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The imagination, according to Aristotle, is Janus-faced: it can either be subject to the will and be categorised as an active categorical power, or it can be characterised as a passive process in which the schema imposed upon what is seen, remembered, and “thought” has its source in sensations or feelings, whose essential characteristic is that they “happen to one”. Imagination in this latter case is non-conceptual. In an article entitled “Aristotle on the Imagination” by Malcolm Schofield(“Articles on Aristotle”, ed. by Barnes J., Schofield, M., Scrabji, R., (London Duckworth, 2003), it is argued that the Greek equivalent to our word “imagination” is “phantasia”:
“But Aristotle’s own unitary explanation of dreams and such pathological phenomena, on the one hand, and the similarity between pathological and normal seeing of aspects, on the other, put us in a position in which we can now exhibit the unity in Aristotle’s conception of phantasia, while retaining our characterisation of it as imagination.” (P. 125)
We should in the context of this discussion recall that for Aristotle:
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” (The Collected Works of Aristotle)
On this account dreams must aim at the good in spite of their tenuous connection to reality: they do not, that is, aim at the true. The dreamer believes that they are experiencing or seeing a man in a red shirt, and do not know that they are merely imagining that they are seeing a man in a red shirt. The absence of actual experience or actual perception in this situation means that memory must be playing a role in the production of these images, and the question then becomes: what is it that is activating the memory to produce such images. For Freud, dreams are wish-fulfilments in a double sense: they are disguised desires for something which requires the art of interpretation to make manifest, and they express the wish to continue sleeping. Two different types of “good” are being aimed at. In both cases the wish is located in the unconscious or preconscious systems of the psychic apparatus. For Freud, we should recall, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious system of our mind: memories were presented in disguised form on the dream screen in accordance with both the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle. Dreams such as the father’s dream of a child that has recently died, manifest the wish on the part of the father that the child was still alive. The memory that he is dead is overridden by other memories of the child alive, which are more in accord with the fathers desire that the child not be dead. The dream-memory of the child shouting out “father, father, cant you see that I am burning!” is a synthesis of the present near-waking experience of the body being burned by candles that have fallen over near the body, plus the memory of the event of the dying as a result of a burning fever. The dream is a phantasy: it never happened and what is wished for could never happen, now that the child is dead. Yet it is a real expression of a real wish projected onto the dream screen of a sleeping subject. It is most definitely a substantial clue in relation to the royal road of the subject’s state of mind. It is also part of the mourning process: a process that will for some time prevent the subject from fully engaging with his life-projects in accordance with the reality principle: the pleasure-pain principle(which uses feelings as regulators) rules on this royal road. The task for the father is to become fully conscious of his wish, and its role in the mourning process. Feelings are manifestations of what is happening to the body, and share with sensations, a non-active status. Bring them into a context of judgement as Kant did in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and they can be subject to the activities of the imagination, the understanding and judgement. For Kant, the aesthetic judgement is concerned with the active communication of a feeling of the harmony of different powers of the mind, e.g. the imagination and the understanding. In such judgements there may even be a partial aim at the truth when, for example, one claims that the evening sunset is beautiful. Kant maintains that this is a cognitive claim on the grounds that we attempt, as Kant puts the matter, to speak with a “universal voice”. In this form of judgement, the understanding and its categories are involved in the organisation of the representations involved in this judgement. We know from his work on the Rhetoric and De Anima, that Aristotle believed Emotions can be connected to both our powers of understanding and judgement, and have therefore a claim to be cognitive (emotions have both objects and grounds for their occurrence). Anger, to take a typical Aristotelian example, connects judgement and thought via an awareness of an apparent injustice that has been done to the angry subject. Here Aristotle appeals to his hylomorphic account, and speaks of the matter of anger being the physiological response of the agitation of the blood around the heart: he also speaks of the form of the subjects anger being related to the subjects desire for retaliation or revenge. It is clear here that the subject’s judgement, in such circumstances, is only partially overcome and there is a complex relation to the pain involved in the situation. Fear, too, has a similar structure in which the matter are a number of complex physiological responses and the form is connected to the perception or thought of an evil that is related to imminent danger and the possible pain associated with this danger. Both anger and fear can be, as Aristotle claimed, praised or blamed for their positive or negative relation to the good. The angry man must believe that he has been insulted for the anger to be authentic, and the fearful man must believe in dangerous circumstances, if the fear is to be genuine. Fear and anger can be communicated in rhetorical speeches, which may also contain elements of deliberation or reasoning about the insult or danger, either diminishing its magnitude or fortifying a good spirited response to the events in question.
