Lacan and Language
Jacques
Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who from 1953 until 1980, in addition to his
own clinical practice, gave regular seminars in
The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other
According
to Lacan, the human subject is always split between a conscious side, a mind
that is accessible, and an unconscious side, a series of drives and forces
which remain inaccessible. The cost of
human “knowledge” is that these drives must remain unknown. What is most basic to each human entity is
what is most alien. This (S) is the symbol that Lacan
uses to figure the subject in its division. We are what we are on the basis of
something that we experience to be missing from us—our understanding of the
other—that is the other side of the split out of which our unconscious must
emerge. Because we experience this
“something missing” as a lack we desire to close it, to fill it in, to replace it
with something. Lacan calls this lack desire.
Desire is what cannot be satisfied even when our demands are met. All our needs are at once converted into
desires that cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled. This is why sexuality cannot be considered as
the result of a need. The unconscious manifests
itself by the way it insists on filling the “gap” that has been left by the
very thing the subject feels is lacking in him or her, that is the
unconscious! (The
unconscious attempts to fill in the gap caused by the unconscious).
The Unconscious is structured like a
Language
Lacan
borrows some ideas of linguistics that Freud did not have access to. As we have seen, Saussure showed that a sign
is not necessarily something that connects a word or name to a thing, but is in
fact something which connects a sound or image to a concept. The sound or image is called a
signifier. The concept is called a
signified. Meaning is produced not only
by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also,
crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers
(in a given context). When Saussure’s
theory is put together with Freud’s it is not difficult to see that the
movement of signifiers, which generates meaning, must remain fundamentally
unconscious. Meaning may only have a
place in what Lacan calls “the signifying chain.” So the signifier has primacy over the
signified, which means that meaning is generated not by the normal meaning of a
word but by the place the word has in a signifying chain.
Metaphor and Metonymy
Metaphor:
substitutes a word for another word.
Metonymy:
involves a linear form of displacement.
These
two axes of language—substitution and displacement—correspond to the working of
the unconscious. Metonymy, which carries
language along its syntagmatic axis, corresponds to the displacement of desire that characterizes the dream work in
Freud. Metaphor, on the other hand,
corresponds to the paradigmatic
axis, the axis of substitution and, therefore, corresponds to that aspect of condensation whereby different figures
can be substituted or are condensed into one through an overdetermined nodal
point.
Compare
Freud’s distinction to Saussure’s formulation:
Signified Conscious
Signifier Unconscious
Lacan
turns the formulation on its head:
Sr
Sd
Henceforth
the unconscious, sexuality and fantasy can be pictured as the Signifier over
the signified. The unconscious is constituted in the same way as our intrinsic
ability to speak. Desire is left always
unsatisfied and is either displaced from signifier to signifier or it is
substituted for—one signifier for another—and the whole process makes up a
“chain of signifiers,” which remains unconscious but which, like the
unconscious, leaves traces of itself, traces which may be read.
Metonymy
follows the horizontal line of signifiers, which never cross the bar (of
repression) that leads to the signified and to signification. Just as desire is always deferred from one
object to the next, so the signifier suspends signification while following the
horizontal chain. Each signifier that
fails to cross the bar has exactly the same meaning. If signifies lack (desire).
Metaphor
is placed in a vertical relation. One
signifier can substitute as the signified for another signifier. “Crossing the bar” is really the action of
one signifier becoming signified by taking the place reserved for the signified
itself—the bar allows the substitution of one signifier for another:
Sr S
Sd î Sr
Sexuality and Sexual Difference
One
of the most controversial contributions of psychoanalysis has been on the issue
of sexuality and sexual difference. Most
famously Freud introduced a new definition of sexuality. We need to first look at the more traditional
one (which still has adherents today) and then examine the nature of the
Freudian definition. The terms on which
sexuality is usually defined turn on the relation between notions of normality
and notions of perversity. Freud was at
his most controversial when he stated that he had discovered a form of
sexuality present in infants. At this
stage the infant expresses his or her sexuality polymorphously (taking many forms)—that is, with no
particular fixed object or aim, just a kind of indulgent pleasure. The meaning of this pleasure is then
presented back to the adolescent in a kind of deferred action in which primal fantasies are given a more fixed
shape (helped along by the notorious Oedipus
Complex) with a socially sanctioned object type and a useful aim in
reproduction.
Deferred Action
Nachtragtlichkeit
describes the ways in which an infantile experience that is either
incomprehensible or traumatic is nonetheless somehow retained by memory
unconsciously and reactivated at a later time in a different context. The notion comes from an early stage in
Freud’s speculations and was used to explain the mechanism of hysteria, in
which a traumatic early experience is reactivated in terms of a less traumatic
later provocation. He sometimes explains
this with the mildly comic story of a young man infatuated with women. “A young man who was a great admirer of
feminine beauty was talking once of the good-looking wet nurse who had suckled
him when he was a baby. ‘I’m sorry,’ he
remarked, ‘that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.’” (IoD 295). This is not, of course, an example of
deferred-action, but it does illustrate the notion by emphasising
an inability at the early stage to understand or to act at all on experiences,
which are retrospectively activated in later life. Freud’s commentators have found the notion
more useful than he evidently did, in so far as the rhetorical aspect has become
much more obvious. Signification
involves the constant reactivation of significant material in new and
unpredictable contexts, which thus produces new significance and new
meanings.
