(Anti-)Hermeneutic Pleasure

"This method is constantly defined as analytical, associative-dissociative; "free association" (freie Assoziation) or "freely occurring ideas" (freie Einfalle) are only the means employed for the dissociation of all proposed meaning. An analytical method, then; one that is supposed to conform to the object it posits - the 'representation' termed 'unconscious'" (7)"psychoanalysis is not the system of stereotypical interpretations to which it is too often reduced by certain of its adepts, to the great advantage of its detractors, who have things made very easy for them" (8)YES! I'm tired of the easy stereotypes."Alongside the step-by-step method of individual free association, something called a 'symbolic method' was proposed: a sort of reading-off, or good translation. Symbolism versus association: my question is, do these amount to parallel, or even complementary methods, as Freud wished? Or are we dealing rather with two antagonistic vectors, precisely those of anti-hermeneutics and hermeneutics?" (8)"it is symbolism which silences association. And to go further: synthesis - encoded thought 0 is on the side of repression" (9)"To stress the ethnological contingency of the myth of Hans and Sigmund is not to play down its importance. It introduces what I have termed a phallic logic, a binary logic of 'plus' and 'minus'. The oft-praised assumption of castration is not some grandiose amor fati; it is directly linked to the expansion of binarism, the foundation of the modern occidental world. but despite the irresistible conquest of the world by binarism; it is worth recalling that this expansion remains contingent, in relation to so many civilizations whose founding myths are not binary but plural - accepting ambivalence instead of staking everything on difference" (9)"Heideggerianism, along with the entirety of hermeneutical thought, bears the seal of reflexive thinking - what I term Ptolemaic thinking, which is the mode of thought par excellence of the adult closed in upon himself. Originary translation is, then, performed by the child, the nursing baby. And let us add, for good measure: the baby that has no unconscious" (11)"However, beneath the flood of supposedly psychoanalytic, secondary theorizations, the method and the analytic situation remain there, rock-like, to remind us of the heterogeneity of the unconscious to all systems" (11)"The first level, which I will call for convenience Level 1, is that of the theories discovered in the human being by psychoanalysis. These are ideologies, myths, cultural formations which, as such, can be neither refuted nor endorsed by psychoanalysis. They are what critics of psychoanalysis most often choose to attack - and not without justification, because the majority of psychoanalysts have made them their own theories. It is rather like claiming to refute ethnology by demonstrating the phantasmagoric and contingent nature of some American Indian myth" (12)"psychoanalytic 'discoveries' concerning mythical theories tie in at numerous points with ethnological discoveries. As for the function of these theories, we place ourselves broadly in agreement with a Levi-Strauss, when he says that they 'diminish intellectual, and if need be, existential, anxiety'. We would only add that this existential anxiety is correlative to the attack by the message of the other: first, the human adult other (der Andere) and then the other thing inside (das Andere: the unconscious)... Level II... metapsychology. Like all theory, it can only be constructed in an attempt to account for an experience" (12)"However different, even heterogeneous, these two levels of theory are, there exists between them an existential practical link: the theory at Level II aims to account for an experience and a praxis, and, conversely, it offers to guide that praxis. Now, one of the goals of Theory II is to give an account of the function of Theory I (myths and ideologies) in the human being, and especially in the process of repression" (12)