Modern positivist theories, we know, proposed an account of a special kind of meaning–emotional meaning–in response to the more ethical accounts of anger and fear. Such accounts focussed on the moment of persuasion involved in such circumstances, analysing the idea of the good into a feeling component and a subjective imperative component. Such an account was meant to be critical of Aristotelian accounts of ethics and emotions as well as Kantian accounts which attached great importance to the role of ethical law and principles in ethical judgements. For Aristotle, both Ethics and rhetoric involve practical reasoning in the process of praising and blaming the judgements and actions of the agents responsible for them. The grounds for such praise and blame lie in the realm of ought judgements and action—what we ought and ought not to have done. The practical reasoning used in such circumstances will, for example involve appeal to principles of judgement which claim that fear and anger can be appropriate if the circumstances and objects are appropriate. Aristotle’s account also refers to appetition, hunger, thirst and sexual desire which for both Plato and Aristotle were clearly linked to what both Freud and William James designated as the realm of instinct. Freud presupposes much of what Aristotle wrote in his account of the sexual instincts where sources, objects, and aims are all connected to the cathartic effect of a form of discourse that possessed the power to mitigate the undue influence of sexual desire in our lives. So, with respect to Freud’s account of the life instinct, we encounter a hylomorphic strategy which appeals to both form and matter. With respect to hunger and thirst for example a biological account of the physiological functions of the body suffice to explain such phenomena. Sexual instincts, on the other hand, require a more formal account to complement the bodily sources of the associated phenomena. Practical reasoning of the kind we encounter in relation to anger and fear plays an important role in the discourse we use to praise and blame agents for the appropriateness of their sexual activity(areté).
Aristotle’s work on poetic and epic tragedy speaks about the use of the emotions in dramatic works of art, in particular, the emotions of pity and fear. The cathartic process Aristotle describes is a process involving good objects that may be lost, good grounds, and associated goods such as areté and diké. All in accordance with the essence-specifying definition of tragedy:
“the imitation of an action that is serious and complete…..accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of such affections.”(The Complete Works of Aristotle. The revised Oxford Edition edited by Barnes J.,(Princetown, Princetown University Press, Vol 2, 1984(Poetics)
The actions concerned are concerned with what ought or ought not to be done or said, the moral quality of the actors, and the catharsis referred to is more of an educational and less of a medical-physical process. Medical catharsis involves the purging of pathological impurities related to states of health or disease of the body, whereas educational catharsis is concerned with the pathologies and the healing of the soul(psuché) in relation to areté and diké. There is, as Aristotle maintains, a kind of educational pleasure attached to this process in which one learns what the good is. Needless to say, we are concerned with the imagination and its universalisation in the process of appreciating dramatic works of art. There is an equivalent work of appreciation which helps us to understand the peculiar nature of those goods that are both good in their consequences and good in themselves. Knowledge(epistemé) of the Good is at issue in the mimetic context of an art work and the imagination therefore plays a decisive role in both the creation and the appreciation of works of art. Judgement, therefore, plays a more important role than reason in the realm of the productive sciences such as rhetoric and art.
