In their work Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim rarely encounter each other as philosophers, but they are, I argue, in a silent interlocution that can be articulated through Stanley Cavell’s reflections on philosophy and psychoanalysis (Cavell Reference Cavell1987). Cavell urged the renewal of philosophy as a humanistic discipline through a rapprochement of philosophy and psychoanalysis. In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ Williams articulated his long-held view of philosophy as a discipline of reflective enquiry aimed at self-knowledge. This paper explores how Richard Wollheim’s philosophical deployment of psychoanalytic theses owed to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein can supply a real, bodily, basis for the form of critical self-knowledge on which Williams insisted.

1. The examined life

This paper brings together three philosophers who knew each other well. They had in common a preoccupation with how to understand philosophy; how it should see itself and what it is about. Stanley Cavell shared with Wollheim a commitment to a philosophical understanding of Freud, and with Williams a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline both critical and self-critical, while for all three philosophers the critical self-examination of thought makes possible a reflective understanding of human life.

Williams and Wollheim both ‘bookend’ a major monograph with the question of what it is to live a human life. For both, the answer to the Socratic question is that the examined life is a life that is understood as it is lived. Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy begins and ends with Socrates’ question about how one should one live, to which Socrates’ answer is, that the life worth living will take the form of an examined one (Williams Reference Williams1985). Wollheim begins The Thread of Life with Kierkegaard’s remark that in living our life forwards we at the same time understand it backwards, and ends with the conclusion that to live life forwards is also to understand it as we live it (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1984). What then is needed is a proper understanding of human life as the life of a natural creature in a natural world, possessing language and capable of creating and living in relation with others under culture. Humanistic enquiry as an activity draws on natural science, the humanistic and social scientific disciplines, and the arts. Both philosophers understood philosophy as being part of that enterprise and so, as needing to accommodate the insights of other disciplines. The discipline, and the activity, that will be considered in this paper is psychoanalysis.Footnote ¹ But if philosophy is the critical self-examination of thought that makes possible a reflective understanding of human life, the tradition of analytic philosophy sets it at odds with the theory and the practice of reflective understanding with which psychoanalysis accesses the working of unconscious mind. Analytic philosophy, in insisting on the primacy of a rational and transparent cognitivism, risks reducing unconscious mind to a cognitive failure that is either procedural or neurophysiological.

Williams detected a pernicious form of philosophical scepticism at work when scientific claims to an absolute knowledge of the human were aided and abetted by analytic philosophy’s scientistic aspirations. Scientistic philosophical claims about an evolutionary or a neuroscientific basis for mind and its place in culture open a nihilistic perspective on human mental life when humans become eliminatively, mere clever animals or, alternatively, ‘epistemic engines’. Scientism was, for Williams, nihilistic about the mental and dismissive of the distinctively human condition that was philosophy’s defining concern. It was, we may think, with this also in mind that Williams wrote in Truth and Truthfulness of the dismissal of truth in postmodern thought, that in losing to a nihilistic scepticism the human value of truth ‘we certainly lose something, and may well lose everything’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 7).

In calling for the re-orientation of philosophy to its historic self-conception as humanistic inquiry, and in foreseeing the threat, both to philosophy’s survival as a critical mode of self-knowledge and for what is lost to humanity if philosophy’s concern for the truth were lost, Williams is at one with Cavell when he writes that ‘it is in philosophy that the question of the loss of itself is internal to its faithfulness to itself’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1987: 389). If philosophy is to be faithful both to its critical calling and to the humanistic value of self-understanding, it will need to take itself and in particular its own claims about self-knowledge as its own object. But to put in question its own knowledge of itself, as well as of the self-knowledge it purports to explain, is to be self-sceptical. Such inbuilt self-directed scepticism risks philosophy’s survival as a humanistic discipline; there is a question whether philosophy on its own can meet the critique of itself that, to be faithful to itself as a critical, hence self-sceptical, mode of enquiry it must allow.

For Cavell psychoanalysis too is a reflexively critical discipline; like philosophy it must be critically sceptical about the self-knowledge it yields and of how it yields it. Cavell therefore re-poses the question, asking ‘what would be lost if [either] philosophy, or psychoanalysis, were lost to us?’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1987: 390). Taking ‘or’ as inclusive, one thing lost would be the possibility of a jointly illuminating conjunction, criticism with a new identity forged, in adaptive philosophical engagement, with the different modes of thinking and unfamiliar concepts of psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Wollheim’s integration of philosophy with psychoanalysis offers just such an engagement. In his 1969 Ernest Jones Lecture he presented the British Psychoanalytical Society with the famously gnomic conclusion that:

This placing of the body at the centre of conceptions of the mind, to be clarified in what follows, condenses themes from both philosophy and psychoanalysis into a more complete account of human life than either can separately provide. Wollheim’s path to his conclusion shows in what way psychoanalysis can extend philosophy and return it to its foundational topic of living a human life, a life lived along a psychical and bodily trajectory from birth to death. This then is Wollheim’s contribution to the defence of philosophy as a humanistic discipline; it aligns itself with Williams’s own concerns and so, opposes the nihilistic scepticism that Williams deplored. But the argumentative force of this opposition lies not in the conclusion itself, but in the route taken via psychoanalysis, hence very different from Williams’s own. To elucidate Wollheim’s argument and trace out the connection between psychoanalysis and philosophy that would answer to Williams’s concerns, I extract from Cavell’s writing on psychoanalysis a ‘challenge’, issued to both disciplines, to account for the intuitions that found a humanistic self-conception in which the mind has a life of its own. Behind the challenge, the question ‘what would be lost if [either] philosophy, or psychoanalysis, were lost to us?’ has methodological application in establishing a new identity for criticism as a joint enterprise of philosophy and psychoanalysis. But it will also be important for the success of reconciling philosophy and psychoanalysis, to see how far Wollheim’s thinking can supply a substantive answer to Cavell’s question.