Freud’s
Three Essays on Sexuality can be a
frustrating read, with its delays and detours and often inconclusive
observations. Perhaps because of this,
however, it remains one of the key books on sexuality and sexual difference
both within and outside the institution of psychoanalysis. There are two striking aspects to Freud’s
work on sexuality. The first involves
his use of the mainstream professional views of his time. He doesn’t simply critique these or oppose
them and he doesn’t even try to produce a convincing alternative vocabulary to
talk about these issues. So his quite
stark departure from mainstream knowledge is made within the terms and the
frameworks of that knowledge itself, which is why the standard oppositions like
normal and perverse, masculine and feminine, etc. remain part of the
vocabulary. However the system governing
the meanings of that vocabulary is both subverted and transformed in Freud’s
text. The second aspect involves his use
of evidence in relation to the professional views. Basically he employs the same hypothetical
framework but transforms it through his rigorous and tenacious insistence on
the evidence—what happens to the theory when one confronts it with these
facts? The theory
changes. Perversity, which was once a category
for sexuality gone wrong, a
perversion of normal sexuality (like fetishism, same sex desire, bestiality,
even masturbation), becomes the general condition of all sexuality per se. Normal
desire, on the contrary, which had an extremely narrow definition supported
(as it still is) by everyday common-sense assumptions, is now understood as
being one of the
numerous contingent possibilities of a general perversity. Thus Freud appears to be saying extremely odd
things in a rather traditional language.
In that language, that
framework, that vocabulary, however, Freud’s theories remain the only ones that
work.
Sexuality
Freud
describes the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in the following way:
Psychoanalysis
considers that a choice of object independently of its sex—freedom to range
equally over male and female objects—as it is found in childhood, in primitive
states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from
which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the
normal and the inverted types develop.
Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual
interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is
not a self-evident fact based on an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical
nature. (Freud, 1915).
In
other words, the normal assumption is that normal sexuality involves an
exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women. Both the implicit one way sign [men è
women] and the exclusive nature of the interest are present in the traditional
notions. Of course it is obvious that
sexual interest ranges all over the place and that women
fancy other people as much as men do.
But for the traditional views these would have been problems. For Freud, that is no less true, but for him
the normal version (boxed above) is also a problem and has no clear
explanation. For him the evidence shows
that sexuality is grounded in a condition where there is no pre-existing object
and no defined aim. The pleasure
principle is unscrupulous.
Some
rudimentary definitions of sexuality don’t much help. The standard definitions of sexuality grow out of husbandry. Sexuality
has the following related meanings: the condition of being sexed; being male or
female; having sexual characteristics; feelings or desires to a specified
degree (over-, under-, etc.); the condition of having a sex. Thus the sexuality of someone (their being
one or other of the sexes) gets extended to also signify behavioural
characteristics. You might begin to
expect certain types of behaviour from one or the other sex and you can justly
express shock or concern when people behave outside those norms. So what is a sex? The dictionary tells us that Sex is that by which an animal or plant is male or female; the quality of
being male or female; either of the divisions according to this, or its members
collectively; the whole domain connected with this distinction. (In so far as I am sexed, my sex is male; I
share this quality with the whole of the male sex; but I share the quality of
being sexed with the entire human race as well as the animal and plant
kingdoms). It seems that we are not
going to get very far without encountering some aspect of our universally
shared sexual difference. This is all
very well if you are mating chicks or growing violets. In that case the distinctions have a
practical and functional purpose. This
is the female and this is the male. Put
them together in these particular ways and they will produce. In so far as people reproduce in these ways
too, a kind of loose analogy emerges, conferring specific meaning upon each
relation that may or may not have a sexual aspect (in the biological
sense). The idea that biology is at the
root of human sexual relations, and thus explains human sexuality, is at best
grounded in the loosest of analogies.
Psychoanalysis has played an important role in helping to undo these
narrow and ungrounded assumptions. Along
the way it has revealed a tangle of problems.
Psychoanalysis,
without departing from the traditional vocabulary, develops an extended and transformed
understanding of the concept of sexuality.
Before Freud, sexuality was most likely to be defined as an instinct
with a predetermined object and aim. The
object was a member of the opposite sex.
The aim was for union of the genital organs in coitus. The sole function was considered to be
reproduction. Any kind of sexuality or
sexual behaviour that does not aim for reproduction is considered to be
perverse. Again the influence from
cultivation and husbandry is clear. What
is the good of a stud that won’t mount the mare? But psychoanalysis questions
the notion of perversity.
Freud
takes one of the most influential and highly respected authorities on the
matter, Krafft-Ebing, as an example of the normative explanation. This is Krafft-Ebing:
During
the time of maturation of physical processes in the reproductive glands, desire
arise in the consciousness of the individual, which have for their purpose the
perpetuation of the species (sexual instinct) [...] with opportunity for the
natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does
not correspond with the purpose of nature, i.e. propagation—must be regarded as
perverse.
