Freud, Piaget, and Jargon, Part I

 

"Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche."

I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge.

The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.) 

But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a puzzle. It is premise because all our experience speaks to their continuity. Even an Olympic gymnast whose body was in champion shape had to bow out of competitions not long ago because her mind was boggling for some poorly understood reason.

It is a puzzle though because we experience our mind as something intangible and our body as something that pushes and pulls other bodies. The connection between them is not self-evident.

In Aragna's view, and that of the other authors in this book, part of the answer to the puzzle is this: the Freudian 'unconscious' is stuff that the body does. The Freudian conscious mind, or ego, is a built-in observer of that stuff the body does. 

But, also in Aragna's view, Freud did not do enough to clarify this connection. He was still trying to make sense of it when he died in London in 1939. Gratuitously, Jean Piaget picked up some of the connected questions in his work soon thereafter. [The phrase "on the heels of" is itself what one might call a physicalist metaphor.] 

Piaget was appointed professor of experimental psychology and sociology at the University of Lausanne in 1938 and continued in that post until 1951. This accounts for the expression about Piaget following Freud's heels. His later publications may be traced to his work at Lausanne.   

So, behind all the jargon, Aragna is saying that Piaget's work, describing the cognitive development of children, helps us understand how human beings learn to observe ourselves, that is, how the ego arises out of the id, that is again, how the mind emerges out of the body.