2. Cavell’s challenge

Cavell calls on psychoanalysis to fortify philosophy’s faltering conception of the mind against radical scepticism about human knowledge. His challenge acts equally to marshal psychoanalysis against the nihilistic scepticism that presents itself under the guise of scientism. In the history of Western thought’s turn to self-knowledge, Cavell argued, psychoanalysis would provide philosophy with the route, perhaps the only one, to knowledge of the self that allows scepticism but resists a nihilistic termination.Footnote ³

Cavell writes that:

Cavell continues, ‘for the mind to lose the psychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious would be for it to lose the last proof of its own existence’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1987: 391).Footnote ⁴ Expanding this claim revolves around just what the suggestive expression ‘psychoanalytic intuition’ might mean. I shall start from a philosophical understanding of ‘intuition’ in broadly Kantian terms, as knowledge of something apprehended by the senses that is valid for others too; it is ‘objectively valid’ but is known without conceptual mediation. A psychoanalytic intuition is then an intuition having application to phenomena identified in psychoanalytic theory, hence to thought, experience and knowledge that are unconscious. Thus, if intuition is to be the grounding source of psychoanalytic knowledge it will need to be shown to be proof against scepticism about its object’s knowable basis as apprehended by the senses but yet, unconscious. But Cavell writes, it is the psychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious whose loss would be loss of the last proof of its own existence (Cavell Reference Cavell1987: 390, my italics). It is for a resolution of this conundrum, that such an intuition is possible, and is proof against scepticism, that I shall turn to Wollheim’s working out of the ‘proof’ that psychoanalysis supplies to the mind’s knowledge of itself. Paradoxically, this proof by psychoanalytic intuition will come from what it is an intuition of, the body.

Wollheim closely ties his claim that a human life is to be understood as it is lived forward, to the idea that mind is an ongoing onward process of self-making. His claim that we are at home in our mind ‘somewhat’ as in a body, though enigmatically put, condenses his argument for mind’s unconscious knowledge of this process as bodily.Footnote ⁵ Psychoanalysis shows the conception of unconscious mind to be the mind’s image or representation of itself as bodily, while philosophy will, at the end of the argument, show this intuition to be an unmediated self-knowledge whose distinctive phenomenology in the mind emanates from its unconscious bodily self-misrepresentation.

3. Philosophy and psychoanalysis

Cavell’s challenge to philosophy and to philosophers is, then, to retrieve philosophy for its original humanistic mission of articulating what it is to live a human life and to do so by turning to psychoanalysis for the deeper account that it offers of both human mind and culture. It falls to philosophy and psychoanalysis together to keep open the path to this knowledge. Scepticism, necessary to both, is served through philosophical critique of conceptual appropriation and psychoanalytic suspicion of motivated misrepresentation respectively. At the same time, philosophy is called to an engagement with the concepts of psychoanalysis. To grasp concepts and explanatory moves that are very different to those it customarily deals in, analytic philosophy must itself understand their grounding in theories and practices that, while not readily available to it, can be made comprehensible in the terms of ordinary psychology initially, and with the aid of philosophical reconstruction subsequently.

Wollheim’s retrieval of a philosophically reconstructed psychoanalysis for philosophy exemplifies this strategy. In it Wollheim aims to extract from Freud’s thought a defensible analytical-philosophical basis for the key theses of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis can be shown to be an extension of ordinary psychology by linking psychoanalytic concepts to psychological observations up to the point where new, and psychoanalytic, concepts are called on to render irrational and puzzling behaviour intelligible.Footnote ⁶ But Wollheim goes beyond this in what we might call his ‘extension of ordinary philosophy’, in which he takes up a position in analytic philosophy and extends it by argument to embrace the psychoanalytic thesis of unconscious mental life that involves the constitutive relation to the body.Footnote ⁷

In showing how one of psychoanalysis’ foundational theses is, under philosophical reconstruction, apt for extending the philosophy of mind Wollheim is, as he elsewhere described his approach to art, ‘recruiting … the hypotheses of psychoanalysis’. We thence acquire a deeper psychology, or what Wollheim (Reference Wollheim1993: 79) calls an ‘anthropology… an account of human nature that is explanatorily rich’. In this way, his method yields a philosophy of mind that answers to the conception of a human life with which we started: the life worth living, understood as it is lived forwards, by an embodied being that is both natural and social. Thus equipped, philosophy can be called on to account more fully for the human in the mode of a humanistic discipline, and in a way more humanly relevant than that of the nihilist, whether post-modern or scientistic.

The terminus ad quem of Wollheim’s strategy is not however a refutation of a nihilistic scepticism itself, whether or not scientistic. Wollheim is, from his theoretical knowledge and own experience of psychoanalytic therapy, antecedently convinced of the validity of the concept of unconscious mental life; unlike Cavell, he is unconcerned to fortify it against scepticism, therefore. His goal is the extension of philosophy by the enrichment offered from psychoanalysis; it includes a commitment on his part to the materialism he understood Freud to embrace as part of his scientific conception of the mind.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless, his method serves well Cavell’s proposal for a unification of the two disciplines in respect of their critical calling, always in the face of their mutual sceptical attitude to each other.

