How Can We Think Psychoanalytically?

Do you know someone whose certainty in themselves and conviction that they are always right has gone so far that they no longer regard any opinion or statement as even worth hearing unless it echoes the voice of their own mind? Someone who is always categorically certain about what is right and what is wrong, and for whom hearing anything other than their own voice has become intolerable?

It is easy to think categorically, to speak and write with certainty and self-righteousness, and continually congratulate ourselves on always being right. But what way of thinking can help us become something other than this?

To think psychoanalytically—what is also called psychoanalytic thinking—is a way of thinking in which we move continually and freely between what we ourselves believe and its opposing side. We allow ourselves to see the shadows within our own position and the points of light within the opposing position, and to understand both. Psychoanalytic thinking continually asks after its own hidden half and shadow. This difficult method is an entry into the dialectic of opposing concepts and an attempt to create a new synthesis of them in the mind.

Being stirred by words and judging them is familiar to us. Notice, for example, what you feel when you encounter words such as God, religion, faith, atheism, love, mysticism, and so on, and observe how we approach some words with a strong judgement that arouses a powerful feeling of agreement or opposition.

Most of us encounter words and their meanings through a sense of opposition and conflict. We are usually either “this” or “that,” and are almost always certain about being this or that, passionately defending what we think and what we are. If we are “this,” we attack “those” who are “that,” and vice versa. We live as though the concepts whose meanings we imagine we know stand in an eternal, irreconcilable opposition to one another.

To think psychoanalytically is a different way of thinking, one that requires us to look at the world “phenomenologically.” To look phenomenologically at the world means placing our present knowledge in brackets and holding it suspended and uncertain. By placing our belief in brackets, we allow the concept in our mind to expand and enable ourselves to understand more fully the complexities that a judgement-driven view can easily overlook. In this approach, we temporarily hold apart from our mind—in brackets—a concept we believe we know well and about which our self-righteous judgement feels certain. In the next step, we move from the bright side of this concept, of which we are certain, toward its dark side. We then look at a concept opposed to our own belief, examine its shades of light and shadow, and travel the same path back toward our own position.

By doing this—looking at the bright side of the opposing belief, the antithesis, while asking about the dark side of the concept we ourselves believe, the thesis—we can escape the trap of superficial seeing and superficial thinking and step into a deeper understanding of concepts and their internal “dialectic.”

For example, if we believe in “this thesis,” we should not build a straw man out of the ideas of “that antithesis” and then congratulate ourselves on an easy victory. By refusing an easy triumph over an enemy constructed by our own mind, we can honestly try to see the luminous side of the opposing belief. Only after genuinely understanding that bright side should we look again at its shadow. In this way we can distinguish the shadow of every idea from its light, and establish a fluid dialectic in the mind among the shadow of our own thought, the shadow of the opposing thought, and the light within both, so as to reach a more complex understanding of concepts.

This is something like refusing to wage war against opposing concepts, refusing the angry judgement and desire to defeat the opposing view, and instead examining more carefully the dark sides of these concepts. We can approach beliefs opposed to our own with the understanding that our final aim is to rescue their light and luminous side, while also refusing to become captive to the shadows of what we ourselves believe. This openness of mind is also a way we can choose to respond to our judgements of other human beings.

Through psychoanalytic thinking, we allow ourselves to struggle against our first and simplistic understanding of all opposing concepts so that we may eventually become reconciled with a fuller understanding of them. This takes us away from superficial thinking and simultaneously allows conflict and harmony—the primordial forces of nature—to appear in our thinking and writing.

Even if we are certain that the belief opposing ours is entirely demonic, we must still search for a point of light within it so that we can understand why others have chosen it. At the same time, we must see the dark side of our own thought and ask why what we believe has not been chosen by those others.