voi Cesone thing of which dilthey was certain, was that the problem of placing shakespeare
within a conceptual framework could be approached only by the human sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften) which analyse relations of parts to wholes, and contribute to
understanding (Verstehen) within human lifeworlds, as opposed to the natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften) which examine cause and effect and which favour explanations
(Erklärung) that abstractly theorize, rather than contextualize, phenomena. psychology,
in dilthey’s view, was one of those human sciences. This placed the self within a model
of psychic continuity, a whole nexus of lived experience within which a set of inner
experiences were contained. This establishes a distinction between psychology seen as
a social science, and a natural scientific approach, since dilthey believed that while
we can explain the natural world, we could only understand the situation of the self in
a lifeworld. For dilthey, description is the preferred analytical tool in psychological
understanding, because it relates parts (inner experiences) to wholes (life experience).
This is set against the model in which a description of the natural world operates as a
synthesis of discontinuous observed objects within a unified explanatory framework.
in dilthey’s view, a ‘descriptive and analytical psychology’, could be used to mark
the difference between the continuity of a lifeworld and the discontinuous external
world. This raises an immediate problem for research in the creative arts, which is that
as soon as one passes from experience itself to the conceptual analysis of experience,
no matter how self- reflexive that analysis is, the forbidden spectre of a totalizing and
inappropriate explanatory framework arises. This explanatory framework threatens the
very division between the continuity of selfhood within practice and the life nexus on
the one hand, and a discontinuous, alienated, non- human world on the other. This may
also account for some of the superstitions still surrounding the relationship of practice
and research, and the perceived need for guarantees that practice and life experience
constitutes an inviolable whole that research activity cannot fundamentally challenge.
The term ‘practice’ thus becomes a guarantee of psychic liberty, and describes a field of
operations in which the artist and designer can work undisturbed.
This returns us to the problem of where and how to situate the self within a model
of research while preserving analytical rigour. at this juncture, a psychoanalytic
approach to the question of practice, and practice- led research, becomes useful.
While the relation of the analyst and the analysand must be seen as a social bond of a
particular type, this bond is an experimental and deliberately artificial one, in which
specific elements of the self are staged or deployed. Furthermore, while psychoanalysis
is primarily concerned with an analysis of the subject at the level of the utterance, it
offers no guarantees on the preservation of self- identity within a continuous framework
of experience. in fact, the introduction of the notion of a thinking unconscious
immediately places this in doubt. The crucial move that Freud accomplished from
preconscious thought to a thinking unconscious, precludes dilthey’s opposition of
a continuous life nexus and a discontinuous external world, and instead introduces
a fundamental discontinuity within psychic constitution, a splitting or division of
thought. The primary division within thought that psychoanalysis introduces, is
the basis for Freud’s ‘first topography’ that distinguishes between consciousness, the
preconscious and the unconscious, and also underpins his ‘second topography’, of id,
ego and superego (Freud 1961 [1923]). What needs careful elucidation is how the
positing of a thinking unconscious in psychoanalysis, affects not just the status and