I shall argue that Wollheim’s provision of philosophical credentials for the basis of psychoanalytic theory in the Kleinian conception of unconscious mind, suitably explicated, offers to supply the unifying theme, the ‘last proof’, that Cavell’s challenge demands. Two Kleinian theses in particular are relevant; the next sections pursue the first of these, the formation of unconscious phantasy which, despite being a form of imagining, comes to be efficacious in the world. The second, to which I return at the end, is the significant theoretical contribution to the genesis of mind made by Melanie Klein’s theory of the mother-infant relation.

Establishing this conception of unconscious mind as part of a properly extended philosophy of mind is a principal goal of Wollheim’s philosophy of mind. It is in the work done by Wollheim towards proving psychoanalysis’ claim to explain unconscious mind, that we will find the material to explain what must be meant by, and so what we must look for in the final stage of this whole argument: the mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious such that it can supply the last proof of its own existence. This, summarised as the intuition of an unarticulated, bodily subjectivity, is contained in what Wollheim calls Freud’s thesis of the bodily ego (Wollheim Reference Wollheim, Wollheim and Hopkins1982).

4. The bodily ego

Two Freudian passages provide the basis on which Wollheim develops the thesis of the bodily ego. In ‘The Ego and the Id’, Freud writes of the subject’s conscious ego that it is ‘first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Freud Reference Freud1923: 26–27). It is this bodily subjectivity that Freud attempts to delineate in ‘Negation’, writing of ‘the language of the oldest – the oral – instinctual impulses’ as conveying in oral terms the judgement, ‘“It shall be inside me” or “it shall be outside me”’ (Freud Reference Freud1925: 237). The thesis that Wollheim attributes to Freud from these remarks is equally a development in his own thinking on bodily subjectivity. More than one line of thinking led Wollheim to anticipate, by some span of time, the philosophical interest now directed at embodiment.Footnote ⁹ He drew from the art critic Adrian Stokes, with whom he had a close intellectual relationship that spanned their shared interest and experience of psychoanalysis and art, the idea of corporeality in art, and of the body as part of art’s material medium. He drew on Merleau-Ponty’s writing on the phenomenology of perception and on art. Philosophical materialism, and the bodily continuity it brought with it, was a matter of central theoretical concern for Wollheim, since it provided for the ‘housing’ of memory and of dispositions. Dispositions, the concept being taken directly from Gilbert Ryle, are functional repositories of experience and cognition, supplying consciousness with occurrent mental states; like memories they ensure continuity of function over time in organising a mental life of recurrent thoughts and feelings. Dissenting from Rylean behaviourism, Wollheim held that dispositions must be materially present as the basis for regulation of the cognitive load on the mind which, he said, had real limits. Materialism is also central to Wollheim’s philosophy of mind, which concurs with Freud’s conception of mind as a store or a repository, of dispositions to affective feeling and memories of bodily experiences. These jointly supply an affective dimension and a surplus of meaning which, unavailable to linguistic articulation as ‘word-presentations’, remain un-articulated as ‘thing-presentations’ in the mind.Footnote ¹⁰

The philosophical reconstruction through which Wollheim brings Freud’s writing about a bodily ego into philosophy presents the idea of a necessary bodily subjectivity. It is from this basis that we may derive ‘the mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious’. Freud characterises the bodily ego as the ‘mental projection’ of the bodily origin of perceptions which include subjective ‘sensations of processes arising … in the deepest strata of the mental apparatus’ lying in the ‘pleasure-unpleasure series’ (Freud Reference Freud1923: 21–22).Footnote ¹¹ In Wollheim’s exposition the bodily ego thesis is based on a subclass of mental states that are reflexive in representing themselves ‘to themselves’ and that under a ‘primitive form of mental functioning’ (which Wollheim will term ‘archaic’) represent themselves as bodily states; hence they misrepresent themselves as being states of the body while nevertheless being states of the mind. The claim about self-misrepresentation is based on the passage noted earlier where Freud can be seen as enunciating a consciousness of objects as either inside me or outside me. Wollheim interprets Freud as suggesting that such thoughts, cast in ‘the language of the oldest, that is the oral instinctual impulses’ as ‘“I should like to eat this”, or “I should like to spit it out”’ (my italics), are about something that in being taken in or expelled is a piece of something suited to ingestion or expulsion. Here the bodily ego or ‘I’ is presiding over a scenario in which what is presented to it in thought as ‘representation’ can be dealt with as a physical, bodily thing; it can be taken into the body or evacuated out of it.

However, such a thought’s content is a mis-representation; its content misleads the subject not just as to what it is a thought of but what it is. Pieces of the mind are misrepresented to the subject as pieces or products of the subject’s body, and accordingly, the subject’s thought processes are felt to be bodily experiences or actions, and thoughts are experienced as objects introduced from without or as produced from within. This theoretical claim is hard to put clearly since the metalanguage in which it is (necessarily) couched is also (necessarily) inappropriate to the phenomenological presentation ascribed to such a thought; as Bishop Berkeley remarked, ‘an idea can resemble nothing but another idea’ (Berkeley Reference Berkeley and Robinson1996: 27), and an idea, as a piece of the mind, is not like a piece of food or shit, nor to be mistaken for such a thing. How then can we understand this claim?

