Why Things Matter Inthisbook,DavidM.Blackasksquestionssuchas‘whydowecare?’and ‘what gives our values power?’ using ideas from psychoanalysis and its adjacentsciencessuchasneuroscienceandevolutionary biologyinorderto do so. WhyThingsMatterexploreshowthecomparativelynewscientificdiscipline of consciousness studies requires us to recognise that subjectivity is as irreducible a feature of the world as matter and energy. Necessarily inter- disciplinary, this book draws on science, philosophy and the history of religion to argue that there can be influential values which are not based exclusively on biological need or capricious life-style choices. It suggests thatmanyrecentscientificcriticsofreligion,includingFreud,havefailedto see clearly the issues at stake. This book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as counsellors with an interest in the basis of religious feeling and in moral and aesthetic values. The book will also be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion. David M. Black is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society/Institute of Psychoanalysis and a founder member of the Foundation for Psycho- therapy and Counselling (WPF). He works in London. He has written and lectured widely on science, religion and consciousness studies and is the editor of Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? (Routledge, 2006). Why Things Matter The place of values in science, psychoanalysis and religion David M. Black Firstpublished2011 byRoutledge 27ChurchRoad,Hove,EastSussexBN32FA SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada byRoutledge 711ThirdAvenue,NewYorkNY10017 RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,anInformabusiness (cid:216)2011DavidM.Black Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor utilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,now knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orin anyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwriting fromthepublishers. Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksor registeredtrademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationandexplanation withoutintenttoinfringe. BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary Libraryof CongressCataloginginPublicationData Black,DavidM. Whythingsmatter:theplaceofvaluesinscience,psychoanalysisand religion/DavidM.Black. p.cm. Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN978-0-415-49370-3(hbk.) – ISBN978-0-415-49371-0(pbk.)1. Values.2.Psychoanalysisandphilosophy.3.Philosophyandreligion.I.Title. BF778.B592011 121'.8–dc22 2010047769 ISBN:978-0-415-49370-3(hbk) ISBN:978-0-415-49371-0(pbk) ISBN:978-0-203-80874-0(ebk) TypesetinTimesbyGarfieldMorgan,Swansea,WestGlamorgan PrintedandboundinGreatBritainbyTJInternationalLtd,Padstow,Cornwall PaperbackcoverdesignbyAndrewWard Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: science and values 1 2 Consciousness: ‘a fact without parallel’ 11 3 Value-free science? Galileo and Darwin 28 4 Sympathy is different from empathy 45 5 How religions work: a comparison with psychoanalysis 63 6 The ownership of consciousness and the uniqueness of subjects 84 7 Mapping a detour: why did Freud speak of a death drive? 105 8 An outline of a ‘contemplative position’ 121 9 Selves and no-selves 139 10 The basis of responsible commitment 162 References 180 Index 190 Preface This book has been two years in the writing, and about fifteen in the incubating. It consists of a series of chapters, or linked essays, broadly on the theme of values and how they can be thought about in an age when science, often described as ‘value-free’, has such great and well-deserved prestige. Most of these chapters began life as lectures in professional settings, then as papers in journals or, in two cases, chapters in edited books,butallhavebeenrevised,someveryextensively,tobecomechapters inthisbook.Theyhavebeenwrittenintheintersticesofabusyprofessional life, and although I hope they do not fall down on scholarship, I have envied academic colleagues who have more time for wider reading. Papers‘incubated’oversuchalongspanoftimeinevitablycontainmany inconsistencies: some for good reasons (one’s thought has developed over this long period), some stylistic (one is no longer the same person as fifteen years ago), some for bad reasons (one has come to be high-handed with distinctions or important points one was earlier sensitive to). I have attemptedinthereworkingphasetodiminishtheseinconsistenciesasmuch as possible, but some will undoubtedly remain. Similarly, I have tried to eliminate repetitions as far as possible. I owe many debts in connection with this book, and many of the most important are to early figures and influences that steered me, long before I encountered psychoanalysis, to a concern with issues of science, sympathy, crueltyandinjustice,andafearofapossiblefutureinwhich‘gentlehearts’, as W.H. Auden once put it, might become ‘extinct like Hegelian Bishops’. Such afuturestillthreatens, thoughthe remarkablerecent developments in science,inparticularthenewinterestinconsciousness,seemnowtoawaken new possibilities, and propel the issue of values to the forefront of our concerns. My psychoanalytic debts will be readily recognisable to my pro- fessional colleagues: I have avoided technicalities as far as possible (except in Chapter 7 where they became inevitable), but broadly the line that leads from Freud through Melanie Klein to the British post-Kleinians has given memostofmytheoreticalpsychoanalyticlandmarks.Evenwhere,inplaces, IdisagreewithmainstreamKleiniantheory,Iamgratefultoitforitsclarity Preface vii andintellectualintegrity.Withregardtoneuroscience,evolutionarybiology andphilosophy,Ihaveattemptedtoguidemyselfbyrecognisedauthorities, helped by the fact that several