‘A PHILOSOPHY OF HAMMERS
I’ll begin as so many have been motivated to begin, by exposing a lie.
To do this, a little history is needed.
The middle and late 1800s in Europe were rich with philosophical development, driven by development in scientific thought (Darwin’s natural selection) and movement toward empiricism and skepticism, away from metaphysical trends which had dominated the field for so long.
Friedrich Nietzsche arrives on this scene ready to deal blows. Among other projects he set upon exposing the subject-object distinction (I am I, that is that, I cause that, x causes y) as a useful feature of what is human, human-all-too-human, rather than a feature of some some objective or metaphysical 'reality.' Simultaneously his ideas also challenged the foundation of mechanical materialism and axiomatic philosophy including religious philosophy. It’s not important to know exactly what any of these terms mean. What’s important is that Nietzsche challenged many foundational systems of thought upon which European culture itself rested, while it was simultaneously being challenged by other emerging philosophies like the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Pierce and William James. Something was clearly in the air at the time.
As a philologist, Nietzsche’s work located all of this as dynamic process within the human itself. He stops asking, “What is the right way to interpret reality?” and starts asking, “What happens when we treat interpretation itself as the only reality?” He asks whether philosophers really know anything at all, especially of themselves. He treated philosophy as symptom of the philosopher, rather than evaluating its truth or falsity. The human does not aim to access “reality;” it finds use in an interpretation; it interprets its environment to some end, and that interpretation reveals a truth about the human and how it relates to environment. The content of ideas is not treated as true or false, the ideas themselves are treated as processes-to-be-interpreted-within-reality. This already is a powerful paradigm shift that qualifies and scaffolds much of the psychoanalytic movement.
The second layer might be even more fascinating. Nietzsche’s method operates inside this new epistemology. He presents the core aspects of his philosophy itself as analytic material, not truth claims. He wanted contact, participation, transmutation, tension, aliveness. He wanted his philosophy to have working legs so it might walk with us.
At the heart of his philosophy is a hammer. He strikes the pages as they ring in thunderous prompts, questions, not statements or claims. They roll through the valleys and mountains all around us but never resolve. They enter and rattle the skeleton before we can defend against them. We try to circumnavigate them, mute them, kill them, idealize them, maybe even stumble after them in longing for what movement they promised. All of that, what happens in us as these hammer blows reverberate, IS the philosophy.
Epistemology/Perspectivism: “SUPPOSING truth were a woman, WHAT THEN?” This might be his most stylish blow. Here he critiques traditional epistemology with a Koan. This question does not ask for an answer. You can feel it. It is meant to be experienced. The way the question moves through me is like this: what does it mean for our lives if truth is a process, a dialectic, a relationship, rather than a fixed state or object? If a truth is a truth, just lying there waiting to be discovered, it is inanimate. But a woman is alive, a human who cannot be seen or known at a glance. You know her though relating to her many, many times though dynamic exchange. Her nature and aims will not explain themselves to you in the form of any language she could speak to you, or any observations you make in any moment. You come to know these by enacting many movements together, feeling your own experience in movements. "You have to get involved if you want to come to know the truth." This is maybe one of the most delightful aspects of his philosophy: he built in compassionate barriers that some simply cannot cross. We can see that if a person is different in this way or that way, they inevitably experience this prompt differently in exactly those ways. In this relational dialectic the reader's experience is part of the philosophy. In this sense it is not one philosophy, but as many philosophies as there are readers. This way of organizing philosophy directly challenged a long standing philosophical tradition that framed knowledge as “understanding of what is real.” Nietzsche asks, “What if the human organism can’t 'know reality' at all, but is itself a functional movement of reality? How would this change what we have called "philosophy?”
Eternal recurrence: WHAT IF a demon were to whisper in your ear the terrible secret that this exact life you live now will repeat into infinity? Eternal recurrence uses a thought experiment as an amplification device. Your life will repeat, exactly as it occurred, forever. What does your life feel like when you consider this? Do you value it more? Less? How does it change your decisions? Can you tolerate it? No answer is provided.
The Will to Power: again a refusal of anything defined or fixed. Even his broadest and most encompassing “concept” is no concept at all, but a process of engagement, a movement through contact, dialectic that leads toward a more alive experience.