Wollheim has a two-step tactic for evading a Berkeleyan objection: first, he appeals to the ‘evidential order’ (Wollheim Reference Wollheim, Wollheim and Hopkins1982: 127–129), by which he means clinical observation, in the form of patients’ reports of their state of mind, as supplying evidence for this sort of concrete experience. Second, he advances the claim that these states’ self-misrepresentation as bodily is tied in with their function in the mind when, and where, their phenomenology renders them causally efficacious.Footnote ¹² The phenomenology of a thought representing a bodily thing can, under the conditions of a ‘primitive form of mental functioning’, supply the mind with a misleading representation that masquerades as an experience; this is a ‘collusion’ between phenomenology and representation that contributes to the mind’s hedonic self-regulation.Footnote ¹³

5. Psychoanalytic phantasy

The psychoanalytic term ‘phantasy’ translates the German (Phantasie) but denotes a form of imagining that differs radically from the cognitive imagining of rational thought and action in which activities of conscious mind are carried out under a regime of rules that can be thought of as constitutive.Footnote ¹⁴ Contrary to the ordinary psychological conception of the imagination, phantasy is not accessible to consciousness and so, not constrained by the regulative principle that allows conscious imagining to suspend considerations of reality and extend into wish-fulfilling daydreaming, for example. While, like conscious daydreaming, phantasy’s content comes from experience there is no rational limit set to how it represents what is imagined; accordingly the activity of unconscious mind is imagining which is not regulated as a cognitive activity that is aimed at rational action but has escaped this to lie under a radically different regime in which the mind conceives itself as omnipotent. Operating under this conception, mental activity leads to irrational behaviour enacting unconscious, wishful phantasy that misrepresents itself as a desire.

In Wollheim’s claim that under the sway of the bodily ego, thoughts misrepresent themselves as bodily, we see that such a thought, one that misrepresents itself as bodily is, necessarily, a phantasy. Phantasy derives from bodily experiences registered and laid down in dispositional memory in which, inevitably, there accumulates a preponderance of pre-linguistic infantile experience. Phantasy then will tend to present as bodily when imaginative activity draws upon memories of bodily experiences of ingestion and expulsion through the orifices.Footnote ¹⁵ Experience that is bodily, or corporeal, thus supplies the representational content of oral phantasies of projection and introjection which make up the psychic machinery through which an internal world of phantasies is brought into being. Projections are phantasies pictured as expulsions of mental content. These distort the projecting subject’s perception of the real world so that persons in it are misperceived as figures that by threat or by lure draw the subject into an introjective phantasy of taking them into the body, notably through the mouth. Oral incorporation pictures thought as an oral experience associated with satisfaction; for instance the satisfaction of controlling an unruly piece of the world by biting or swallowing it.Footnote ¹⁶ This ‘incorporative’ phantasy is a mental event which, if repeated, will lead to a disposition to reproduce that phantasy; that is, the phantasy in which the subject relates to that piece of the world as an object to be controlled by consuming it. But as we have seen, that object arrives freighted with the subject’s own projections and these are now re-incorporated into the subject’s internal world as the figures there. The phantasy world becomes peopled with figures which as parts of the subject derive their agency from the subject, but act on their own account.Footnote ¹⁷ The internal world thus set up contains figures that, as autonomous internalised parts of the self, divert agency from a subject who is at the same time compelled to live in the world of real people. Iterations of introjection and projection follow, to which occurrent phantasy continually adjusts and in which dispositional phantasy is modified, the picture of the internal world becoming by turns less, or more, like the external world.

Introjection and projection are psychoanalytic concepts denoting the processes which initially produce phantasy, but we encounter phantasy itself only indirectly. Introjection and projection together create an internal world that derives from the real one, by the distorting effects of bodily self-misrepresentation. That internal world of phantasy then inflects or colours representation of the real world with that distortion. The theory of an internal world of phantasy shows how even apparently rational beliefs, desires, and actions, and certainly many evidently irrational ones, can have powerful effects while remaining intractable to reason. Originating in phantasy, the internal world is peopled with figures whose attributes and relations to the subject are felt as real. Fundamentally unlike the inner representations of conscious imagination, unconscious phantasies are neither regulated within cognition nor, consequently, are they corrigible by experience. Their maintenance by cycles of projection and introjection give them an autonomous existence within the mind, forming an internal world where what is thought already presents as what is real to the subject. It is only in mental development, with sufficient experience of real relatedness to another, that there can be a move towards the ‘depressive position’ in which that the inner world itself becomes more realistic (see Section 10).

6. ‘Self-misrepresentation’

The concept of self-misrepresentation supplies a philosophical explanation of an internal world in terms of function. Psychoanalysis posits a phantasied world built up by mechanisms of introjection and projection which are themselves phantasies of relocation of mental content. To be disposed of in this way, mental representations must be treated as object-like. Thoughts that come to misrepresent themselves as being of a bodily nature form an internal world within which phantasy can modulate hedonic valence in the mind. This is an elaboration of the thesis of the bodily ego’s account of the misrepresentation of thoughts as things. But the question left unanswered there was, how functional self-misrepresentation of a mental state as bodily can come about at all. Ordinary psychology accepts the idea of a mental state’s self-misrepresentation, but we have criteria, answerable to cognition, for when a conscious state of mind misrepresents itself through its phenomenology as of another mental state type. When wish masquerades as the false memory of an occurrence, or desire produces belief in its fulfilment, there is a temporary replacement of one regulative concept by another even if, as often, it is unacknowledged.

