Levi has recently posted an argument on psychoanalysis and ontological realism, which I felt was worth responding to, if only because he tries to annex psychoanalysis towards object-oriented ontology, a view that I am obviously opposed to.

To begin, I find Levi’s argument interesting, as opposed to his earlier attempts to somewhat naïvely convert Marx’s entire body of works into ontological objectology in one fell swoop, but in my opinion I don’t find it entirely convincing, for basically one simple reason.

The beginning of his post does a decent job of outlining the difference between epistemology and ontology. Levi talks about how epistemology is premised on “bracketing” entities as they are in themselves and privileging the sensible realm of how we perceive things: accordingly, epistemology is, obviously, a philosophy of access. No one was claiming otherwise. On the other hand, ontology, etc., etc.

What I don’t understand is this: Levi goes from talking about the difference between epistemology and ontology (let’s call this “axis 1”), and then, after quoting very large excerpt from Roy Bhaskar, he switches to talking about the difference between anti-realism and realism (let’s call this “axis 2”). In other words, it seems to me that Levi’s argument makes sense only if we agree with this clever rhetorical substitution (I’m tempted to use the word “trick,” but I’ll give Levi the benefit of the doubt) of “axis 2” for “axis 1.” Note that the first reference to the word “realism” (occurring as “anti-realism” in Levi’s post) doesn’t appear until immediately after he cites Bhaskar, rather than being part of a larger argumentative syllogism.

Maybe I’m stupid or missing something, but how can one so quickly make this jump from axis 1 (epistemology—ontology) to axis 2 (anti-realism—realism), without providing any argument for why we should believe that these two axes of terms are interchangeable? I’ll grant Levi the fact that his reference to Hume sort of implies that he’s talking about a specifically anti-realist form of empiricist epistemology (as opposed to naïve epistemological realism, which he’s gone into quite some depth about in his past posts), but that doesn’t solve the problem of conflating the latter of the two terms (ontology and realism) in his set of binary oppositions, which seems a bit deceptive in my opinion.

Now, obviously, Levi has certain partisan commitments to ontological realism, commitments which predate this post, but unless he’s truly convinced himself so thoroughly of just how correct he is that he doesn’t need to provide any argument for why ontology and realism are interchangeable terms, one would at least expect some mention of why he’s substituting these terms for one another. I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that there are a lot of different forms of ontology that aren’t realist, as I’m sure Levi’s well aware of.

Ordinarily, such a substitution might not be entirely problematic: if the argument just ended there, we could just presuppose that Levi was extending an argument from one of his previous posts about how ontological realism offers a more powerful and coherent philosophical argument than does epistemological anti-realism, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post seems to be that psychoanalysis presupposes a realist ontology, which is another thing entirely:

Wouldn’t it be delicious, I thought, if it could be shown that Lacanian psychoanalytic practice could be shown to presuppose a realist ontology?

Of course, this isn’t exactly what the title of his post suggests (“A Psychoanalytic Defense of Realism” is different than “A Realist Interpretation of Psychoanalysis”), but I’ll put that aside for now. The problem seems to be that Levi’s extending his conflation of axis 1 and axis 2 towards a second, far more complex argument about psychoanalysis presupposing a realist ontology, as he writes. But, while he’s provided a convincing argument for why psychoanalysis is premised on certain fundamental ontological conditions, this is hardly tantamount to proving that it implies a commitment to ontological realism. And while his last paragraph purports to answer the question of where the “realism” is in all of this, it seems that he’s only restated what is ontological about the argument, not what is realist.

So, we might ask, where is the ontological realism in all of this? Why, we might ask, is this practice only intelligible on the grounds of an ontological realism? If, as my good friend suggested, we only went on perception, the practice of analysis would be completely incoherent? Why? Because the practice of drawing the differend between the Other and the Other is dependent the premise of something that we do not have access to through perception.

That psychoanalysis is not premised on epistemology or perception or “access,” etc., is not tantamount to psychoanalysis being ontologically realist. One can’t simply jump from axis 1 to axis 2 like Levi’s done. Now, Levi is obviously well-versed in Lacanian theory, so maybe I’m just missing the crucial lynch-pin in his post, or perhaps like Harman’s theory of vicarious causation, it is an incomplete argument to be followed up with something more thorough, but I’m kind of at a loss.

As a final remark, I want to note that Levi’s defense of the self-reflexive nature of psychoanalytic theory in this Ktismatics thread belies his argument in favor of ontological realism, at least of the object-oriented variety:

It is, of course, true that every practice has a theory of what it is doing behind it. The shaman has a theory of his interventions, the CBT a theory of his engagement, and so on. This isn’t really the point. What distinguishes psychoanalytic theories of practice from a number of other theories of practice is that it is a self-reflexive theory. Other therapeutic orientations tend to think of the therapist as something separate from the patient. They think of the problem as in the patient and their role in the treatment as separate from that problem. This is basically the medical model of psychological disorders. When a doctor treats someone for the flu, the flu is strictly inside the patient and the doctor is independent of that disorder. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, takes into account the transferential relationship between the patient and analyst and how transference structures the dynamic of treatment.

(Although it isn’t entirely relevant to my argument, I also think it’s worth pointing out that in this same thread, Levi additionally foregrounds the epistemological dimension of psychoanalysis, rather than the ontological—gasp!):

The point was that if a therapist does not know how to properly listen they end up making the patient’s symptom worse. When analysts attempt to mold their patient’s in the image of what they believe is good for the patient they further alienate the patient’s symptoms or desire, intensifying the lethal nature of the symptom.

While I vigorously agree with Levi’s argument regarding the issue of reflexivity, as I think it offers a powerful answer to the skeptical charges against psychoanalytic diagnostics of symptoms—and indeed, the entire notion of “symptoms” as such—I fail to see how this argument, which relies on a category of subjectivity that necessarily carries out the reflexive operation (otherwise, how can the theory itself be operatively reflexive? Does it make any sense for objects themselves to be reflexive?), chimes with object-oriented ontology, for which the subject is just another object. Here Levi’s arguments appear totally anathema to those of Graham’s, or even his own. I mean, quite simply, how could such reflexivity possibly function in a flat and realist ontology like Levi’s? In fact, Levi even says it can’t (!) in one of his posts titled “Self-Reflexivity and the Hegemonic Fallacy”:

What self-reflexive approaches cannot abide is an ontology where the agency of difference cannot be localized in any one or predominant agency. In other words, self-reflexive analysis cannot abide multiplicities where the final phenomena is the result of a complex interaction of differences without one presiding over the putting-into-form, and where the actors in these multiplicities are heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of different objects ranging from the human to signs to technology to physical objects to animals and so on. Unfortunately, for self-reflexive thought, the world consists of these sorts of multiplicities.

In my opinion, this amounts to a major contradiction.