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By Root 2229 0

Nay, as it will presently be shown, such an attitude prevents us altogether from comprehending those defects in their specific moral meaning and import. For, given an essentially amoral frame of reference (as implied by the pursuit of neutral self-knowledge), we are of necessity precluded from consideration of the true significance of our person. First, we are denied the capacity to understand completely a person as such. So far as a person is concerned—that is, a free being capable of rational behavior for which its relationship with God and the world of values is basic and constitutive—appropriate presentation itself is inseparable from appreciation. Secondly, we are even less able to take an adequate view of our own person in regard to the fact that it is our own, since our method of analysis debars us from experiencing responsibility for that person’s conduct. This method involves a fundamental falsification of the perspective in which to place our object of research. It is an arbitrary mutilation of our pattern of comprehension which is sure to warp our vision and to distort our picture.

This type of self-knowledge is not rooted in any willingness to change, and so it is completely sterile from the standpoint of moral progress. People who are wont to diagnose their blemishes in this neutral and purely psychological mood will draw from such discoveries no increased power to overcome their defects. On the contrary, such an indolently neutral self-knowledge will make them even more inclined to resign themselves to those defects as a matter of course. They are more remote from the chance of curing those ills than they would be if they knew nothing about them. They are often disposed to admit their faults overtly, without restraint or reticence: not however from the motive of humility, nor under the impulse of guilt-consciousness, but because they pique themselves on presenting their vices, a psychologically absorbing sight.

Psychoanalysis reveals a similarly sterile and destructive conception of self-knowledge. Its adherents believe themselves to possess a particular capacity for objective self-knowledge, thanks to their elimination of all value viewpoints and their methodic principle of treating matters of intimate human psychology as objects of pure science. The truth is that such a neutrality of outlook, being completely out of tune with the subject treated, precludes the exploration of the depths of personality, and makes adequate self-knowledge impossible. The real nature of a person’s attitudes and decisions and of their spiritual origins can only be comprehended by us if we take our departure from the dialogic situation between subject and object: interpreting his object-references as acts of response. And that remains true, of course, if the person in question is ourselves. Once we disregard the content of meaning and value of the object to which our attitudes are directed, the very meaning of the attitude itself will become impenetrable to our gaze and all our hypotheses as to its origins will be mere arbitrary guesswork devoid of reality.

Thus, any scientific approach in the sense of a purely immanent psychology (built on a disregard of that constitutive trait of object-reference) must fail. It is doomed to fall short of achieving anything like an adequate self-knowledge. Unless we take account of the object that affects us and elicits a response on our part, we are essentially incapable of a pertinent analysis of our experiences. The obsession with a neutral approach brings in its train a general disfigurement of what we pretend to describe faithfully. Everything is flattened out and deprived of its dimension of depth; our deliberate blindness to the inherent meaning of a psychic act compels us to interpret it in terms of mechanical causation, thus dismissing the essential and holding onto the accidental, if not the imaginary.

The inadequacy of this kind of self-knowledge is confirmed by the test of its application to psychotherapy, which has proved highly unsuccessful. If diagnosis itself is dependent on