philosophy and family therapy: intersubjectivity, ethics, biopolitics - ifta buenos aires -...

Global Sharing in Challenging Times

• XVIII World IFTA Congress

• Buenos Aires, Argentina • Friday, 19 March 2010• 8:30 – 10:00 am

Philosophy and Family Therapy:

Intersubjectivity Ethics

Biopolitics

Geopoliticus child watching the birth of the new man

- Dali

Philosophy & Family Therapy

Vincenzo Di Nicola

• Psychologist, Child Psychiatrist, Relational therapist

Université de Montréal

• Doctoral candidate European Graduate School

Key words

• Philosophy and family therapy

• Phenomenology and existential psychiatry

• Ethics and biopolitics

Pedagogical objectives

1. To identify the history of the relationship between family therapy and philosophy.


2. To offer an overview of areas of mutual interest to both family therapy and

philosophy, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and definitions of the person, identity and what we consider as essentially human qualities.


3. To review three areas in more detail: (a) intersubjectivity (b) ethics and (c) biopolitics.

Areas of mutual interest

• Philosophy of mind• Philosophy of science • Philosophy of technology• Phenomenology (as a science of the person

and hence a foundation study for psychiatry)• Philosophy as a tool for social exploration

(identity, the definition of the person)• Ethics and biopolitics

Uses of philosophy by family therapy

• Inspiration

• Validation

• Justification

Other uses of philosophy

• Edification

• Consolation

Other uses of philosophy

• Clinical philosophy … Consolation as intervention

• Applied philosophy … Bio-ethics Research ethics Professional ethics

What is philosophy?

• Everything is like something, what is this like?

--Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (1982) quoting English novelist E.M. Forster

What is philosophy?

• The purpose of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

(1889-1951)

What is philosophy?

• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

--G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820)

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)

(1770-1831)

What is philosophy?

• One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it...

• When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old.

• By philosophy’s gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.

• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

—G.W.F. Hegel, “Preface,” Philosophy of Right (1820)

What is philosophy?

• Understanding, clarification, edification, reflection, groundwork, foundations …

• Critical theory, deconstruction

What is philosophy?

Two kinds of philosophers …

• Those who build up theories and explanations, carefully, brick by brick --Aristotle, Aquinas, William James, Freud

• Those who tear them down, critically … brick by brick or with a wrecker’s ball--Luther, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault

What is family therapy?

• This can be imagined as a philosophical question

• People often invoke philosophical considerations in their definition of family theray …

What is psychiatry?

• Karl Jaspers … phenomenological psychiatry

• R.D. Laing … existential psychiatry

• Salvador Minuchin … structural family therapy

• Mara Selvini Palazzoli … systemic family therapy

• Samuel Guze … Why Psychiatry is a Branch of Medicine

• Robert Spitzer … architect of DSM … descriptive nosography, atheoretical

What are they?

• Sigmund Freud

• Karl Jaspers

• Jean Piaget

• Michel Foucault

What are they?

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• Neurologist & neuropathologist

• Founder of psychoanalysis

• Philosopher

What are they?

• Karl Jaspers (1883-1959)

• PhenomenologicalPsychiatrist

• Professor of Philosophy

What are they?

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

• Natural scientist• Genetic epistemology• Philosophy: Jürgen Habermas

What are they?

• Michel Foucault(1926-1984)

• Psychologist• Philosopher:

Structuralism & post-structuralism

• Historian • Critic

Philosophical deconstruction

• What do family therapists still refer to psychodynamics ?


Alternatives for describing families and family phenomena …

• Relationships, attachment• Interpersonal patterns• Myths, rules, rituals• Family as a structure, system• Family life as a text (to be edited)• The family as a storying culture


Why do so many terms for negative psychosocial factors come from hydraulics and materials sciences ?

• Stress• (Mental) fatigue• Tension• Resistance


And of course, so do the positive factors …

• Resilience• Bouyancy• Rebound


What do we mean by development ?

