Who Needs Yalom When We Have Žižek?
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Hegel’s Logic of Reflection
It was said above that Kant’s (and our group’s) thinking remains stuck in an external reflection. What this means more precisely is that ‘essence’ (what can be thought of as homologous to Lacanian subjectivity or alternatively, to the group’s effort/activity) presupposes itself as its own other; that is, essence presupposes itself in the form of an immediacy as something objectively given in advance, in the form of an externality. This is why the reflection is ‘external:’ essence presupposes itself in the inverse-alienated form of some transcendent entity, excluded from the movement of reflection. (Sublime, 225, 227) From this point, how does one move to a determinate reflection?
Before answering this question, we must ask a logically prior question: how does one ever get to an external reflection? After all, the premise of positing reflection (the first in the triad of positing-external-determinate) is that ‘every given positive content can be “mediated,” reduced to something “posited,” recuperated by reflective activity.’ (Indivisible, 51) Reflection at this level designates the simple relation between appearance and essence, where the former ‘reflects’ the latter. So that essence, as the power of absolute negativity and opposed to appearance, mediates-sublates-posits every positive immediacy, making it ‘mere appearance.’ (Sublime, 227) So, with regard to its presuppositions, there is nothing that is not previously posited by the activity of positing reflection. Again, how does the reflecting subject come to believe that some substantial content (the Thing) is lost for him when there was no such content to be lost previous to this experience of loss?
Žižek answers that ‘[i]n order to “forget” (or to “lose”) something, one must first forget that there is nothing to forget: this oblivion makes possible the illusion that there is something to forget in the first place.’ (For They, 60, italics in original) Another way of saying this is that the very form of activity of ‘positing the presuppositions’ (i.e., positing reflection) is that very ‘nothing’ that is not previously posited by its activity; in other words, the ‘positing of presuppositions’ finds its limitation in the feminine, non-all Lacanian logic4 and this ‘nothing’ is precisely what Lacan calls the Real. (Tarrying, 128)
To reiterate, what eludes the power of positing reflection is itself, its own act and once reflection is aware of this inherent limitation to its activity, it reverts to immediacy – its own act is misperceived necessarily in a ‘reified form, as the In-itself of an external presupposition.’ (Indivisible, 51) And Hegel accomplishes the move to determinate reflection by simply assuming the identity of the reflective activity with its immediate In-itself. In The Parallax View (46), Žižek quotes from Hegel’s Science of Logic:
“[essence] presupposes itself and the sublating of this presupposition is essence itself; conversely, this sublating of its presupposition is the presupposition itself. Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return. But this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind; its immediacy is sublated immediacy... For the presupposition of the return-into-self – that from which essence comes, and is only as this return – is only in the return itself.” (italics in original)
For Žižek, this is Hegel’s crucial insight and it is critical to understand if we want to grasp Žižek’s logical framework: the very initial immediacy that positing reflection overlooks (and, in some sense, is) and that which external reflection presupposes as a substantial entity prior to and external to its activity, ‘is always-already “posited” retroactively, so that its emergence coincides with its loss.’ (For They, 167, italics in original)
The Kantian (externally reflective) subject who attempts to grasp the suprasensible Idea-Thing (when viewing, say, the spectacular vista of the Grand Canyon), does not experience how his very reflective activity entails the loss of the object’s immediate, full presence; how the object is mortified, lost ‘as such,’ dissected by means of reflective categories so that what he retains is just a dead abstraction. Once he does experience how the sublime object in its immediate, pre-reflective given ‘only comes to be through being left behind,’ he moves into a determinate reflection, which realizes not the reappropriation of the lost object in its full presence that would annul the insurmountable gap between the sensuous world and the Thing, but rather how that gap was always-already there. That is to say, the subject now experiences how he never had what he believed he lost; he experiences that loss in a way precedes what is being lost. This is Hegelian ‘loss of the loss,’ (For They, 168) logically homologous to the concept which is one of the Lacanian definitions of anxiety. (Harari, xxxi) The externally reflecting subject engages in his activity of attempting to grasp the ungraspable in an effort to avoid the anxiety-provoking experience of how ‘the very act of reflection as failed constitutes retroactively that which eludes it.’ (For They, 86)
The interpersonal psychotherapeutic group can likewise be seen as a positing entity, engaged in a pursuit of the Group-Thing, overlooking how its very failing activity of delineating its contours is retroactively constitutive. Yalom himself seems to have an impression of this, yet still clearly holds onto an externally reflective understanding of matters: ‘It has been my impression that whether a group jells is only partly related to the competence or efforts of the therapist or to the number of “good” members in the group. To a degree, the critical variable is some as yet unclear blending of the members.’ (Yalom, 270) His perhaps optimistic belief, at some future date, of being able to provide a definition of a positive representation of the Group-Thing aside, we can ask what the logic of reflection has to say regarding the structural role of the therapist.
