Presentation of my reflections on philosophy and family during my philosophical investigations at the European Graduate School. IFTA - Buenos Aires, Argentina - 19 March 2010

1. Global Sharing in
Challenging Times
• XVIII World IFTA Congress
• Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Friday, 19 March 2010
• 8:30 – 10:00 am

2. Philosophy and Family
Therapy:
Intersubjectivity
Ethics
Biopolitics

3. Geopoliticus child watching the birth
of the new man
- Dali

4. Philosophy &
Family Therapy
Vincenzo Di Nicola
• Psychologist, Child Psychiatrist,
Relational therapist
Université de Montréal
• Doctoral candidate
European Graduate School

5. Key words
• Philosophy and family therapy
• Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry
• Ethics and biopolitics

6. Pedagogical objectives
1. To identify the history of the
relationship between family therapy
and philosophy.

7. 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.

8. Pedagogical objectives
3. To review three areas in more detail:
(a) intersubjectivity
(b) ethics and
(c) biopolitics.

9. 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

10. Uses of philosophy
by family therapy
• Inspiration
• Validation
• Justification

11. Other uses of philosophy
• Edification
• Consolation

12. Other uses of philosophy
• Clinical philosophy …
Consolation as intervention
• Applied philosophy …
Bio-ethics
Research ethics
Professional ethics

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

14. What is philosophy?
• The purpose of philosophy is to show
the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)
(1889-1951)

16. 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)

17. G.W.F. Hegel
(1770-1831)
(1770-1831)

18. 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)

19. What is philosophy?
• Understanding, clarification, edification,
reflection, groundwork, foundations …
• Critical theory, deconstruction

20. 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

21. What is family therapy?
• This can be imagined as
a philosophical question
• People often invoke philosophical
considerations in their definition of
family theray …

22. 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

23. What are they?
• Sigmund Freud
• Karl Jaspers
• Jean Piaget
• Michel Foucault

24. What are they?
• Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
• Neurologist &
neuropathologist
• Founder of
psychoanalysis
• Philosopher

25. What are they?
• Karl Jaspers
(1883-1959)
• Phenomenological
Psychiatrist
• Professor of
Philosophy

26. What are they?
• Jean Piaget
(1896-1980)
• Natural scientist
• Genetic epistemology
• Philosophy:
Jürgen Habermas

27. What are they?
• Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
• Psychologist
• Philosopher:
Structuralism & post-
structuralism
• Historian
• Critic

28. Philosophical deconstruction
• What do family therapists still refer to
psychodynamics ?

29. 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

30. Philosophical deconstruction
Why do so many terms for negative
psychosocial factors come from
hydraulics and materials sciences ?
• Stress
• (Mental) fatigue
• Tension
• Resistance

31. Philosophical deconstruction
And of course, so do the positive factors
…
• Resilience
• Bouyancy
• Rebound

32. 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)

33. 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)

34. Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry
• Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)
• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)

35. • Karl Jaspers
(1883-1959)
• Phenomenological
Psychiatrist
• General Psychopathology
Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry

36. Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry
• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)
• Existential analysis
• The Case of Ellen West
• with many rereadings
(R.D. Laing, Sal Minuchin)

37. Phenomenology and existential
psychiatry
• R.D. Laing (1927-1989)
• Scottish psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst
• Existential philosophy
and psychiatry
• Pioneer in family studies
• Critical psychiatry

38. Intersubjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy
(b. 1927, Paris)
• French philosopher
• Wrote on Lacanian
psychoanalysis
• The Inoperative Community (1982)
• Being Singular Plural (2000)

39. 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.

40. 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

41. 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."

42. 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

43. 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.”

44. Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
(1906-1995)
• Lithuanian Jew,
French philosopher and
Talmudic scholar

45. Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Ethics as first philosophy
• Philosophy as the wisdom of love
(as opposed to love of wisdom)
• The face-to-face

46. Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Buber vs Levinas on the face-to-face
• Buber: symmetrical co-presence
• Levinas: relation with the other is inherently
asymmetrical

47. 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

48. Biopolitics
• Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942, Rome)

49. Biopolitics
• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942)
Italian philosopher
• Key notions:
• Homo sacer/Sacred Man (1998)
• Stato di eccezione/State of Exception
(2005)

50. 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”

51. 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

52. 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

53. Conclusion
• The history of psychiatry, psychology
and psychoanalysis are intimately
intertwined with philosophical questions
• Family therapy as a system of thought
shares that heritage

54. Conclusion
• Understanding this history will help us
avoid reductive modes of thought
• Contemporary psychology & psychiatry
accept the notion of paradigms as
evolution and progress

55. 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.

56. Conclusion
• Leon Eisenberg put the question as
brainlessness vs mindlessness
• or psychoanalysis without brain vs
biological psychiatry without mind

57. Conclusion
• I expand the question to include:
• Mind (the science of mental life)
• Body (biological psychiatry,
neurosciences)
• Heart (phenomenology, empathy)
• Soul (meaning, transcendence)

58. Conclusion
• The questions for family therapy:
• A model of mind as relational
• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity
• Appropriating the common

59. Conclusion
• The questions for family therapy:
• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity

60. Conclusion
• Subjectivity as intersubjectivity
Our culture is at war with subjectivity
Technopoly is the surrender of culture
to technology (Neil Postman)

61. Conclusion
• Relational ethics
Ethics as therapy (guiding how it is
conducted, what its goals are, how it is
appreciated)

62. Conclusion
• We have not exhausted what
phenomenology can teach us by
elucidating human experience and
expanding our empathy