In contexts of practical reason where we are directly concerned with action rather than imitative representations, understanding and reason play a larger constitutive role and teleological judgement and imagination a lesser role. The key idea involved in ethical forms of practical reasoning, is that of the freedom to choose ones action-alternatives. This is a direct consequence of the Kantian claim that forms of life are entities that are self-causing and can therefore negate any destructive desire that arises in their mental arena, e.g. refusing to take a drink if one is a recovering alcoholic. Sartre characterises this freedom in terms of Consciousness, and claims that the essence of consciousness is Negation. Freud, here, as in other matters, aligns himself more with Kant, and claims that the desire to take a drink as a result of the cravings of ones appetite-system arises as a so-called “primary process”, activity which can be neutralised by a secondary process reality-based operation of choosing not to imbibe. The secondary process is operating in these circumstances as an inhibitory power. In this process the representation of the drink thus becomes a lost object in the history of the individuals desire. The wounded desire that resulted in the choice not to take the drink is then required to submit to an attitude of resignation and acceptance of the wound to the self. This impulse-control triangle is for Freud related to the Greek idea of arête, which ensures that we do the right thing in the right way at the right time. Yet the whole process is haunted by feelings of mourning and melancholia, which hover like dark clouds over such kinds of action.
Paul Ricouer, in his work, “Freud and Philosophy: An essay in Interpretation”, is more inclined to place faith in the teleological aspect of action processes which he claims must supplement the so-called archeologically oriented account provided by Freud. This presupposes that Freud’s account did not contain a teleological element, which is a questionable presupposition, given Freud’s use of Platonic themes and ideas in his later work. Plato’s “Republic, we know, was an attempt to provide an account of the Good-in-itself and the Good-in-its-consequences, in relation to the ideas of areté and diké. Ricouer, in contrast, attempts to synthesise the teleological and archeological aspects he refers to with a theologically-laden eschatological meaning of justice (getting what one deserves). This places both the Socratic account of Justice (involving knowledge (epistemé) of how the laws work in the polis), and the Aristotelian account of justice (involving the virtues of a middle class who choose to rule in accordance with the principle or law of the golden mean), in a state of suspension. Behind the account given by Ricouer, lies a conviction that Psychology is not an observational science, but rather an exegetical science: a science involving language and what he regards as its relation to a dialectics of presence and absence.
The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud we know demanded a theory to guide the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, and pathological behaviour of his patients, who were providing Freud with a “story about their lives and its meaning”. This story reached back into the past and forwards out into an imagined future. Such a story could not possibly be conceived of as a collection of facts established by observational activity, but must rather be conceived of as a motivational history organised by the “types” constituted by case studies of individuals. The questions raised in this latter kind of “science” is less akin to establishing the facts (questio factii) of the case, and more concerned with what Kant would have called “questio juris”—an organisation of the facts in accordance with principles and laws that justify/explain the conditions of the possibility of the history of the patients failures and lost-objects. Psychoanalysis, then, in its theoretical aspect is concerned with the “production” of mental health, but also with areté and diké, with how the patient ought to be leading their life in order to achieve eudaimonia (a good-spirited flourishing life). The concept of “health” being presupposed, is a teleological concept that has both technological (techné) and practical ethical aspects, hence Freud’s claim that he was a Kantian Psychologist. The combination of principles of the productive sciences (techné) and the principles of ethics in psychoanalytical theory must also be part of the reason why Freud focussed on the ideas of “meaning” and “interpretation”.
Freud is sometimes characterised as an anti-phenomenological theorist, and if ones models of phenomenological theory emanate from Husserl or Heidegger, there may be some substance to this claim, but if one, instead, compares the Phenomenology of Merleau -Ponty to Freudian theory, the differences of the positions seem less striking. For Merleau-Ponty, the human body is not a set of causally related entities and processes, but rather a lived form of being-in-the-world (psuché), in which meanings relate to meanings in a way very different to the way in which material and efficient causation relate to their effects. For both Merleau-Ponty and Freud, sexuality is a form of life with global rather than “local” meaning, and is related to our freedom, which also has a global meaning. Freedom, however, has more “cultural” significance than sexuality, and there are therefore circumstances in which culture rightly demands of us that we sacrifice our sexual satisfactions for higher purposes. Freud in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents” claimed that this “giving up of sexual objects and satisfactions”, was not a straightforward sacrifice and may give rise to a form of discontentment with our civilisation. This inhibitory process is obviously connected to the work of the Ego and the defence mechanism of “sublimation”, which is, in fact, a vicissitude of instinct. What is being invoked here is the Freudian impulse-control-triangle of Desire-Demand-Refusal, and the melancholic image that emerges from this, is of the wounded self that needs to go in search of “treatment”, that hopefully results in the resignation and acceptance that comes with increased “wisdom and understanding (A process steered by the Reality Principle). This latter characterisation of the education of desire is, in fact, difficult to represent using phenomenological concepts and ideas, since there is no clear role for rational principles in this kind of account.