In a word: the therapist is treated as if he is the Thing, or more accurately, he is the sublime object of and for the group. This will become clearer when we discuss Lacan’s logic of the signifier and the Hegelian conception of the Monarch. For now, we can make the common sense observation that if the therapist does not arrive for the group meeting, there is no group. This is not true for any other group member, for the group with missing members can function satisfactorily for its allotted time that week provided there is present a group member with the title ‘therapist’ that starts and ends the session at the appropriate times.
Following Žižek (and Hegel), we could term the therapist the ‘reflective determination’ of the group, since the therapist is that unique group member who embodies again – gives positive form to – the very movement of sublation of all positivity (the activity/effort of the group as a whole). (Sublime, 215) That is to say, determinate reflection involves a redoubling movement in which a reflection-into-itself occurs of the simple, positing reflection.5 In this way, the group becomes a consistent field totalized by the therapist’s exceptional position, and this exceptional position is critical: ‘ ”Everything can be mediated,” sublated in its immediacy and posited as an ideal moment of rational totality – on condition that this very power of absolute mediation is embodied anew in the form of its opposite; of an inert, non-rational residue of natural immediacy.’ (For They, 85) The group could not form itself as the positing, therapeutic group entity that it is were it not for the therapist’s role as that inert immediacy – a role that is ‘non-rational’ in the sense that one therapist is as good as another. So it is not surprising that Yalom only deals with the six-month therapist turnover rate that is common practice in groups in only two short paragraphs. (Yalom, 388) Although he does underline the group members’ concern over such transitions of leadership, devoting less than one-tenth of one percent of his book to this issue is telling: it is the occupation of the structural position of the therapist that is the crucial factor for the cohesiveness of the group.
In these terms, what would it entail for the group to achieve determinate reflection? Žižek is critical of the Feuerbachian gesture of recognizing God (the Thing) as an alien essence as being nothing but the alienated image of man’s creative potential, for it does not take into account the necessity of the redoubled reflection, ‘for this reflexive relationship between God and man to reflect itself into God himself.’6 This means that while it is ‘important that the group begin to assume responsibility for its own functioning’ (129), which Yalom argues is accomplished through the individual members taking a personal responsibility in their interactions amongst themselves (129, 229), this is far from enough. Rather, the group must recognize that the substantial Thing it attempts to grasp has already effectively split and engendered the group activity, embodied in the form of the therapist. The group members can ‘assume responsibility for its own functioning,’ can recognize itself as its own work, only by reflecting free subjectivity into the very group at the point of the therapist, for the therapist is precisely that point at which a group of contingent individuals are effectively changed into a group. In precise language, the group effectively posits its presuppositions by presupposing/reflecting itself in them as positing. (Sublime, 229) The condition of the group’s positing, of its subjective freedom, is that it must be reflected in advance into the substantial group itself, as its own reflective determination. (Sublime, 230) Once the group experiences this, it has reached determinate reflection and has fully assumed responsibility for itself.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
