If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy

Fieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level concepts and practices. It departs from Michel Foucault’s gray and meticulous approach to the history of the present, which understands the transformation of high-level organizing concepts such as “Man” or “the subject” through an inquiry into scientific discourses, clinical practices, disciplinary institutions, etc. However, fieldwork in philosophy doesn’t approach the present by writing its history but by conducting anthropological fieldwork. This essay reconstructs Paul Rabinow’s conception of fieldwork in philosophy as it inspired the author’s work on the perennial philosophy of the psychedelic renaissance, a case study of neurophilosophers in a sleep laboratory, as well as research on cultural primatologists who took the Enlightenment question of human nature to the African rainforest. The essay ends with a plea for reimagining anthropology as fieldwork in philosophy

Devil’s advocate: Sketch of an amoral anthropology

This essay polemicizes against contemporary anthropology’s ubiquitous moralism and its demand for engagement. It does so by trying on the glasses of evolutionary theories of moral behavior. If we take Homo sapiens to be a moralistic ape and consider that anthropologists are members of the species they study, their moralizing appears only natural. In the past decade, however, the moral and political landscapes of North America and Europe have changed dramatically, which has provoked a renewed problematization of moral discourse. Like all polemics, this essay proposes an alternative to what it attacks: the possibility of an amoral anthropology, in which the anthropologist plays the role of devil’s advocate. The project refurbishes the ivory tower as a high-containment laboratory for ideas, especially dangerous ideas that we might have good reason to sanction in public

Lacan's Practice of Variable-length Sessions and his Theory of Temporality

Titel und Einleitung Einleitung 1 1\. Zwischen Gedächtniswissenschaften und Phänomenologie der Zeitlichkeit 7 2\. Logische Zeit und Logik des Kollektivs 35 3\. Die Praxis der variablen Sitzungsdauer 58 4\. Der linguistic turn der Psychoanalyse und die Theorie der variablen Sitzungsdauer 86 5\. Wiederholung und Nachträglichkeit: Das Unbewusste als symbolische Maschine 110 6\. Antizipation und Übertragung: Die genuin menschliche Dimension der Analyse 144 7\. Die Dauer der Kur und die Sitzungsdauer 171 Schluss 215 Literatur 219 AnhangDer französische Psychoanalytiker Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) brach mit der Regel, dass psychoanalytische Sitzungen 50 Minuten dauern müssen. Diese Vorschrift hatte die IPA, der internationale Dachverband psychoanalytischer Gesellschaften, Ende der zwanziger Jahre erlassen, um die Qualität von Therapien und Lehranalysen zu standardisieren. Lacan sah darin nichts als einen Formalismus. Als Redekur sollte sich die Psychoanalyse am Inhalt der Rede des Patienten und nicht an der Uhr orientieren. Lacan begann deshalb 1947, sich bei der Beendigung der Sitzungen nach dem zu richten, was der Analysand sagte und ersetzte damit das formale Kriterium der Uhrzeit durch ein inhaltliches Kriterium. Darüber kam es in den fünfziger Jahren zu heftigen Auseinandersetzungen unter französischen Analytikern, die 1953 und 1963 in zwei institutionellen Brüchen der französischen Psychoanalyse gipfelten. Lacan und seine Mitstreiter mussten teuer bezahlen, dass Lacan seine Praxis der variablen Sitzungsdauer nicht aufgeben wollte: die Anerkennung und Legitimierung durch die IPA blieb ihnen versagt. Die vorliegende Dissertation rekonstruiert den theoretischen Hintergrund, vor dem Lacans Verhalten in dieser Angelegenheit verständlich wird, und verortet diesen Themenkomplex in einem breiten medizinhistorischen und ideengeschichtlichen Kontext. Hierzu werden die beiden Traditionen dargestellt, in denen Lacan als junger Mediziner in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren auf das Problem der Zeitlichkeit als einem Thema der Psychopathologie stieß: die "Gedächtniswissenschaften", zu denen auch die Psychoanalyse zählt, und die phänomenologische Psychiatrie und Philosophie. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie Lacan den von Heidegger und Minkowski behaupteten "Vorrangs der Zukunft" aufgriff und sich in dieser Hinsicht von den Gedächtniswissenschaften distanzierte. Im Gegensatz zu Freud sah er im Unbewussten nicht das Medium einer Determination durch die Vergangenheit sondern die unerschöpfliche Quelle des Neuen im Leben eines Menschen. Lacans dem linguistic turn folgende Umdeutung der Psychoanalyse wird erläutert, insofern als Lacan die Beendigung der Sitzung als sinnstiftende "Interpunktion" der Rede des Analysanden begriff. Im Zusammenhang mit seiner Vorstellung vom Unbewussten als einer symbolischen Maschine wird näher untersucht, welche Impulse er von der Informationstheorie, der Kybernetik und der Computertechnologie erhalten hatte. Denn Lacan verstand das Gedächtnis in Analogie zu digitalen Speichermedien. Auf diesem Modell basierte seine Annahme, die Geschichte des Patienten, inklusive seiner traumatischen Erinnerungen, ließe sich umschreiben, indem man ihm hilft, seine Vergangenheit - mit Blick auf die Zukunft - neu zu interpretieren. Doch mit dem Primat der Zukunft rückte Lacan eine Dimension der Zeitlichkeit in den Vordergrund, die nur der menschlichen Subjektivität zu Eigen ist. Der andere spezifisch menschliche Gesichtspunkt in Lacans Konzeption liegt in dem intersubjektiven Prozess begründet, der sich im Laufe einer Analyse zwischen Analytiker und Patient entfaltet. Lacan sah den Fortschritt der Behandlung vor allem in der Dynamik dieser so genannten Übertragungsbeziehung und - anders als Freud - nicht in der Vervollständigung der Anamnese. Es werden also auch die Ziele von Lacans Analyse herausgearbeitet. Im Gegensatz zu Freud wollte er seinen Patienten nicht zu Normalität, d.h. zu Gesundheit, verhelfen, sondern zu Authentizität. Der Autor stellt die These auf, dass sich Lacans Handhabung der Gesamtdauer der Analyse zu seinem Vorgehen in den einzelnen Sitzungen komplementär verhielt: die einzelne Sitzung sollte der Analytiker beschließen, die gesamte Analyse jedoch der Analysand selber. In beiden Fällen sollte sich die Wahl des Zeitpunkts der Beendigung nach dem Inhalt der Analyse und nicht nach der Uhr bzw. dem Kalender richten. In diesem theoretischen Rahmenwerk wird Lacans Praxis der variablen Sitzungsdauer, die auf Basis von Berichten seiner ehemaligen Analysanden beschrieben und in ihrem psychoanalysehistorischen Kontext erörtert wird, verständlich und einer kritischen Diskussion zugänglich.The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) broke the rule that psychoanalytic sessions need to last 50 minutes. This regulation had been established by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in the late 1920s in order to standardize the quality of therapies and training analyses. Lacan considered it a mere formality: he believed that as a talking cure, psychoanalysis should depend on the discourse of the patient, not on the clock. Hence, from 1947 onwards, when ending a session Lacan took his cue from what the analysand said replacing the formal criterion of time by one based on content. This led to fierce disputes between French psychoanalysts, culminating in two institutional ruptures in 1953 and 1963. Lacan and his supporters paid dearly for his unwillingness to give up his practice of variable-length sessions: the IPA refused them recognition and legitimation. The dissertation in hand aims at a reconstruction of the theoretical background of Lacan's position through which Lacan's practice becomes intelligible and broadly contextualizes this subject matter within the history of medicine and the history of ideas. For this purpose, the two traditions in which Lacan, as a medical student in the 1920s and 1930s, came across the question of temporality as a problem of psychopathology are discussed: the "sciences of memory" (including psychoanalysis) and phenomenological psychiatry and philosophy. It is demonstrated that Lacan took up the "primacy of the future" as proposed by Heidegger and Minkowski, which prompted him to dissociate himself from the "sciences of memory" in this respect: in contrast to Freud, he did not regard the unconscious as the medium of a determination by the past, but as the inexhaustible source of novelty in life. Lacan's reinterpretation of psychoanalysis following the linguistic turn is discussed in so far as Lacan regarded the termination of the session as a meaningful "punctuation" of the discourse of the analysand. In the context of his notion of the unconscious as a symbolic machine, it will be examined which impulses he received from information theory, cybernetics, and computer technology since he considered memory as analogous to digital memory devices. This model served as the basis of Lacan's assumption that the history of the patient, including his traumatic memories, could be rewritten by helping him to interpret his past anew in looking forwards. However, by emphasizing an orientation toward the future, Lacan stressed a dimension of temporality that is characteristic of human subjectivity. The other specifically human aspect in Lacan's model is inherent in the intersubjective process unfolding between analyst and patient in the course of the analysis. In Lacan's eyes, the progress of the treatment was based on the dynamics of this so-called transference relationship and not, as in Freud, on the completion of the anamnesis. The purposes of Lacan's analysis are explicated. In contrast to Freud, Lacan did not aim at helping his patients to obtain normality, i.e. health, but authenticity. The author proposes that the way in which Lacan dealt with the overall length of the analysis was complementary to his way of handling the duration of single sessions: the individual session was terminated by the analyst, but the analysis as a whole was brought to a conclusion by the analysand himself. In both cases, the choice of the right moment to end the analysis was based on its content and not on the clock or the calendar. Lacan's practice of variable-length sessions, which is described on the basis of reports of Lacan's former analysands and that is contextualized in the history of psychoanalysis, is made intelligible and available to critical discussion within its theoretical framework