• Growth (Classical models, Dante)• Evolution

--Convergence, teleology (Teilhard de Chardin)

• Ages & stages (Paediatrics)• IQ as a model (Binet, Dalton)• Unfolding

--Genetic epistemology (Piaget, Kohlberg)


Explanatory models are usually based on metaphors

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Cancer Ward (1968)

• Susan Sontag (1933-2004) Illness as Metaphor (1978) Aids and Its Metaphors (1988)

Phenomenology and existential psychiatry


• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)

• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)


• PhenomenologicalPsychiatrist

• General Psychopathology



• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)

• Existential analysis• The Case of Ellen West• with many rereadings

(R.D. Laing, Sal Minuchin)


• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)

• Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

• Existential philosophy and psychiatry

• Pioneer in family studies• Critical psychiatry

Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1927, Paris)

• French philosopher • Wrote on Lacanian psychoanalysis• The Inoperative Community (1982)• Being Singular Plural (2000)

Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community (1982)

• Traces the influence of the notion of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual

Intersubjectivity


• Redefines community, asking what can it be if it is reduced neither to a collection of separate individuals, nor to a hypostasized communal substance, e.g., fascism.

• Hypostatic abstraction: X = Y, X has Y-ness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypostasis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

Intersubjectivity


• "The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader) ... necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being."

Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy Being Singular Plural (2000)

• How we can speak of a plurality of a "we" without making the "we" a singular identity?

• There is no being without "being-with" • "I" does not come before "we" (i.e., Dasein

does not precede Mitsein)• There is no existence without co-existence

Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy Being Singular Plural (2000)

• “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.”

Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)

• Lithuanian Jew, French philosopher and Talmudic scholar

Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas

• Ethics as first philosophy

• Philosophy as the wisdom of love (as opposed to love of wisdom)

• The face-to-face

Ethics


• Buber vs Levinas on the face-to-face

• Buber: symmetrical co-presence• Levinas: relation with the other is inherently

asymmetrical

Ethics


• Ethics is not morality• Ethics marks the primary situation of the face-

to-face• Morality comes later as a set of rules

Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942, Rome)

Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942) Italian philosopher

• Key notions:

• Homo sacer/Sacred Man (1998)• Stato di eccezione/State of Exception

(2005)

Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben The Coming Community (1993)

• describes the nature of “whatever singularity”

• that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”

Biopolitics

• Key notions: • Biopolitics • Adopted from Foucault (a technology of

power, biopower)

• Biós (a form of life, culture) vs Zōē (mere life, nature)• Biopolitics is the reduction of others to

bare life

Biopolitics

• The ban is the original political relation (the state of exception, zone of indistinction)

• Sovereign power produces bare life (as threshold between zōē and biós)

• The camp is the new biopolitical paradigm of the West

Conclusion

• The history of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis are intimately intertwined with philosophical questions

• Family therapy as a system of thought shares that heritage

Conclusion

• Understanding this history will help us avoid reductive modes of thought

• Contemporary psychology & psychiatry accept the notion of paradigms as evolution and progress

Conclusion

• A full account of mind cannot be provided by an understanding of brain

• No matter how sophisticated the argument for biological psychiatry becomes (cf. Eric Kandel), it will not speak to mind, fully understood.

Conclusion

• Leon Eisenberg put the question as brainlessness vs mindlessness

• or psychoanalysis without brain vs biological psychiatry without mind

Conclusion

• I expand the question to include:

• Mind (the science of mental life)• Body (biological psychiatry,

neurosciences)• Heart (phenomenology, empathy)• Soul (meaning, transcendence)

Conclusion

• The questions for family therapy:

• A model of mind as relational• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity• Appropriating the common

Conclusion

• The questions for family therapy:

• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity

Conclusion

• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity

Our culture is at war with subjectivity

Technopoly is the surrender of culture to technology (Neil Postman)

Conclusion

• Relational ethics

Ethics as therapy (guiding how it is conducted, what its goals are, how it is appreciated)

Conclusion

• We have not exhausted what phenomenology can teach us by elucidating human experience and expanding our empathy

philosophy and family therapy: intersubjectivity, ethics, biopolitics - ifta buenos aires -...

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