Ubermesch: “WHAT IF we adopt a collective project for our future, and that project were the overman?” Overman is not the aim. We’re asked to consider what would be revealed if the human collectively tried to overcome itself?”
All of this moves away from fixed concept, statement, fixed reality, truth, and toward a model in which everything is a living process. It’s this exact movement away from previous iterations of epistemology that establishes Nietzsche as the first psychoanalyst: truth as interpretive function of reality, which is described by participating in it rather than referring to it from the outside. All behavior and experience can now be treated as symptom, interpretation, sign, signal about how the the organism is becoming and overcoming itself. The the contribution of the analyst is no exception.
This is, fundamentally, the foundation for psychoanalysis.
FREUD SMELLS FISHY
Secondly, this history sets the stage for a lie which might have misattributed the origin of psychodynamics to Freud, who is largely credited as the “father” of this movement. The foundations of Freud's ideas about internal drives and repression/displacement were largely established by Nietzsche, who also operated within the very analytic framework Freud claimed to be pioneering. Freud’s work also built upon emerging ideas in other areas like physiology (Ernst von Bruck), but we have hard evidence of Nietzsche’s profound and direct influence on Freud. Direct paraphrases and citations of Nietzsche in Freud’s formal work, Paneth’s long letters to Freud about Nietzsche, records of Lou Salome introducing Nietzsche’s work to Freud, Freud’s letters to Zweig about Nietzsche, methodological scaffolding that had only been built by Nietzsche’s work at that time, Freud’s later credit to Nietzsche as possessing "...a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live." All of this is now a matter of public record, and contact with Nietzsche’s work is evident even very early in Freud’s life and writings, but Freud repeatedly and publicly denied this. We can only speculate about why. Many scholars seem to gravitate toward an interpretation that sounds like, “Freud might have wanted to separate himself from the philosophical tradition in order to establish something more concrete, testable, physiological, scientific." I find this motive less plausible than narcissism, stolen valor and strategic maneuvering to be credited (on Freud’s part). Imagine Freud, an infant in front of Nietzsche's breadth and depth, pointing to Nietzsche's collapse at the end then commenting, "He must not have known himself well enough after all if he could not stop this," while parading himself in the false garb of Freidrich's life and work--which he longs more than anything to have been able to do himself. I can feel it in Freud's writings. He was full of contradictions and self deceptions which he could not access. Maybe I'm right about this, maybe not; but this says more about me than the “truth” of what transpired. This snaps the psychoanalytic process back to the forefront for us.
METHODS AND MOTHERS
My interpretation of Freud itself is live analytic material. What am I expressing through this label, "intellectual theft?” What force, what stimulus, what internal feelings necessitated the conviction in me that this object [“taking credit for others’ ideas] is purely and intensely bad. There is so much disgust and disdain in my language. This conviction reflects that I find my experience of this object intolerable. What specifically is intolerable to me? How did I come to experience it this way?
In contemporary psychodynamics, we now seem to agree that following this thread tends to lead back to recurring patterns of experience during developmental periods of life. Following this dialectic would expose something about the human animal, Devin, and how that whole animal is organizing toward its aims. In short, any action I take in the present, including this sentence, is itself live material to be interpreted. This method is the foundation of modern psychoanalysis, even today. If we had more information about my experience in that moment of intolerance, we might be able to establish a psychodynamic hypothesis.
We already have clues. I said I interpreted Freud’s behavior as motivated by “narcissism and maneuvering”: he read Nietzsche, was enamored of his work, considered him a genius, was moved by that to produce his own work, but could never face he had not generated the foundations for that work. Instead of properly individuating from Nietzsche, Freud stole his foundation then confabulated that he never encountered it.
Here we can already see a dynamic moving in me: bad object becomes enamored —> realizes incompetence —> fails to contain shame —> self disparages —> steals out of ambition or resentment —> confabulation (inner deception) —> lie (outward deception) —> someone is harmed.
We might then ask, “What felt least tolerable about this dynamic in that moment to you?”
I answer: “He could have borne the cost of his shame, inside his own organism, in his failure to generate something that felt significant and true to him, but instead he compensated for it without considering the cost to others.” Now a much clearer theme emerges. It’s no longer about this specific theft, it’s about how I’m interpreting this pattern. This also reveals a visceral element. I seem to be saying the cost is at the level of the body and psyche (‘inside the organism’).