But the self-misrepresentation of a mental state as a bodily state does not fully fit this schema. Rather, it has the character of a hallucination arising in response to a need, because bodily self-misrepresentation is functionally efficacious in the way that neurotic symptoms have (partial) efficacy in deflecting anxiety. Conceiving a thought as a bodily thing allows the mind to dispose of unwanted parts of itself by projection, or incorporate wanted parts of the world into itself by introjection. Such self-misrepresentation as bodily will, functionally, enable the mind to quiet itself, or to gratify its urges by calling up bodily memories of previous satisfaction by the external world and inserting them into the mental process as experiences of bodily events. This was what Freud theorised as the hallucinatory fulfilment of wishes that occurs in dreams and in daydreams, but that unchecked by reality would not allow the organism to exist ‘for the shortest time’ (Freud Reference Freud1911: 220n).

But there is a second way in which bodily self-misrepresentation does not fit the schema under which a mental state masquerades as one of another type by suspension or attenuation of its defining regulatory concept in favour of another type’s concept. In ordinary conscious life there is no equivalent to the replacement of a regulatory concept of a mental activity such as imagining someone in one’s inner world, by that of a categorially different, because physical, activity such as swallowing them. It is here that the resources of ordinary philosophy come under pressure, to say just what is involved in a mental state’s representing itself as a categorially different entity, and how this misleading representation can be functionally efficacious in the way Wollheim claims. This is a problem that requires philosophy to reconsider the way that representation serves thought. ‘Ordinary’ philosophy traditionally sees thought, on Kantian lines, as the medium of cognitively accessible representation, dependent on the mind’s self-conception as cognitive and rational. But Wollheim is here urging ordinary philosophy to allow that the mind can function, and thought can occur, under a different conception of itself. This then leads to the idea that thought can take place in the medium of a different sort of representation.

Under this new conception representation takes the form of phantasy, whose bodily content and self-presentation express or emanate from the conception the mind has of itself as a body. Mind operating in this mode conceives and so, experiences itself as a spatial medium that receives and ejects thoughts which it encounters as objects that have physical, usually bodily, characteristics. Such thinking, itself ‘in the grip’ of this image, is a mode of thinking that philosophical language has not (yet) been extended to describe.Footnote ¹⁸ Phantasying, as a form of mental activity where the mind, conceiving itself as bodily, creates an internal world in which actions are conceived as brought about by thinking. What now concerns us, and philosophy, is the relation between these two conceptions of the mind. For this we turn to Wolheim’s philosophical reconstruction of the interplay between Freud’s two principles of mental functioning (Freud Reference Freud1911).

7. Archaic mind: spatiality and its shadow

Wollheim calls the mind’s bodily self-conception its ‘archaic theory’ of itself. The expression conveys the idea of origin as first principle; the Greek arche means beginning, first cause, or origin.Footnote ¹⁹ ‘Archaic’ also keeps Wollheim’s materialism in play; the body is mind’s originating source, but it appears only as its own ‘shadow’ in conscious mind. In ‘The Mind and the Mind’s Image of Itself’ Wollheim writes of ‘a correspondence between the two sets of phenomena … the unconscious set and the conscious set’: the phenomena as described by psychoanalysis, and the phenomena of conscious everyday life (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1969: 216). He continues, ‘the correspondence occurs … just in respect of those features of unconscious phenomena which I picked upon for saying that the conception of mind they presuppose is a truly spatial one. In the corresponding conscious phenomena we may observe, in each case, a shadow of that feature. What I mean by “shadow” is that with the conscious phenomena the possibilities now open to us for making assertions or for asking questions, couched in spatial terms, are severely diminished’ (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1969: 216–7).Footnote ²⁰

While spatiality is linguistically intimated by expressions like ‘before the mind, or ‘in the mind’, it is best identified when in our ordinary conception of the mind we discern its trace phenomenologically, as tinge-ing or inflecting ordinary thought. Wollheim sees a phenomenological contrast between a thought occurring to us and one produced by our own thinking; in the first case the thought enters the mind from outside, in the second the thought arises from mental activity, hence in the mind. Spatiality is also phenomenologically evident in the thought’s content, particularly in envisaging scenes with other people. Someone is imagined as saying or thinking something, a thought that can be re-located to different subject positions within an imagined space. It is a thought, produced by the imaginer, but attributed within the scope of their imagining, to some other person imagined there. Further, such spatial imagining of a scenario involving another person’s thoughts presupposes a spatial conception of the mind as a whole; the minds of the subject and the other are separable in being allotted separate places (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1969: 216–17).

Wollheim takes psychoanalytic data as evidential for the correspondence of the two sets of phenomena under the mind’s two conceptions; patients report mental experience in terms of a concretising phenomenology that assimilates thought to body. At extremity this becomes what psychoanalysis calls a ‘symbolic equation’ between thought and body, in which the mind becomes totally passive to its thoughts, now not thought but experienced as things bombarding or penetrating the mind.Footnote ²¹ Wollheim takes such psychoanalytic observation to show that the correspondence of unconscious and conscious sets of mental phenomena is not fortuitous. Since the vocabulary and discourse of conscious thought do not allow for the corporeality, or the spatial-corporeal dimension, of unconscious thought, what penetrates in the conscious phenomena from the identity between thought and body of the corporeal conception is restricted to the ‘tinge’ or shadow of spatiality.

