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M Cavell

Publications and source records attributed to M Cavell.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Knowledge, consensus and uncertainty.

Some months ago the editors of this journal asked me if I would undertake a series of short entries of a general sort on philosophical topics germane to current discussions in psychoanalysis. Both authors and topics were left to my discretion. I thought the series was a good idea and gladly agreed to do it. To my surprise and pleasure, all the philosophers I invited accepted I am only sorry that the series could not be longer as there are other philosophers as well who would have been splendid participants, and other topics I would like to have addressed. The essays that will follow in subsequent issues represent by and large the tradition of analytic philosophy, though this has come in the last few decades to comprise many of the themes we used to associate with the Continental tradition. Future entries, by James Conant, Donald Davison, Pascal Engel, Dagfinn Føllesdal, James Hopkins, Ernest Le Pore, Jeffrey Malpas, Jerome Neu, Brian O'Shaughnessy, Richard Rorty and Richard Wollheim, will address the following topics: intersubjectivity, meaning and language, consciousness and perception, pragmatism, knowledge and belief, norms and nature, metaphor, hermeneutics, truth, self-deception, the emotions. The essay below on knowledge, which will also be the topic of another entry by a different author later on, is the only one in the series that I will write.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

Triangulation, one's own mind and objectivity.

Some psychoanalysts now hold that an intersubjective model of the mind and of the analytic situation renders the ideas of truth, reality and objectivity obsolete. Arguing from a position of sympathy with this model, the author contends that nevertheless both a real, shared, external world and the concept of such a world are indispensable to propositional thought, and to the capacity to know one's own thoughts as thoughts, as a subjective perspective on the world. Without the idea of an objective world with which we are in touch and which we attempt to be more-or-less objective about, any so-called intersubjectivist model collapses into the one-person paradigm. The author traces a certain developmental line in twentieth-century philosophy that supports an intersubjective view, a line that shows the place of the normative ideas of truth and falsity, right and wrong, in the advent of mind; it attempts to disentangle the concept of truth from an authoritarian view that was implicit in Descartes; it points out connections, and a difference, between the view of triangulation that it argues for and the views espoused by a number of psychoanalysts. Some implications of this intersubjectivist position for psychoanalytic practice are considered; for instance: the interrelations between the analyst's third-person knowledge of her patient, and the patient's developing understanding of himself; and what the concept of unconscious fantasy presupposes.

Child↗
PubMed1991

The subject of mind.

Though certain assumptions about the nature of meaning that I call subjectivist go contrary to the general direction of psychoanalytic thought, they are intrinsic to Freud's view of the unconscious as a special mental system with characteristics unique to it. A corollary to this view of meaning in Freud's case is that instinctual processes are a rudimentary form of the mental, providing a genetic base from which 'secondary' mental states derive. I argue that the mental is irreducible to instinct or anything else, and that even in its most rudimentary form, mentality presumes an interaction between creature and the external world, also creature and other creatures, that has an essentially linguistic nature. I claim that psychoanalysis would lose nothing that is crucial to it were it to view subjectivity as something that can only emerge in time; on the contrary it would clarify its own most valuable insights.

Countertransference↗
PubMed1988

Interpretation, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of mind.

I suggest that a conflict between two philosophical models of the mind so far unremarked in discussions of psychoanalysis is at the heart of questions about its status as a science, the objectivity of psychoanalytic interpretations, and the nature of the unconscious. In philosophy one model is embodied in the tradition of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, among many others, which construes thought as prior to and independent of language. According to this tradition the mind is self-contained and mental contents or "ideas" are essentially subjective phenomena. It follows that knowledge of other minds and the material world is radically problematic. In the second and more contemporary model the phenomenon of meaning is dependent on interactions between minds, and between mind and the world. Since meaning is understood to be intrinsically social, so in an important sense is mind. I develop this second philosophic model, indicating its relevance for psychoanalysis. I also point out some of the contributions of psychoanalysis to philosophy of mind.

Humans↗