Next we might ask, “Can you remember any experiences, especially early in life, when you experienced this pattern?”
I answer: “Yes, clearly. I can remember my mother inflating her accomplishments to strangers, to us, claiming credit for work she didn’t do, making herself a hero in every story. Even her personality itself was a lie through and through. She didn’t seem to care about the impact she had on anyone’s experience outside of what it did to or for her. She brought disaster to the lives of countless people including her own children, and has never once apologized for any harm she caused. She can’t even articulate it. The most she can manage is, “Yeah… I was going through a hard time in the past.” When her deception and malice are questioned or exposed with facts, she lies, confabulates, and becomes aggressive (much like Freud did when questioned about Nietzsche) yet still holds herself in very high regard including morally and socially (Freud got away with it and was recognized). But her psyche would not let her reflect on any of this; it was all unconscious movement (Freud's confabulation, ironic lack of self awareness as he comments on Nietzsche's collapse). This left me with a confusing and distressing experience of my mother in my body, a resentment toward her which feels to still hold tension in me.
What’s clear from this last answer is that my experience of Freud’s behavior shares a strong structural dynamic with how I chronically experienced my mother. The working hypothesis becomes: Devin might be experiencing Freud, at least in part, through the internal dynamics he formed with his mother.
We’ll stop the analysis there, but if we wanted to probe further we would look at specific ways I experienced these patterns in my mother as harmful—intolerable affect states, cognitive thought, impulses, internal sensations, etc.—exploring what kind of impacts this had on the way I organized my experiences and decisions going forward.
What I believe about Freud could plausibly be true of him, or not. But my interpretation of him, the way I relate to him as an internal object (see Melanie Klein), is itself a truth about me. Psychoanalysis is fundamentally a relational process. We move through that process, without an end point or conclusion, and this exposes something about the internal dynamics of the psyches involved. What I did here demonstrates that psychoanalytic method in real time. All contributions to the relational field (what’s arising in experience presently between the patient and analyst) can be treated as live material to be analyzed through dialectic.
This was a revelation at the time. The emergence of psychodynamics as a field can be seen not only as an emergent phenomenon of 19th century Europe’s economy of philosophical and scientific thought, but also as a product of the social dynamics and psyches of the humans who engaged with these ideas. They expanded, built up, tore down, reorganized, stole and borrowed from each other in their efforts to break through similar thresholds under similar cultural tensions. Nietzsche might have framed his own contribution as a necessary discharge of disruptive force, a “plough” of perspective that upturned many presumptions about the process of interpretation—repositioning interpretation itself as the process to be interpreted.
In the upturned soil behind that plough bloomed more development. The late 19th and early 20th century produced a cascade of thinkers and practitioners—Freud, Jung, Adler, Klein, Bion, Winnicott—who expanded and applied this method of inquiry to clinical-relational work in the way I demonstrated above. It would no doubt be very valuable to cover their lives, perspectives and contributions to the field, and maybe there will be space for this in the future. What I want to communicate to you now, though, is something about the process itself and how it functions in practice.
FEELINGS AND FATHERS
Fundamentally: I can view any given pattern of undesired experience or behavior in me as two sides of my own face in a mirror. I turn my head to look at the left side and I see a symptom of a failure to resolve some process of individuation; I turn to the other side and see movement toward resolution of that very same failure.
Here I’ll need to mention Jung briefly, as his notion of individuation is central to the field. He posited the aim of psychoanalysis as moving the individual toward an experience and expression of whole self, in both conscious and unconscious life, through dialectic. Later thinkers differed in their description psychoanalysis, like Winnicott who centered the process around “continuity of spontaneous being,” (personally I’m very attracted to this framing) but in my view these other ways of thinking about the function of psychoanalysis are very compatible and not contradictory to what Jung calls individuation.
Examples tend to help, so let’s walk through one.
Meet Jessica. She is product of my imagination, but let’s pretend she is real and I have direct access to Jessica’s inner experience. Jessica experienced her father as never caring about her inner emotional life as a child. When she shared challenging emotions, her father consistently had no comment and showed no affective empathy for her experience. The same was true for her other sensations like pain or discomfort. This often left her feeling unsafe, confused, and in physical pain when trying and failing to process her emotions alone.