The evidential worth of these observations is not evaluated here; they are given as illustrative of what I have called Wollheim’s antecedent conviction, based on his own experience and his protracted, indeed lifelong, reflection on psychoanalysis. Their place in his exposition is to motivate the account of archaic mind in an all-fours argument with one philosophically pre-established. In ‘The Bodily Ego’ Wollheim deploys an argument of Donald Davidson to explicate the theme that thinking occurs under a conception of the mind.Footnote ²² To ascribe belief to someone we must also ascribe to them the concept of belief; more generally, we must think of them as thinking under some overarching regime, which Wollheim also refers to as a ‘theory,’ whose requirements determine their mental activity in toto. The activity of believing is determined by the regulative requirement that to have a belief is to hold something to be true, and the belief holder has already to understand that the rule about holding true entails discarding beliefs found to be false. Only so can they hold and act upon beliefs successfully and only so can a thought held as a belief fulfil its function in the mind. Here, we see cognitive mind as operating under a broader conception of the mind itself as the domain or the realm of regulated mental activity in general.

Wollheim extends this philosophical theme to embrace a necessary second, psychoanalytic conception that posits, in parallel, a conception of archaic mind whose function is directed not to successful action but to hedonic modulation. Under this conception the mind retains a thought that is agreeable or pleasant and discards a thought that is disagreeable or painful. It does so by seizing on or ejecting thoughts in toto as objects, according to their hedonic valence. Under this archaic conception the spatiality of thought becomes marked, and thoughts are felt to be things entering, exiting or lodging in the mind. Archaic mind does not track the truth of thoughts: it manages their hedonic valence by spatially relocating their content inside or outside of the space that it conceives and thus images itself as. And, when thoughts lend themselves to this treatment it is through misrepresenting themselves as things that the bodily ego can dispose of in this way.

The two conceptions of the mind are yoked together in mental life; as modalities of the ongoing mental process their two forms of thought are constantly in dynamic interplay.Footnote ²³ Archaic thought conceives itself as omnipotent through its powers conceived as bodily and so, intractable to any form of regulation. When the cognitive conception can moderate the extreme hegemony of archaic thinking, reality may be ‘enchanted’ by the creativity of omnipotent thought but equally, can be distorted by it. Thus phantasy, modulating and modulated by experience, is ever-shifting as these two forms of thought together create a medium in which perception, action, memory, imagination, belief and desire must all accommodate the spatiality with which the archaic conception makes itself apparent in muted form as its spatial ‘shadow’.

8. The mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious

With Wollheim’s philosophical reconstruction of Freud’s two principles of mental functioning laid out, we may now try to parse the idea of the mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself as supplying the last proof of its own existence. The first thing to note is the contradiction here; an intuition, understood in Kantian terms, is a representation in the mind only made possible by its object, such that the intuition yields immediate knowledge of its object; however, as intuition it is then available for cognitive uptake by the understanding in forming a judgment.Footnote ²⁴ But in the extension of philosophy that Wollheim’s exposition of phantasy supplies and that Cavell in effect endorses, the intuited knowledge that is the mind’s last proof of itself must remain un-conscious, hence un-knowable in the cognitive system, and yet be proof against scepticism. As Cavell writes, the mind ‘receives its proof of its own existence in the only form in which that psyche can (any longer) believe it, namely as essentially unknown to itself’.

This conundrum has yet to be resolved. We might be tempted to take the spatiality that inflects conscious thought as the sensible basis for the mind’s ‘intuition of itself as unconscious’; spatiality is all that sense detects of the originating bodily phantasy that is the intuition’s object. Accordingly, spatiality as the bodily phantasy’s shadow in the mind would supply the ‘psychoanalytic intuition’ we are seeking to identify because it would, in Kant’s phrase, ‘come together with’ its object even though the object itself, which lies behind and casts that shadow, being phantasy, is unconscious. But calling the phantasy an object does not establish it as having objective reality; phantasy remains a product of the imagination.

A philosophical solution here might then be to expand the Kantian concept of intuition to allow for a mediation by phantasy between intuition and object; although unconscious, phantasy would by casting a shadow still transmit a knowledge of the body unmediated by conceptual thought.Footnote ²⁵ But it would cast a ‘shadow’ of something real since phantasy ultimately arises from (though it then distorts) experience of the body through body’s own impingements on its internal and external senses.Footnote ²⁶ However, having an intuition of my body just as I do of an object in the world does not entail that I have an intuition of that body as mine; reflexivity of thought is not part of this picture. From the intuitive knowledge Kant sees us as having of objects we do not derive our intuition of a body there as that of our own body. Moreover, if phantasy is the transmitter of bodily intuition then it re-introduces what intuition supposedly excludes, the intermediary of imagination. Just as we apprehend a world of objects that appear to us only in ways permitted by our mind, that much is equally true of our bodies; direct intuitive bodily knowledge is eliminated from the account.

If then the conscious psychoanalytic intuition of what is unknown is to be a piece of unmediated knowledge, able to resist such sceptical doubt, and be probative, it will need to be direct knowledge of something real. A phantasied bodiliness is not the ‘reality’ we seek; as noted, calling a phantasy an object will not suffice for its objective reality. Moreover, although the spatiality cast by bodily phantasy may be experienced as a direct sense of something bodily, for instance in dreams, that experience is to be interpreted as bodily phantasy manifesting itself. While interpreting spatiality as bodily phantasy illuminates its contribution in mental life, it is not itself probative of anything we can understand to be reality. Further clarification is needed to show how the exiguous presentation of spatiality that is the shadow cast by bodily phantasy in conscious mental life can lead us back to the ‘psychoanalytic intuition’; the intuitive knowledge the conscious mind has of its unconscious self.

