BPAS - Recognition

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Recognition

Catherine Audard and
Stephen Grosz

This article first appeared in the Spring & Summer 2000 edition of News & Events. We are grateful for the editor's permission to reproduce it here.

Recognition

Recognition seems quite straightforward, an everyday word describing an everyday experience. It does not, at first, appear to be an act involving the unconscious nor needing psychoanalytic explanation. What, however, is recognition? And what is its importance to psychoanalysis and philosophy? The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott saw it as the emotional response that makes our feelings, intentions and actions meaningful. Recognition, he believed, can only come from another whom we, in turn, recognise as different and valuable in his or her own right. He traced our need for mutual recognition from the earliest relationship between mother and infant into adult sexuality, and public life.

Where Hobbes and Machiavelli emphasised the individual as agent and the struggle for self-preservation, a number of contemporary political philosophers emphasise the struggle for recognition as a precondition for self-realisation. This second tradition - which might be called Hegelian but has a history much older than this name suggests - stresses the importance of social relationships to the development of a person’s identity. Winnicott’s work has become important to theorists who identify with this second tradition - often communitarians and feminists - because Winnicott, against Freud’s stress on the instinctual drives, argues that a child’s development is a manifold process which cannot be separated from the mother-infant relationship. Winnicott asks and answers a question implicitly posed by Hegel, namely: what is the process by which mother and infant detach themselves from a state of undifferentiated unity in such a way that, ultimately, they learn to accept and love each other as independent persons? It is Winnicott’s account of the paradoxical process through which this mutual recognition is achieved, that has attracted the attention of philosophers.

Where Freud held that an individual’s struggle with irreconcilable and unacceptable desires leads to an ambivalent and precarious adult identity, Winnicott held that this is true, but only part of the story. Freud failed, he thought, to appreciate the importance of recognition in our development. ‘Aliveness’ or ‘being real’, Winnicott found, is not inevitable, it can only be achieved through recognition. In his clinical work with children and adults he met patients whose lives were characterised by a sense of utter futility - patients who felt they had not begun to exist. In his attempt to understand them, Winnicott came to the startling conclusion that there is something profoundly paradoxical about the struggle through which recognition is arrived at. Recognition, he discovered, is achieved through destruction. Or, to be more precise, we find the ‘realness’ of those we love through our ultimately unsuccessful attempts to destroy them: it is the ‘destructive drive that creates the quality of externally’ that establishes the other as ‘real’, different, and, therefore, available for satisfaction.

‘It is the destruction of the object’, Winnicott writes, ‘that places the object outside of the area of the subject’s omnipotent control. In these ways the object develops its own autonomy and life and (if it survives) contributes to the subject, according to its own properties.’ Winnicott’s illustration of what destruction means between a patient and psychoanalyst recalls the baby at the mother’s breast: ‘The subject [patient] says to the object [psychoanalyst]: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you. You have value to me because of your survival of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Thus, in a radio talk on the BBC in 1949 he advised parents: ‘if a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from each other.’

The parent who never says ‘no’ does not make his or her child feel happy but omnipotent. And so deprives his or her child of reality and, therefore, any chance of ‘aliveness’. Conversely, the parent who always says ‘no’ - and ‘retaliates’ when the child seeks the recognition inherent in destructiveness - leaves the child no choice but to comply with the parent. This child will feel that independence of mind is loneliness. Submissive and acquiescent, this child will seek his or her parent’s approval because in his or her mind, the parent is omnipotent. The struggle for recognition modifies omnipotence in both the parent and the child. Finding a balance - between the two extremes of never saying ‘no’ and always saying ‘no’ - will require that both the parent and the child extricate themselves from a blurred, undifferentiated state of ‘symbiotic unity’ by recognising the needs of the other. If all goes well a ‘world of shared reality is created which the subject can use and which can feed back other-than-me substance’.