psychoanalysts, in particular Mark Solms, are also neuroscientists, and several, including Jonathan Lear, are philos- ophers. In our understanding of early development, the major recent advances have no longer come from within psychoanalysis; I have been influenced especially by the work of Colwyn Trevarthen and his associates in Edinburgh; one major root of that work is in attachment theory, which derivesfromthepsychoanalytictraditionofJohnBowlbyandDanielStern. Beyond my professional home territory, my reading has been extensive but I am sure, to specialists, very shallow. Michael Polanyi I mention only occasionally,buthisexample,asascientistwhoventuredtofollowthetrue breadthofthephilosophicalissuesthatopenedupinfrontofhim,hasbeen a constant inspiration to me. I would say something similar of William James, a wonderfully daring and humane thinker, who figures nowhere in the psychoanalytic curriculum but who undoubtedly deserves to be read alongsideFreudasoneofthegreatpioneersinunderstandingpsychological dynamics. I discovered the physiologist Charles Sherrington only when most of this book was in draft form, but I felt when I did so that I was meetingakindredspirit:thechallengetothescientificvisionof‘values’was his concern also, many years before it was remotely fashionable. It is notable that these impressively broad thinkers – to whom one might add Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, and several of the originators of quan- tumphysics – allbelongtoamuchearliergeneration.Isuspectmorerecent scientists have often had to work too hard to achieve their professional eminence to be able to embody the depth of seriousness and wider culture that make a William James, a Freud, a Charles Sherrington, an Erwin Shro¨dinger, so exhilarating and so enriching to the reader. Onamorepersonalfront,Ihavediscussedtheseideaswithmanyfriends and colleagues over the years, and am grateful to all of them. A psycho- analyst lives in a world of continual serious conversations, with patients, with students, and also with colleagues, and my thinking, ‘like the dyer’s hand’,hasbeendeeplycolouredbymanyyearsinthisprofessionalcontext. More particularly I am grateful to many people who made specific com- mentsonsomeoftheearlierversionsofthesechapters,amongthemRobert Chandler,FrancisGrier,JohnHerdman,MarthaKapos,MarthaPapadakis andRichardRusbridger.IoweanaltogetherspecialdebttoDavidPugmire, who read the entire manuscript in draft, and with whom I have discussed many points in it along the way: the result would be a great deal more philosophically naive if I had not had the benefit of his input. Onayetmore personal front,I owe agreat debtto Juliet, mywife, who, though often disapproving of my sympathy with religion, has been gener- ously willing to discuss all these topics and to comment on many stages of the drafts. She has also endured with good humour my many hours of viii Preface preoccupation, and ‘absence’ in all senses of the word. And finally, my parents, the one a scientist, the other a Christian, both stand behind this book.Inmanyways,itrepresentstheconversationtheyneverhadtogether. I dedicate it to their memory. Acknowledgements Many of the chapters in this book have a history in previously published papers. I am grateful to the referees and editors of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Mental Health Religion and Culture, who published the papers ancestral to Chapters 2 and 7, Chapter 4, Chapter 6 and Chapter 5 respectively. Jean Arundale, then editor of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, first asked me to write a paper on Freud’s death drive (part of an exchange with Joseph Schwartz) which became Chapter 7 here. Chapter 3 had its origins in a chapter entitled ‘The challenge of evolution and the place of sympathy’ that appeared in Ten Lectures on Psychotherapy and Spirituality, edited by Nathan Field, Trudy Harvey and Belinda Sharp (Karnac, 2005) and Chapter 8 derives from a chapter in my own edited book, Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Com- petitors or Collaborators? (Routledge, 2006). All these papers have been adapted, some very extensively, to convert them into ‘chapters’. Permissions Chapter 2 based on Black, D.M. (2004) ‘A fact without parallel’: Con- sciousness as an emergent property. British Journal of Psychotherapy 21(1), 69–82. Reprinted with permission from Wiley-Blackwell. Chapter 3 based on a chapter by D.M. Black (2005) in Ten Lectures on Psychotherapy and Spirituality edited by Nathan Field, Belinda Sharp and Trudy Harvey, reprinted with kind permission of Karnac Books. Chapter 4, based on Black, D.M. (2004b) Sympathy reconfigured: Some reflectionsonsympathy,empathyandthediscoveryofvalues.International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85, 579–96. Reprinted with permission from Wiley-Blackwell. Chapter5basedonBlack,D.M.(2000)Thefunctioningofreligionsfrom a modern psychoanalytic perspective. Mental Health Religion and Culture 3(1), 13–26. Reprinted with permission from Routledge. http://www. informaworld.com. x Acknowledgements Chapter 6 based on Black, D. M. (2008) Reflections on the ownership of consciousness.JournalofConsciousnessStudies15(7),5–27.Reprintedwith permission. Also in Chapter 6: Excerpt from ‘‘In the Waiting Room’’ from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright (cid:216) 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Chapter 7 based on Black, D.M. (2001) Mapping a detour: Why did Freud speak of a death drive? British Journal of Psychotherapy 18(2), 185– 98. Reprinted with permission from Wiley-Blackwell. In Chapter 10: Epigraph taken from Polanyi, M. (1958/1962) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Reprinted with permission from Routledge (UK) and University of Chicago Press (US).