For this intuition to be a proof to the mind of its own existence, as Cavell’s challenge demands, more is needed than either of the source texts yields as argument. However, both texts contain pointers: how to understand Cavell’s suggestive phrase, and what Wollheim’s philosophy might supply in answer. Henceforward, then, my exposition’s argument will rest heavily on interpretation.

9. The mind’s image of itself

Concluding, Cavell re-visits, and re-phrases the challenge that faces psychoanalysis and philosophy. He writes ‘But psychoanalysis has not surmounted the obscurities of the philosophical problematic of representation and reality it inherits. Until it stops shrinking from philosophy (from its own past), it will continue to shrink before the derivative question, for example, whether the stories of its patients are fantasy merely or (also?) of reality’. He continues, ‘the matter is to express the intuition that fantasy shadows anything that we can understand reality to be.’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1987: 393). Here, as the alert reader will note, ‘intuition’ is being used in a non-Kantian way; it denotes the sense of suspicion or doubt about the veridicality of our knowledge that hovers over all our grasp of reality. For psychoanalysis to advert to an unconscious ‘psychical reality’ of phantasy will not suffice to fend off this totalising doubt. Wollheim’s analysis is explicit here; phantasy is always in process of changing itself under the regime of hedonic modulation.

Understood as talking about phantasy, Cavell is saying then, that the question psychoanalysis needs philosophy’s help with is (again) how to defend its claims to know the unconscious when everything we can know through the understanding (the cognitive system), including what we know about psychoanalysis and phantasy, is subject to distortion by phantasy. Scepticism as doubt about what we can know about the mind’s cognitive functioning extends to its archaic functioning also.

What Cavell, and we, are seeking is the reality that, lying behind the bodily phantasy, does supply an objective content; one which, misrepresented through the mechanisms of phantasy formation, then casts its shadow in consciousness. We are seeking to clarify ‘the intuition that fantasy shadows anything we can understand reality to be’ (my italics), including therefore what we can understand as the reality of our own body as it rests on immediate experience and has an objective reality.Footnote ²⁷ It is here that Wollheim’s strategy of drawing on psychoanalytic theses pays off; in what follows I shall return to pick up the second psychoanalytic theme mentioned at the end of Section 3, the Kleinian theory of the mother-infant relation. To situate the theory in my argument I summarise Wollheim’s argument so far and then return to what I think is the correct interpretation of his thesis of the mind’s image of itself and how it yields something like the result needed to answer Cavell’s challenge.

We saw Wollheim arrive at a philosophically intelligible position on the relation of mind’s two self-conceptions, and to identify the trace of archaic mind in conscious mind through which psychoanalysis can detect phantasy and from which it can infer an unconscious life of the mind in which mind is conceived as bodily. But as argued, the suggestive phrase ‘psychoanalytic intuition’ is not simply to be understood as an intuition of a psychoanalytically-accessed domain of thought whose medium is phantasy. Phantasy as what casts its shadow on conscious mental life cannot itself be the real object of an intuition; to resist an ultimate scepticism we cannot rely on assurances from psychoanalysis that our unconscious mental life, conducted in terms of bodily phantasy and resting on a misrepresentation of our own body, nevertheless presents us with something known to be real.

To extract a solution from Wollheim I return to ‘The Mind and the Mind’s Image of Itself’ and to a fuller interpretation of his claim that psychoanalysis shows that ‘the mysterious union of mind and body occurs also at a stage further back than the traditional philosophers apprehended.’. The famous remark of one such philosopher, Descartes, that ‘I am not merely lodged in my body as a pilot in his vessel’, is echoed by Wollheim’s: ‘[i]t is not merely that we are at home in our body; we are at home in our mind somewhat as in a body’. Unlike the Cartesian ego, our ego is already bodily in its self-representation. This reiterates the thesis of the bodily ego; our mind is pictured by us as a body in which we are in some way (‘somewhat’) at home. But the puzzle encountered in the previous section, not resolved there, remains; whence do we acquire this image as a veridical representation, not yet distorted by phantasy.

Wollheim ends ‘The Bodily Ego’ by saying ‘[t]he philosophical interest of the thesis of the bodily ego is that it ties not just the mind to the body but the development of the mind to the development of the body’ (Wollheim Reference Wollheim, Wollheim and Hopkins1982: 138). This points to the Kleinian theory of mental development and the mother-infant relation. Abbreviating to avoid a long exposition, I take two key features from the theory.Footnote ²⁸ The first is the biological universal on which it is based: the bodily and psychological interaction of mother and infant as the whole nurturing environment of the infant from birth onwards. The mutuality of response in care and feeding supply experiences of bodily interaction in all sensory modalities of communication and response. These are then laid down (in both infant and mother) as non-verbal memory; such memory, which Wollheim elsewhere calls ‘experiential’ memory, is in life-long operation.

