Abstract
Certainty is neither an empirical finding nor a logical conclusion, but an absolute state of mind—a state of mind that does not tolerate the complexity either of empirical investigation or of conceptual analysis. That is why I will speak of the feeling of certainty. We believe in it; through it our experience becomes evidence. Typically our convictions are so far inside our sense of empirical reality that they seem to come directly from it. And while that confusion of certainty with perceived reality can be productive, as persistence in science and mathematics, its unconscious aim is to unburden the individual or group of doubt by projection, which further obscures evidence, whether of the senses or reason. Psychoanalysis can contribute to understanding the individual construction of certainty, through working with the transference that is alive in the psychoanalytic process. But it can also study social processes that create the reassurance of certainty. The process with which I am concerned is projection. For Freud, projection established the difference between internal and external domains, and, therefore, a relationship between external, perceived reality and internal, phantasied reality. In my view, it does the same for the social as for in the individual worlds, and with the same two consequences: it can support experimentation with the external world or a delusion of the nature of the external world, as in the delusion of race and the prejudices that follow from it.
There are so many people who made this book possible. The conference organizers—Matt Ffytche, Kevin Lu, Nikolay Mintchev , Mike Scott and Debbie Stewart, as always, backed up by Alison Evans, Fiona Gillies and May Andrews—chose The Feeling of Certainty from a paper of mine with that title. Bob Hinshelwood and Nikolay Mintchev had the idea that the conference contributions could become a book and with dedication and hard work fashioned it into a reality . And, of course, the speakers and the additional authors kindly and thoughtfully turned their minds to producing a fascinating text. I am grateful to them all.
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Notes
- 1.
Kant conceived of a moral law that garnered authority from the very fact of its lawfulness. The idea that this sort of immediate authority of rationality could—that the super-ego could—be motivated, could be passionate, could be loving, has been explored by Velleman (2006).
- 2.
By irrationality, I don’t mean ‘bizarre’, as in a strange symptom: I mean something more like the root meaning of irrational; one cannot make a ratio of it. 2/4 works, but 2/3 does not: it creates the infinitely extending 0.666666. Or, in the physical world, the value of π, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, which turns up in countless equations that describe the world, equals 3.14159265359 and on for ever. Add to these irrationalities, what we mean by the imaginary number, i = the square root of −1 or any number multiplied by it. A bit like π, it enters into many formulae that describe the real world, and it will drive you nuts trying to understand it. Irrationality drives you nuts. Apart from its derivatives and defences, psychoanalysis cannot describe the unconscious. What Freud said, and it is implied in all psychoanalysis, is that we experience the unconscious as projection, as if it were conscious—we project it and act towards it as if it were like consciousness. In consciousness we can take action against what threatens us, now from the outside, and can disregard the threat that came from the unconscious (1915c, p. 184).
- 3.
For example, Freud used the conservation of energy, according to which energy could be transformed but neither created nor destroyed, in his model of neuronal functioning; and this abstract process provided a model of the psychological processes of displacement, according to which one thought replaced another, as the affect—the energy of a thought—was transferred from one thought to another, leading to repression of the original thought: a thought remained conscious only while it was charged with energy (1915b).
- 4.
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Figlio, K. (2017). The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search for Truth. In: Mintchev, N., Hinshelwood, R. (eds) The Feeling of Certainty. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_2
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