Now Jessica takes it very personally and reacts defensively when she perceives a man as disinterested in her feelings. She holds the hurt still because it was intolerable to feel it at the time; it might have collapsed her. As an adult Jessica desperately wants to be understood and heard by men with authority on an emotional level. This could be a drive toward a need that was not met in her development. Her organism might be seeking this as part of its individuation process: “To become my own person, to become myself, I must internally integrate a paternal archetype that can see and contain my true feelings.”
Jessica feels compelled to test this in many exchanges with men. Sometimes she does this with women too. When she experiences her emotions as not acknowledged or respected, she feels angry and accuses the other of not caring about her or about feelings generally. Sometimes this dynamic leads to unexpected conflicts, and she struggles to understand why this undesirable experience is repeating for her.
Hypothesis: Jessica learned early in life that her father did not care about her inner life or feelings. This internal dynamic transfers to scenarios in the present that feel similar to her. If true, that might be a very difficult lesson to process and resolve. Her experience and behaviors in the present might be viewed from one angle as a attempt to process, resolve, reframe, defend against the repetition of 'suffering-while-longing-to-be-in-contact-with-the-paternal,' and so on.
Jessica could be expecting, hoping her accusation will be met with disconfirming evidence: “No, of course I care, Jessica, let me do better and prove it to you.” Now she could live in a world that corrects for the longing she feels for paternal contact. This would offer her evidence of care. Unfortunately this reassurance requires Jessica to leverage her anger and accusations to achieve that experience. Further, the hurt from her past was likely enormous, the size she felt her father to be when she was a child, so any disconfirming evidence in the present will likely fail to survive the scale of that stress test. For Jessica it might not be about evidence at all, but about resolving feelings of danger and loneliness based on what she has learned in development about the world [her father]. She could be seeking to fill a deficit of reassurance and support that she is feel safe to feel her pwn experience, now trying to force the world to provide that reassurance by showing it her teeth.
The same pattern of experience and behavior has a dual function: enacting a trauma, and seeking its resolution. If this is exposed to Jessica through the analytic process she can have a clearer view of what she requires to move toward individuation (Jung), safe contact with her felt experience, continuity of spontaneous being (Winnicott), or however you frame the function of this process. She can feel and process those experiences in a way that moves her toward a more whole experience off her self and her life.
CONCLUSION
Every movement or expression of force can be viewed as a fission, fracture, separation, and distinction; but also as fusion, integration, cooperation and unification. When an object is split in experience (see Klein, paranoid schizoid position) into all good/all bad, this represents both a fracture and a repair. The split is a solution to a developmental or survival frustration, or both. The split also generates distortion, and consequences for that distortion in the future. This is not a contradiction or problem to be solved; it is a description of function, of force dynamics occurring in everything. All movement is both a departure and arrival; a moving away, and moving toward; a symptom of the organism’s frustrations, and a process of overcoming those frustrations.
One of the most important lesson I’ve taken from my own psychodynamic process and studies is that a good and fulfilling life requires me to process big, profound, often painful experience. I’m learning to view my emotional world as carrying important signals of meaning and direction, rather than disturbances or signals that something is wrong. My various negotiations with reality, the ways I fracture myself and the world into distortions, are all also truths. Psychodynamics offers a process of moving toward my own aliveness. Where and how was I fractured? How did I organize around that? How is that working for me now? Can I stay in play?
This process can be, and is perhaps by definition, painful. Many of our fractures actually defend against the collapsing force of intolerable experience. It was intolerable then, but now how much can I symbolize, feel, and think about it?
We find in the wreckage of our split selves both a past solution and an invitation to reorganize for the future. There we’ll find our deepest sorrows, fractures--along with our highest joys--frustrated, frozen deep in the unconsciousness, unable to move toward contact with anything alive. The analytic process occupies the present in between, where we get clues as we watch all of this play out in the textures of the moment.
Will you stay and steady me
while I go to a place where I discover
tiny games in the grass
screeches of wonder where I gasp in
the movements before my eyes
which lilt down through me
slingshot around my diaphragm
through my vocal chords
slicing the clean air
where they rattle the skulls of big people
who wince and look sideways at each other
and inhale through their teeth
and wish I would disappear?
I want to look for something there
Can you stand by as I’m slumped over
by my crystal elation hurled back
into my abdomen, its cleaved edges
now a tempest of razors
Can you watch as I learn again
that my highest atmospheres
cast me out of love?
