The Negating Body: A Psychoanalytic‐Phenomenology Approach to Explaining the Source of Dichtomizing

Abstract

Criticizing the tendency of modernist thought to assume a world of dichotomies does not explain the dichotomies as social facts with serious consequences for human life and relations. Based on a critical reading of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, this article elaborates a theory for such an explanation. It argues that dichotomizing, far from being universal to human experience or the result of specific historical circumstances, is powered most fundamentally by negating bodies, which repress an archaic desire in humans to connect with others and the world. The human body can also be socialized to affirm this desire, though negating and affirming bodies are not so much oppositional as they are implicated in each other's psychosomatic dispositions. The article enriches the anthropological study of human subjectivity and demonstrates the use of bringing psychoanalysis and phenomenology to bear on matters of importance to anthropology, related fields, and critical current events.

Half-Connecting Theory: Developing African Psychology Theory in a “Radical Beginnings” Direction

“…HCT provides tools for looking past the appearances of things, including things people may consciously use and value, to make plain this deep essence. HCT is an African psychology theory because it takes the African-centered principle of humans’ atavistic need for community and connection and makes it a standard for interpreting all behaviors, including the Euro-American cultural stress on separation and differentiation (Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Watson, 2016). With HCT, the African and European worldviews are not dichotomously oppositional; they are traced to a common psychological source and the cultural worldviews therefore develop into what might be called “intimate oppositions” whose interpenetration and tension is a source of complexity and paradox.…”

“…Essentially, as humans desire unconsciously to launch into the surrounding world of language, people, meanings, and infrastructures, it is not guaranteed that this surrounding culture has been built in a way that embraces this infant’s desire to connect to it (e.g., Smith & Bond, 1999; Triandis, 1994). For HCT (Watson, 2016, 2017), in fact, the European worldview is unique among world cultures precisely because, unlike indigenous worldviews, the European worldview evolved against the grain of humans’ natural inclination to connect with each other and the world around them (Bradley, 1981; Phillips, 1990; Welsing, 2001). Cultural evaluation has significant implications for the development of the unconscious and therefore how people come to experience feeling human at the deepest level of existence.…”

“…A maxim and a proverb that make connecting a positive value in African-based cultures are “I am because we are” and “if you want to go far, go together.” In these cases, the infant’s desire to connect to others is embraced, permitted to express itself, and consequently the unconscious develops with the grain of connection, not against it. Instead of developing a split or dichotomous structure, the unconscious of this infant is formed to embrace and support a relationship between the self and others as intertwined, co-constituted or, in a word, “mutually arising” (Jackson, 1998, p. 7; Watson, 2016, pp. 144–145).…”

“…First, the reason there are general designs for living for human beings is that culture can respond in only one of two ways to humans’ desire to connect. Culture can embrace or deny the desire to connect, satisfy or frustrate it, express or repress it or, in a sense, say “yes” or “no” to it (Watson, 2016)—to be clear, the first cultural way of responding leads to human relationality, betweenness, or “grey area” possibilities while the second cultural way of responding leads to imaginations and expectations of fixed, binary oppositions. These two foundational cultural evaluations of the desire-to-connect provide the broad parameters for humans to imagine and experience the world as either a cosmos of interrelated, kin-like beings or one consisting of fractured, alienated parts (Ani, 1994; Myers, 1988).…”

“…HCT (Watson, 2016(Watson, , 2017) is a theory designed to empower its users to interpret everything in the world that humans make, think, and do for its deep motivation toward either an African worldview or a European worldview. Every kind of human movement, behavior, emotion, and idea-as well as all forms of residence, architecture, communication device, building tool, fashion, utensil, appliance, and vehicle-reflects, supports, and facilitates one kind of cultural worldview or the other in its deep essence.…”