Such memory records experience of interaction between two embodied minds; one is in statu nascendi, the other, mature enough to provide nurture, is the responsive, thinking maternal body to which the infant is attuned; their interaction in the medium of the body is the objectively generative source of experience which on entering the mind becomes phantasy. The body as which the mind draws or images itself and in which the mind is ‘at home’, is an image, drawn from this store of bodily experience, of the vital relation in which infant and maternal bodies come together. This is the veridical bodily image that lies at the origin of phantasy. I base this interpretation on a clue that Wollheim is offering to his audience of psychoanalysts, we may think for their interpretation, in concluding ‘The Mind and the Mind’s Image of Itself’. We are at home in our body, he says, but at home in our mind ‘somewhat as in a body.’ It is this shared maternal-infant bodily unity that is the mind’s image of itself. Interpreted, this is what Wollhem means by saying ‘if this is the image that the mind sees when it sees itself this is in part at least because it is this image that the mind draws when it draws itself.’ (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1969: 220, my italics).

The conceptual path from spatiality therefore leads back via phantasy to this image arising, and continually modified, from the stored memory of real experience. The guarantee of reality comes from the incontrovertible fact of nurture as the condition of possibility of a human life. The real object of the psychoanalytic intuition the mind has of itself is thus this originating condition: the grounding of mental life in the experienced world of maternal body and mind.Footnote ²⁹ It is experience in this real world of nurture that sets in motion the formation of the internal world by the processes of mind-making psychoanalysis describes. If this correctly interprets Wollheim’s thesis of the mind’s image of itself, it yields something like the result needed to answer Cavell’s challenge. The mind’s intuition of itself as unconscious is its knowledge of the nurturing relation, of mind and body, that makes it possible.

10. Philosophy as a humanistic discipline

I return finally to the idea of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. While the phrase is Williams’s, he shared with both Cavell and Wollheim a concern that Pope’s ‘proper study of mankind’ should allow criticism to, in Eagleton’s phrase, ‘flourish’. Philosophy as criticism would then need to re-think itself and reject institutional legislation on what should count as philosophy in favour of following philosophical enquiry where it led. I have traced a line of argument showing how despite their apparent philosophical separateness Williams and Wollheim were, in what I called a silent interlocution, pursuing an answer to the same question: what, given the obstacles lying in its path, obstacles that scepticism rightly points to, can the human mind come to know about its human nature?

It might be objected that this critical enterprise is peripheral to the humanistic question of how we should live our lives; that the answer given here, though motivated by the need to accommodate scepticism, establishes nothing substantive from psychoanalysis. Insofar as the mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself can be made explicit, this can reveal nothing more than the already known fact that the way mind and body develop is together, over time, in nurture. But if we take seriously Cavell’s insistence on the constitutive connection between psychoanalysis and philosophy, then as I have argued, Wollheim provides what Cavell advocated for; an answer from psychoanalysis combined with philosophy, in which an ethics of human attachment and recognition of the other is given a secure basis in reality.Footnote ³⁰

It is Wollheim’s introduction of the Kleinian theory of mental development, and the concept of phantasy on which it rests, which contributes a substantive basis for a humanistic philosophy. I said that two features of Klein’s theory in particular were relevant to the conjoining of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The first as we saw was phantasy and its ultimate basis in experience; this was central to answering the question, lying behind Cavell’s challenge, about mind’s objective nature. The answer to Socrates’ question about the life worth living is built on the second feature of Klein’s theory, the role in development of the psychic machinery which creates an internal world of phantasies. We saw that the early predominance of projection rested on splitting phantasied content into extremes of good and bad. But phantasy is constantly modified by introjection of ongoing experience, and the picture of the internal world can become more like the external world. As maturation of mind and body proceeds, cognition advances, and mother-infant communication becomes more attuned. There is a shift into a different perception of the mother, who is now experienced (and so, introjected even if always inflected with phantasy) more realistically.

This is the ‘depressive position’ achieved vis à vis the mother by the developing infant. The mother is no longer experienced as an alternation between two figures that are two separate sources of goodness or of badness, to be greedily consumed or destructively attacked respectively. She gradually becomes a whole person for the infant; a real mother. In this new relation the infant is confronted with the phantasied fear that its greed and attack will together destroy this source of goodness. There is a consequent check, as ‘depression’, of the force that lies behind these attacks. When, in the real mother’s real continuity of nurture, she is experienced by the infant as surviving attack there is the opportunity for remorse, gratitude and reparation through love.Footnote ³¹ It is from this theoretical base that in his Dawes Hicks Lecture of 1975 Wollheim proposed a Kleinian theoretical account of morality and the moral emotions. The detail of this cannot detain us here, but it is integral to the Kleinian account that, as I have argued, it shows the mind’s psychoanalytic intuition of itself to originate in a real relation with a real other. Kleinian theory now tells us further that this is an interaction that, if all goes well for the mind’s development, will come to ground other-directed love and reparativeness.

While it might seem that Wollheim’s thinking has taken us a long way from the idea of a humanistic discipline, and into a materialistic metaphysics of bodily mind, it nevertheless returns us to where we began; to Socrates’ question about the life worth living. In doing so it returns us to common ground with Williams who writes that ‘How truthfulness to an existing self ……is to be combined with reflection, self-understanding, and criticism is a question that philosophy, itself, cannot answer. It is the kind of question that has to be answered through reflective living.’ (Williams Reference Williams1985: 200). Williams accepted that psychoanalysis had a place in that answer, while prudently confining himself to what he knew.Footnote ³² But Jonathan Lear, reviewing Williams’s oeuvre as a whole, is nevertheless justified when he writes of ‘the important legacy of Bernard Williams’s approach to ethics: the use of psychoanalytical ideas to develop a robust, naturalistic moral psychology.’ (Lear Reference Lear2004: 521). Williams’s legacy comes at least in part, I have suggested, from the silent interlocution between him and Wollheim.Footnote ³³