Page 8 - NAMAH-Jan-2018

Editorial

The autonomy of experience and the unborn Idea — Freud, Sartre and beyond

Classically, psychoanalysis considers that all locate this object within it and explain the new
experiences are rooted in the past. Psychological relationship by it; but the relationship itself
problems are viewed to arise from unresolved remains irreducible (2). Sartre would thus seem
developmental issues or past traumas. The to be more comfortable dealing with dialectical
quality of a relationship between two individuals dynamics rather than unravelling repressed
is always regarded in reference to some earlier conflicts while analysing relationships.
relationship — a sort of primal absolute, though
forgotten. This would mean that no entirely Beyond Freud and Sartre
novel, autonomous or irreducible experience
would be possible. We would always belong While Sartre moves beyond Freud in asserting
to the past! the autonomy of the experience, both of them
still revolve around experiences perceived at
Jean-Paul Sartre contests this perspective the cognitive plane of consciousness. There
vigorously in his famous essay, ‘The Itinerary are supra-cognitive experiences which are
of a Thought’. He argues that that the idea not merely autonomous but totally new and
of ‘dialectical irreducibility’ is missing in novel, emanating from the unborn future
conventional psychoanalytic accounts. It can and thus cannot be understood either by
be admitted that a particular experiential probing the unconscious or by working
configuration is rigorously conditioned by a through dialectics.
previous one. But that does not mean that the
new experience cannot preserve and supersede Supra-cognitive experiences can only
the previous experience at the same time. It is be possible if the contemporary cognitive
precisely this act of supersession of the past consciousness itself evolves along the trajectory
experience that can be irreducible (1). of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo views that
the human mind is not the summit of creation
Sartre who believed that phenomena derive and the finale of the evolutionary movement.
from each other dialectically, commented New matrices of supra-cognitive consciousness
that, While one configuration may preserve can evolve and herein lies the genesis of the
another, it can never simply be reduced to unborn Idea.
its predecessor. It is the idea of this autonomy
that is lacking in psychoanalytic theory. A Freud’s perspective of historical reductionism,
sentiment or a passion between two persons where the past is considered to be the key to
is certainly highly conditioned by their the present, is actually a Darwinian legacy.
relationship to the ‘primal object’, and one can Freud had considered that two of the great

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