Global Sharing in

Challenging Times

• XVIII World IFTA Congress

• Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Friday, 19 March 2010
• 8:30 – 10:00 am
Philosophy and Family Therapy:

Intersubjectivity
Ethics
Biopolitics
Geopoliticus child watching the birth
of the new man
- Dali
Philosophy &
Family Therapy

Vincenzo Di Nicola

• Psychologist, Child Psychiatrist,

Relational therapist
Université de Montréal

• Doctoral candidate
European Graduate School
Key words

• Philosophy and family therapy

• Phenomenology and existential

psychiatry

• Ethics and biopolitics

Pedagogical objectives

1. To identify the history of the

relationship between family therapy
and philosophy.
Pedagogical objectives

2. To offer an overview of areas of mutual

interest to both family therapy and
philosophy, including philosophy of mind,
philosophy of science and definitions of the
person, identity and what we consider as
essentially human qualities.
Pedagogical objectives

3. To review three areas in more detail:

(a) intersubjectivity

(b) ethics and

(c) biopolitics.
Areas of mutual interest

• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy of science
• Philosophy of technology
• Phenomenology (as a science of the person
and hence a foundation study for psychiatry)
• Philosophy as a tool for social exploration
(identity, the definition of the person)
• Ethics and biopolitics
Uses of philosophy
by family therapy

• Inspiration

• Validation

• Justification
Other uses of philosophy

• Edification

• Consolation
Other uses of philosophy

• Clinical philosophy …
Consolation as intervention

• Applied philosophy …
Bio-ethics
Research ethics
Professional ethics
What is philosophy?

• Everything is like something, what is

this like?
--Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (1982)
quoting English novelist E.M. Forster
What is philosophy?

• The purpose of philosophy is to show

the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)

(1889-1951)
What is philosophy?

• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings

only with the falling of the dusk.
--G.W.F. Hegel,
Philosophy of Right (1820)
G.W.F. Hegel
(1770-1831)

(1770-1831)
What is philosophy?

• One more word about giving instruction as to

what the world ought to be. Philosophy in
any case always comes on the scene too late
to give it...
• When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then
has a shape of life grown old.
• By philosophy’s gray in gray it cannot be
rejuvenated but only understood.
• The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only
with the falling of the dusk.
—G.W.F. Hegel, “Preface,” Philosophy of
Right (1820)
What is philosophy?

• Understanding, clarification, edification,

reflection, groundwork, foundations …

• Critical theory, deconstruction

What is philosophy?

Two kinds of philosophers …

• Those who build up theories and

explanations, carefully, brick by brick
--Aristotle, Aquinas, William James, Freud

• Those who tear them down, critically … brick

by brick or with a wrecker’s ball
--Luther, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault
What is family therapy?

• This can be imagined as

a philosophical question

• People often invoke philosophical

considerations in their definition of
family theray …
What is psychiatry?

• Karl Jaspers … phenomenological psychiatry

• R.D. Laing … existential psychiatry

• Salvador Minuchin … structural family therapy

• Mara Selvini Palazzoli … systemic family therapy

• Samuel Guze … Why Psychiatry is a Branch of

Medicine

• Robert Spitzer … architect of DSM … descriptive

nosography, atheoretical
What are they?

• Sigmund Freud

• Karl Jaspers

• Jean Piaget

• Michel Foucault
What are they?

• Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)

• Neurologist &
neuropathologist
• Founder of
psychoanalysis
• Philosopher
What are they?

• Karl Jaspers
(1883-1959)

• Phenomenological
Psychiatrist
• Professor of
Philosophy
What are they?

• Jean Piaget
(1896-1980)

• Natural scientist
• Genetic epistemology
• Philosophy:
Jürgen Habermas
What are they?

• Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)

• Psychologist
• Philosopher:
Structuralism & post-
structuralism
• Historian
• Critic
Philosophical deconstruction

• What do family therapists still refer to

psychodynamics ?
Philosophical deconstruction

Alternatives for describing families and

family phenomena …

• Relationships, attachment
• Interpersonal patterns
• Myths, rules, rituals
• Family as a structure, system
• Family life as a text (to be edited)
• The family as a storying culture
Philosophical deconstruction

Why do so many terms for negative

psychosocial factors come from
hydraulics and materials sciences ?

• Stress
• (Mental) fatigue
• Tension
• Resistance
Philosophical deconstruction

And of course, so do the positive

factors …

• Resilience
• Bouyancy
• Rebound
Philosophical deconstruction

What do we mean by development ?

