Published: December 2021, Issue 40

Keywords:
Autopoiesis, enactivism, psychoanalysis, attention, autonomy, heteronomy, precariousness, aliveness.

Manos Manakas

Emmanouil Manakas PhD is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He teaches Counselling, Groups and Disability Counselling at several graduate and post-graduate programmes.

Abstract

Maturana, Varela, and Freud approached in distinct ways the riddles bequeathed by German Idealism in an attempt to think about the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. Freud placed action after representation, while Maturana and Varela considered life and mind synonymous. However, despite the ensuing discrete trajectories of their thinking, they chose to remain faithful to a tradition that understood the mind as action and expression and not as representation. Commenting on the importance of Winnicott's work in opening up psychoanalysis to a perspective that brought it close to action and expression, I discuss attention as a paradox. The groundless ground of the autonomy of our experience presupposes its surrender into heteronomy to find the aliveness of its expression, but in a heteronomy that is already the expression of a difference.