First Nature and Second Nature in Hegel and Psychoanalysis

Two broad tendencies can be identified in the history of psychoanalysis. Classical analysts, to one degree or another, adhere to Freud’s pessimistic anthropology. Whether they conceive of it in terms of the drives, hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, the death instinct, infantile helplessness or primary narcissism – that is, a completely monadic “primal psychical situation”1 – they posit a thicket of negativity at the heart of the psyche, which makes substantial conflict within the individual and between the individual and society inevitable. Freud puts it in thoroughly Hobbesian terms when he speaks of the “primary mutual hostility of human beings.”2 At the same time, a countertendency has existed within psychoanalysis almost since its inception, which has contested basic tenets of Freudian anthropology – particularly, the theory of the drives and the postulation of an undifferentiated stage – in an attempt to portray a less conflictual and more mutualistic, which is to say, more sociable picture of the human nature. Two recent representatives of the countertendency, the Relational and Intersubjective Schools of psychoanalysis, believe that infant researchers’ refutation of primary narcissism – together with their demonstration of the interactive nature of the self – substantiate their anti-Freudian program. And who, since Winnicott’s famous apercu that there can be no baby without a mother, can disagree with the centrality of interaction and its ramifications for classical theory? I believe, however, that the Relationalists and Intersubjectivists aren’t only interested in revising development theory, metapsychology and clinical technique, as important as such revisions may be. They also have a more ambitious – if not always explicit – agenda having to do with questions of weltanschauung. For they think that by showing that the self is a product of interaction, they are also showing that the self is intrinsically sociable. Their unstated assumption is that interaction is equivalent to mutuality, which means that if the self is in fact a product of interaction, it is inherently mutualistic. Can we accept this assumption? I think not. The distinguished infant researcher Beatrice Bebee has ferreted out this hidden assumption and argued interaction is not synonymous with mutuality.3 After all, there are innumerable forms of malignant infant-mother interaction that produce selves, which are anything but mutualistic. Clinically, we now know that various forms of mother infant misattunement are responsible for some of the most serious forms of adult psychopathology: for example, schizoid, narcissistic, sociopathic and impulse-ridden personalities. In addition to the all-too-mundane world of warm milk, dirty diapers, baby strollers and snot-covered security blankets, some relationally oriented theorists have also turned to the transcendent heights of German Idealism in their attempt to refute Freud’s pessimistic anthropology.4 For good reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, especially Chapter IVA, has become a central text in this discussion.5 Because it conceptualizes the emergence of the self in terms of the interactive process of recognition, the relational theorists believe the text provides further confirmation for their position. In what follows, I will take exception with this claim, showing that Hegel’s argument is more complicated than the Relationalists and Intersubjectivists would like to believe and that it does not provide the validation they