• Growth (Classical models, Dante)

• Evolution
--Convergence, teleology (Teilhard de
Chardin)
• Ages & stages (Paediatrics)
• IQ as a model (Binet, Dalton)
• Unfolding
--Genetic epistemology (Piaget, Kohlberg)
Philosophical deconstruction

Explanatory models are usually based on

metaphors

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Cancer Ward (1968)

• Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Illness as Metaphor (1978)
Aids and Its Metaphors (1988)
Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry

• Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)

• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)

Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry

• Karl Jaspers
(1883-1959)

• Phenomenological
Psychiatrist

• General Psychopathology
Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry

• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)

• Existential analysis
• The Case of Ellen West
• with many rereadings
(R.D. Laing, Sal Minuchin)
Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry

• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)

• Scottish psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst
• Existential philosophy
and psychiatry
• Pioneer in family studies
• Critical psychiatry
Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
(b. 1927, Paris)

• French philosopher
• Wrote on Lacanian
psychoanalysis
• The Inoperative Community (1982)
• Being Singular Plural (2000)
Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
The Inoperative Community (1982)

• Traces the influence of the notion of

community to concepts of experience,
discourse, and the individual,
and argues that it has dominated modern
thought.
Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
The Inoperative Community (1982)

• Redefines community, asking what can it be if

it is reduced neither to a collection of
separate individuals, nor to a hypostasized
communal substance, e.g., fascism.

• Hypostatic abstraction: X = Y, X has Y-ness

Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
The Inoperative Community (1982)

• "The community that becomes a single thing

(body, mind, fatherland, Leader) ...
necessarily loses the in of being-in-common.
Or, it loses the with or the together that
defines it. It yields its being-together to a
being of togetherness. The truth of
community, on the contrary, resides in the
retreat of such a being."
Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
Being Singular Plural (2000)

• How we can speak of a plurality of a "we"

without making the "we" a singular identity?
• There is no being without "being-with"
• "I" does not come before "we" (i.e., Dasein
does not precede Mitsein)
• There is no existence without co-existence
Intersubjectivity

• Jean-Luc Nancy
Being Singular Plural (2000)

• “There is no meaning if meaning is not

shared, and not because there would be an
ultimate or first signification that all beings
have in common, but because meaning is
itself the sharing of Being.”
Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas
(1906-1995)

• Lithuanian Jew,
French philosopher and
Talmudic scholar
Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas

• Ethics as first philosophy

• Philosophy as the wisdom of love

(as opposed to love of wisdom)

• The face-to-face
Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas

• Buber vs Levinas on the face-to-face

• Buber: symmetrical co-presence

• Levinas: relation with the other is inherently
asymmetrical
Ethics

• Emmanuel Levinas

• Ethics is not morality

• Ethics marks the primary situation of the
face-to-face
• Morality comes later as a set of rules
Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942, Rome)

Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942)

Italian philosopher

• Key notions:

• Homo sacer/Sacred Man (1998)

• Stato di eccezione/State of Exception
(2005)
Biopolitics

• Giorgio Agamben
The Coming Community (1993)

• describes the nature of “whatever

singularity”
• that which has an “inessential
commonality, a solidarity that in no way
concerns an essence”
Biopolitics

• Key notions:
• Biopolitics
• Adopted from Foucault (a technology of
power, biopower)

• Biós (a form of life, culture) vs

Zōē (mere life, nature)
• Biopolitics is the reduction of others to
bare life
Biopolitics

• The ban is the original political relation

(the state of exception, zone of
indistinction)

• Sovereign power produces bare life

(as threshold between zōē and biós)

• The camp is the new biopolitical

paradigm of the West
Conclusion

• The history of psychiatry, psychology

and psychoanalysis are intimately
intertwined with philosophical questions

• Family therapy as a system of thought

shares that heritage
Conclusion

• Understanding this history will help us

avoid reductive modes of thought

• Contemporary psychology & psychiatry

accept the notion of paradigms as
evolution and progress
Conclusion

• A full account of mind cannot be

provided by an understanding of brain

• No matter how sophisticated the

argument for biological psychiatry
becomes (cf. Eric Kandel), it will not
speak to mind, fully understood.
Conclusion

• Leon Eisenberg put the question as

brainlessness vs mindlessness

• or psychoanalysis without brain vs

biological psychiatry without mind
Conclusion

• I expand the question to include:

• Mind (the science of mental life)

• Body (biological psychiatry,
neurosciences)
• Heart (phenomenology, empathy)
• Soul (meaning, transcendence)
Conclusion

• The questions for family therapy:

• A model of mind as relational

• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity
• Appropriating the common
Conclusion

• The questions for family therapy:

• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity
Conclusion

• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity

Our culture is at war with subjectivity

Technopoly is the surrender of culture

to technology (Neil Postman)
Conclusion

• Relational ethics

Ethics as therapy (guiding how it is

conducted, what its goals are, how it is
appreciated)
Conclusion

• We have not exhausted what

phenomenology can teach us by
elucidating human experience and
expanding our empathy