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Show Chapter VII. Pseudorationality 310 course objects of our awareness. By dissociating them, we dissociate part of our own awareness from itself. Thus dissociation maintains some minimal degree of rational intelligibility for the event, object or state of affairs, but nevertheless fails fully to integrate it into one's theory-laden perspective. In this case the thing is not lost to consciousness altogether, as it is in denial. But it is disconnected from the agent's own conception of the range of objects of his experience. It is conceptualized as the negation, and so the devaluation, of some concept or set of concepts that defines the agent's theory-laden perspective, rather than positively in terms of those concepts. Although the agent can positively predicate the self-consciousness property of a dissociated event, he cannot positively predicate other significant properties of it. So he can say of a dissociated event that it is an object of his experience. But he cannot say substantively and positively what kind of experience it is - only what kind of experience it is not. The concepts necessary for making it rationally intelligible are only minimally and negatively available to him. His perspective is not broad enough fully to integrate it. This is why the horizontal consistency within the positive theory that dissociation succeeds in preserving is degenerate. This account of dissociation is compatible with Philip Bromberg's. Bromberg says of dissociation that "the experience that is causing the incompatible perception and emotions is 'unhooked' from the cognitive processing system and remains raw data that is cognitively unsymbolized 5 within that particular self-other representation..." I go further than Bromberg in claiming that although the "raw data" in question is cognitively unsymbolized within what he also calls a "unitary self-experience" - what I would call an agent's theory-laden perspective at a particular moment, this does not mean that it cannot be conceptualized at all. Dissociation is distinct from denial in that dissociated anomalies, but not denied ones, can be conceptualized; but only in negation-concepts that disconnect that object from the rest of the agent's conception of her own perspective. These observations apply in social situations as well as in personal or interpersonal ones. Dinah, for instance, is, on the one hand, acknowledged as a member of her social community - whose social behavior at dinner parties, on the other, conforms to different conventions. After dinner, everyone else moves the furniture out of the way and dances, while Dinah stands on the sidelines, watching and making witty conversation. When she is invited to join in the dancing, she declines. From the perspective of other agents in that community, Dinah's behavior is conceptualized simply as a violation of established customs: as obstructive, inhibiting, or rejecting of those customs. It 5 "'Speak up that I may see you: Some reflections on dissociation, reality and psychoanalytic listening," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 4 (1994), 517-547; pp. 520-521. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
