don’t hear them about that. On the other hand, the “Anglo-American” psychiatry is not without problems: it is not much more than treating symptoms with severe psycho-pharmacological means. The empirical-scientific approach has the advantage that it is likely to improve, while psychoanalysis keeps running in circles.

Philosophy on the couch

But shouldn’t I ‘put the hand in my own bosom’ (as we say in Dutch; what would Freud think of this phrase)? In a philosophical work/presentation/speech as well the question creeps onto me: is it really true what that guy (mostly guys) says? Actually, they should first to start telling why they believe what they say, but that never happens. It’s like you walk into a church where everyone already believes, in which one speak in terms that are outside discussion, where the preaching pastor is never confronted with a non-dogmatic question.

At best you occasionally hear a loose, rejecting remark (‘If you do not start with it, you’ll never get there’,'a kind of saying that isn’t claiming’) or an unsatisfactory, because self-affirming or self-contradictory, statement (‘hermeneutic circle’, ‘think near the experience’, ‘there is no truth’). My first inclination is to think: just let it go, just dive into the pragmatic experience rationality, follow the insatiable command of the superego Enjoy! (to say it Lacanian). But that does not fly, something calls me back (to say it Heideggerian). Furthermore, you fall back to the most stupid position. As a freshman, you discover that your ‘thinking’ contains the most simplistic traces of traditional thought. You see the same phenomenon with scientists, columnists etc. without philosophical training who seek to ‘philosophize’. One then repeats the familiar all too familiar distinctions: subject – object, active – passive, form – content, essence – existence, abstract – concrete, etc. The (post)modern philosophy has focussed on the destruction of the fossils of philosophy, however, once it starts constructing, the neglected question pops up again: ‘is it true?’ So let’s begin with that!

Note: this English translation is a manual correction of the automatic translation of the Dutch text by Google Translate.