Brainstorm

The film by Giovanni Frazzetto and Suzanne Anker documents and collages the ways in which the brain and neurons have been portrayed in both popular culture arenas and the scientific community. The screening is accompanied by the installation &#8216;The Hothouse Archives&#8217; by Suzanne Anker, of large-scale photographs on watercolor paper depicting brain coral and the biophysics of neurons which represent the metaphorical associations concerning the brain. This event marks the opening of the workshop &#8216;Neurocultures&#8217; co-organized by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the BIOS Centre of the London School of Economics. Further details on the workshop.Brainstorm, screening, ICI Berlin, 20 February 2009 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e090220

Moral Psychopharmacology Needs Moral Inquiry: The Case of Psychedelics

The revival of psychedelic research coincided and more recently conjoined with psychopharmacological research on how drugs affect moral judgments and behaviors. This article makes the case for a moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics that examines whether psychedelics serve as non-specific amplifiers that enable subjects to (re-)connect with their values, or whether they promote specific moral-political orientations such as liberal and anti-authoritarian views, as recent psychopharmacological studies suggest. This question gains urgency from the fact that the return of psychedelics from counterculture and underground laboratories to mainstream science and society has been accompanied by a diversification of their users and uses. We propose bringing the pharmacological and neuroscientific literature into a conversation with historical and anthropological scholarship documenting the full spectrum of moral and political views associated with the uses of psychedelics. This paper sheds new light on the cultural plasticity of drug action and has implications for the design of psychedelic pharmacopsychotherapies. It also raises the question of whether other classes of psychoactive drugs have an equally rich moral and political life