Consciousness is one of the central ideas of Phenomenological accounts. It is sometimes characterised in terms of its images (Heidegger’s Transcendental Imagination in his Kant-book), which appear to be regressive forms of perception. There is no obvious role for the rational principle of non-contradiction in phenomenological accounts, which claim to be searching for essential descriptions of phenomena in the dream-like world of images. There is also lacking, the space-time continuity that is present in our perception of the world. For Freud, the history of our desires could be recorded in our dream images which are in need of principles involved in self-knowledge, if the interpretative process of the meaning of these archeological representations is to be made manifest. Knowledge (epistemé) of the complex functioning of the psychic apparatus is at the very least a necessary condition of interpreting the meaning of these images. In his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud maintains that the dream-work is a regressive activity, but at the same time the work of interpretation of these images is the royal road for gaining insight into the patient’s state of mind. Returning to the Freudian triangle of demand-refusal-wounded ego, the demands of the life instinct begin the demand-process and the more materialistic these demands are, the more likely it is that anxiety will arise in relation to the stage of refusal: this anxiety can then haunt the ego. If the ego is strong enough to tolerate this anxiety, a stoical form of resignation/acceptance of the refusal will contribute to the formation of more realistic demands in conjunction with more realistic means to achieve such demands. If, for various developmental reasons, the ego is not sufficiently strong to tolerate the resultant anxiety connected with refusal, defence mechanisms (which are also vicissitudes of the instincts) such as repression, will seek to manage the pain and suffering in ways that may eventually compromise the functioning of the ego. In such cases these unconscious residues would need to re-emerge into consciousness, and be reported to the analyst who will attempt to restructure, and/or re-situate this experience in the preconscious system of the patient (with the aid of language and the memory system). This process of “working through” can occur in relation to dreams symptoms and pathological behaviour.
The Delphic Oracle suspected that the process of knowing oneself would not be an easy one, and Aristotle, Kant, and Freud would undoubtedly have agreed with such a judgement. This process of working-through requires the operation of the reality principle insofar as it regulates both the theoretical discourse connected with the treatment, and the practical activities/symptoms of the patient. With respect to the latter, the task of the therapist is to improve the life of the patient by strengthening the ego with a greater capacity to tolerate refusal and accept the patients “lost-objects” of desire. If the patient has been traumatised, and the ego is strengthened so that the patient no longer blindly and pathologically repeats an activity or “acts-out”, the consequence of good treatment will be to convert traumatic anxiety-laden images into normal memories that will fade in intensity with the passing of time. Memory of the traumatic episode ought, that is, to be recalled in the course of time with diminished levels of anxiety. During the course of this therapeutic process the patient will be subjected to a therapeutic technique that relates to the refusal phase of the Freudian triangle. The analyst, that is, will use the transference love that the patient feels for the analyst, for the purposes of overcoming the patient’s resistances to the treatment. The task of the analyst is partly to overcome the narcissism of the patient, which resists reality when the patient attempts to consolidate a defensive position via the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The instincts and their more positive vicissitudes, such as sublimation, need to be mobilised in a therapeutic process that aims at displacing narcissistic tendencies. If the ego remains narcissistic, lost objects of desire that are valued highly may not be merely mourned but may be subject to the self-destructive mood of melancholia which testifies to the presence of the death instinct. Aggression is the typical response of a narcissist to what is perceived as a universally hostile environment:
“One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this which is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the Metapsychology of the instincts and their vicissitudes.”( James, M.,R.,D., The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2020, Page 203)