Recently, political philosophers have begun to assess the psychological costs of injustice and inequality, the humiliation and shame that follows from being excluded. Avishai Margaret, in his book The Decent Society (1995), asserts that justice is not enough, and that in a less than decent society, the denial of recognition is as painful as the denial of freedom. Can a just society be fair to all its members without recognising their particular identities? Is political recognition of ethnicity, culture, gender or sexuality essential to a person's dignity? To these questions, the German philosopher Axel Honneth, in The Struggle for Recognition (1995), answers that self-respect and self-esteem are both profoundly personal and political demands and that the violation of the body, the denial of rights and the denigration of unfamiliar ways of life all tend to produce evils that formal justice, equality of rights or official citizenship cannot prevent. Justice is more than the fair distribution of material goods. As the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it: ‘recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.’ To support this view, Honneth turns to object-relations theory, in general, and Winnicott, in particular.

‘Object-relations theory’, Honneth writes, ‘represents the first attempt at a conceptual response...it systematically takes into account the increased insight into the psychological status of interactive experiences in early childhood by supplementing the organisation of libidinal drives with affective relationships to other persons as a second component of the maturational process. But what makes object-relations theory seem especially well suited to the purposes of a phenomenology of recognition relations is not the intersubjectivist extension of the psychoanalytic framework of explanation as such. Rather, it can convincingly portray love as a particular form of recognition only owing to the specific way in which it makes the success of affection bonds dependent on the capacity, acquired in early childhood, to strike a balance between symbiosis and self-assertion.’ Honneth continues: ‘The path to this central insight, in which the intuitions of the young Hegel are confirmed to a surprising degree, was prepared by the English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott.’

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, written in 1807, Hegel had arrived at the conclusion that our wish for absolute independence clashes with our need for recognition. He describes two hypothetical selves meeting: each exists only by existing for the other, through recognition. But, he argued, this mutuality of recognition is unstable and must lead to conflict and domination. In her book, The Bonds of Love, Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (1988), the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin suggests that Winnicott’s description of the ‘relation of destruction and survival is a reformulation of and a solution to Hegel’s paradox’. Winnicott’s formulation, she argues, allows us see that the struggle for recognition need not breakdown into conflict and domination but can be resolved as a continuing ‘constant tension’. The vital step, Winnicott discovered, is mutual recognition, ‘recognising the other’.

Domination is not, as Hegel assumed, inevitable - it just feels that way. And this is because domination is fixed early in our lives - in our earliest relation to our mother - as a solution to the conflict between dependence and independence. For Benjamin, the ‘anchoring of this structure so deep in the psyche is what gives domination its appearance of inevitability, makes it seem that a relationship in which both participants are subjects - both empowered and mutually respectful - is impossible.’ Domination, she asserts, is a complex psychological process that ensnares both parties. To ‘reduce domination to a simple relation of doer and done-to is to substitute moral outrage for analysis. Such a simplification, moreover, reproduces the structure of gender polarity under the guise of attacking it.’ Domination does not repress the need for recognition, it enlists and perverts it. Her work on recognition raises a number of questions, not only about society and social injustice, but also about the ways our thinking and actions - including psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice - can reflect rather than explain domination.

On Saturday and Sunday, the 3rd and 4th June 2000, the Institute of psychoanalysis and the Forum for European Philosophy will hold a conference to discuss the struggle for recognition. Recognition: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Identity brings together eight distinguished psychoanalysts and philosophers - David Archard, Jessica Benjamin, Marcia Cavell, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Jonathan Lear, Avishai Margalit and Juliet Mitchell - to discuss a wide range of issues explicit and implicit to recognition. Profiles of the speakers and chairs, as well as the programme and registration information are contained in this issue of News & Events. This conference is open to all.

THE AUTHORS

Catherine Audard and Stephen Grosz have organised the conference held on June 3rd and 4th 2000 entitled Recognition: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Identity.

CATHERINE AUDARD is chair of the Forum for European Philosophy which was set up in 1996 in London as an interdepartmental organisation dedicated to the promotion of dialogue between philosophers in Britain and the rest of Europe. She teaches moral and political philosophy at the London School of Economics and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her most recent book is Anthologie historique et critique de l'utilitarisme in three volumes (1999). She has co-edited Individu et justice sociale (1988) and has edited Le Respect (1993). She has also published numerous articles on utilitarianism, liberalism, citizenship and justice.

STEPHEN GROSZ is a member and Honorary Librarian of the British psychoAnalytical Society. Before training as a psychoanalyst he studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Oxford University and University College London. In addition to teaching at the Institute of psychoanalysis, he teaches psychoanalytic theory in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He is in full-time private practice.