The Concept of the Person: A Brief Psychoanalytic Critique

by metaphysicalvillain

Lately, the concept of “personhood” has seen a revival. In analytic philosophy in particular, “person” seems to have eclipsed its closest conceptual rivals, “human” and “subject.” And if the recent acclaimed work of Robert Chodat and Oren Izenberg (to take just a couple of examples) is any indication, the term has already begun to establish a central position in literary studies.

How could a commonplace, legalistic concept like personhood come to seem so sexy? Having done no exhaustive research on the topic, I can only speculate here. Many of today’s philosophers, especially those working in the subfield of “ethics,” seem anxious to protect their discipline from the encroachments of discoveries in the natural sciences. Hence, the term “person” functions to dissociate an image of man from a biological picture that would reduce “human” to homo sapien. “Person” seems like a safe enough object of inquiry.

The usual post-Wittgensteinian procedure is as follows: begin with sturdy common sense (after all, what could be more self-evident than the fact that persons exist?), and attempt to formulate a non-self-evident argument about the “person” that nonetheless corresponds to our initial intuition. Such a procedure serves to justify the ongoing intellectual commitment to the “person,” as distinct from the biological human. (This is not to say that humanist advocates of the “person”—call them “personalists”—shy away from using the term “human.” Of course they don’t, they’re humanists. My only point is that the term “person” is needed as an essential supplement, in order to specify what their conceptual picture of the human involves.)

The concept of the person is also, I think, conspicuously separated from that of the “subject.” The reasons underpinning this conceptual differentiation are perhaps more complex. I suspect many philosophical thinkers avoid the term “subject” because it has, since Descartes, accrued so much conceptual baggage that it seems no longer recoverable. “Subject” has come to connote dominance, or epistemological and ethical arrogance. Post-structuralist pronouncements of the “death of the subject,” while appealing to many antihumanists, did little to satisfy philosophers who were attached to an image of man that they were unwilling to dispense with. Perhaps even if various conceptualizations of the “subject” were misguided, this line of thought goes, human specificity still exists and must be accounted for. Hence, the “person.”

Now, of course, philosophical projects centered on the term “person” are incredibly various, and I cannot begin to discuss them all here. But I think they make a common assumption: that the “rational” and “irrational” can ultimately be separated. Many of these thinkers subscribe to what we might call an ownership conception of man. What does the person own? His reasons, and thus his rationality. Philosophers of the person, from Bernard Williams to Harry Frankfurt to Christine Korsgaard, insist that our reasons for action are our reasons. Or rather, they insist that one can in principle separate reasons that are ours (good, rational) from reasons that are alien (bad, irrational). Even philosophers who think reasons for action are ultimately impersonal (Derek Parfit comes to mind), nonetheless believe that a properly rational person can acquire the right reasons through philosophical inquiry. That is, rational deliberation can allow me to select the good reasons. While these thinkers concede that persons can fall into irrationality, that is, act on reasons that are either alien to them or intellectually indefensible, they still posit rationality, in some form, as the standard of personhood.

Along with this picture of personhood comes a picture of unity. A person is by definition unified in some way. Whether conceived as a soul, or a form of integration, the person’s component parts are well regulated, allowing the person (at least ideally) to function smoothly. (The sub-field of “ethics” today can ultimately be boiled down to various ideologies of smooth functioning.) No doubt, adherents to this picture believe that persons encounter many snags, owing to human frailty or the contingencies of life. Most would even say that the snags aid the person in his development qua person.

But lurking in the background of this picture is always the ideal person, the one who thinks the right thoughts and acts for the right reasons. This person doesn’t exist empirically, but functions as an upper limit, a seamless model of rationality toward which humans might strive. (Usually this person has the greatest chance of maximizing his happiness. Philosophers of the person also seem unusually concerned with happiness. A non-accidental bourgeois correlation that deserves a separate post.)

The work of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (a one-time Daily Show guest and author of the famous popular essay “On Bullshit”) is especially noteworthy here, if only because he, unlike many of his peers, seems to appreciate the severe constraints placed upon human thought and action. Frankfurt’s image of the person seems unusually close to the psychoanalytic conception of the subject. Frankfurt and psychoanalysis both recognize that certain demands address us as imperatives; our choices are subject to implicit injunctions which are not themselves open to choice.

Thus, Frankfurt’s thought is primarily concerned with the concepts of “care” and “love” (the latter being a special case of the former). When we care about things passionately, we cannot help but care about them; certain necessities precede and limit our possibilities. Unlike ordinary beliefs, care often strikes us as utterly unconditional: “What people cannot help caring about […] is not mandated by logic. It is a volitional necessity, which consists essentially in a limitation of the will” (46). Not every option is open to us. Likewise in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic correlate to Frankfurt’s “limitation” is the super-ego, that ever-present agent that demands the submission of our will.

But importantly, the proximity of Frankfurt’s person to the psychoanalytic subject serves to highlight the radical difference between the two concepts. For Frankfurt, the limitation is one that we can ultimately fully incorporate into our will. So while rationality is groundless—Frankfurt would agree with Wittgenstein that reasons always hit rock bottom somewhere—it nonetheless maintains a clear distance from irrationality. Frankfurt writes:

“Now the necessity that is characteristic of love does not constrain the movements of the will through an imperious surge of passion or compulsion by which the will is defeated and subdued. On the contrary, the constraint operates from within our own will itself. It is by our own will, and not by any external or alien force, that we are constrained.” (46)

So while acknowledging the limitations of reason—one might say its finitude—Frankfurt nonetheless imports an ancient dichotomy between reason and passion, and maps it onto a dichotomy between self-owned and “alien” force. And herein lies the chasm between Frankfurt and psychoanalysis—in psychoanalysis (particularly in its Lacanian instantiation), the force motivating the will always retains its status as alien. In fact, it is precisely because of its alien dimension that the demand can galvanize the will at all. One great insight of psychoanalysis is the following: so-called “alien force” need not take the form of a “surge of passion”; in fact, the alien force inheres in all our thoughts and actions, even at our most “reasonable.” While psychoanalysis denies man the privilege of rationality, it doesn’t dogmatically declare man to be an irrational animal. Rationality and irrationality are alike deemed conceptually barren.

Instead, thoughts and actions are conceived as responses to imperatives—imperatives which, while possessing an irreducibly alien dimension, ground our ability to self-relate in the first place. Whether neurotic or heroic, one is always responding to a demand; whether law-abiding or transgressive, one is always acting within the legislative domain that one cannot fully appropriate. For what would happen if one could fully own or incorporate the law? It would lose its structural position as law and thus lose its binding force. It is because the law is alien that we are so committed to it. As in the Möbius strip, a privileged Lacanian figure, the outside curls seamlessly inside, without thereby losing its status as an outside. It is this contradiction that any thinking of the subject confronts; it is this contradiction that any positing of the person denies.

If a reason is truly binding, it can never be entirely ours. If it is there before us, we can call it ours, but that’s merely the ego—our impression of ourselves as selves—doing the talking. If Freud is to be taken seriously—and clearly, that’s one guiding assumption of this post—we must insist that the ego’s opinions are superficial, and consequently, that the subject is never just a person. The subject, in fact, is neither personal nor impersonal, but resides at the edge between.

See:

Frankfurt, Harry. The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.