According
to this view, nature somehow makes itself felt in the consciousness of the
mature adult, in the form of a conscious desire to mate with a member of the
opposite sex. Nature, in this sense, is
simply the need for the reproduction of the race (that peculiarly nineteenth
century notion of evolution is evident here).
The only “natural” satisfaction of this itch, this desire, would be
subordinated to the purposes of nature.
Anything that does not obviously lead to reproduction is not natural
(“it’s not natural!”), because it
would be a perversion of nature’s aim.
As usual with scientific views of this time, purpose itself, the Greek telos, is the unanalysed
aspect underlying these assumptions.
Krafft-Ebing, it is important to remember, is merely representing the
popular views in scientific discourse.
Freud
responds explicitly to these views at the beginning of his “Three Essays on
Sexuality”:
Popular
opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of this
sexual instinct. It is generally
understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in
connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the
manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the
other; while its aim is presumed to be sexual union. [...] We have every reason to believe,
however, that these views give a very false picture of the true situation. If we look into them more closely we shall
find that they contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and hasty conclusions.
In
the “Three Essays” Freud doesn’t substitute a new theory for the old ones. Rather he extends and transforms the popular
and scientific notions of sexuality by correcting the errors, clarifying the
inaccuracies and rethinking the hasty conclusions that make up what he calls
the “false picture.” A new picture thus
emerges out of the ruins of a now transformed vocabulary.
The
evidence against holding to the false picture is available in everyday
life. Freud also draws explicitly from
his fund of analytic experience, in many cases with distressed men and women of
the inherently conservative European bourgeoisie, who had never been able to
voice their discomfort about their own apparently perverse desires. The distinction between normal and perverse is
so riddled with overlaps that it is impossible to extricate the two. There are numerous perversions and they are
common (though not explicitly talked about in Freud’s time). Not only are there numerous varieties of
different object but also there are uncountable and creative methods for achieving
satisfaction. On the model of means and ends, the normal view holds that sexuality manifests in activities
designed to achieve the aim of reproduction.
The end is reproduction; the method is union of the male and female
genitals. However in Freud’s experiences
with his patients, the methods often overlap between the normal and
perverse. In other words very similar
kinds of activities occur whether there is an obviously reproductive function
or not. Men and women will have “sex” in
all kinds of ways including “normal”
coitus. The ends are as various as the
means. Furthermore, same sex relations,
as well as masturbation and the fantasies of all kinds that accompany it, each
exhibit similar routes to satisfaction, in terms for instance of flirting and
foreplay. Even a comfortably heterosexual
couple will use a creative variety of methods, including coitus, to achieve satisfaction.
So what is consistent in all this is not the function of reproduction at
all but the function of satisfaction.
Thus the reproductive teleology has no ground in evidence at all.
Evidence
against Normativity
The distinction
between the normal and the perverse is riddled with overlaps.
A great diversity of sexual “perversion”
not only exists but is common.
This diversity involves not only the
choice of sexual object but also the type of activity used to obtain
satisfaction.
In the popular view, the “normal” type
of sexual activity involves only coitus between members of the opposite sexes
with the aim of reproduction.
But the “normal” and the “perverse” are
not so easily separated.
For instance, the usual form of
satisfaction may become temporarily impossible, so a “perverse” satisfaction
may replace it.
And the sort of foreplay leading up to
normal sexual behaviour is usually also found leading up to perverse types as
well.
Freud
often found that repressed wishes and desires are of a sexual kind and that the
repressed wish in these cases is a perverse sexual wish. He concluded that the so-called normal types
of behaviour belong with the forces of rational and socially acceptable
convention defensive of the desiring and creative agency. In other words the normative version of
sexuality is socially rather than biologically determined. There is a biological difference but—like all
difference—it is meaningful only in terms of the institutions that organise experience is specific ways. And we are back in the rhetorical
dimension. The libido is thus a kind of
undetermined force that becomes bound by the various kinds of restriction,
paradigmatically the Oedipus Complex, that represent
the institutions of culture and society.
Oedipus
Freud
was struck by the similarity between the myth of Oedipus and his own
discoveries of unconscious processes.
The myth is most clearly dramatised in the
plays of Sophocles (who was a contemporary of Socrates). In Sophocles’ drama the unfolding of the
tragedy involves Oedipus’ gradual discovery of his own guilt. He discovers that he has in ignorance killed
his father and that the woman he loves and has married is none other than his
mother. As a consequence of his
discovery he blinds himself and exiles himself from his home. In fulfilling the oracle that begins the
story he fails to escape his predestined fate.
This is Freud’s explanation: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to
direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our
first murderous wish against our father” (IoD
364). Freud argues that the power of
this artwork lies in the ability of the poet to force us into a transferred
recognition of what he calls “our own inner minds.” Those same impulses (to patricide and incest
with the mother) are still lurking yet “suppressed” within all of us. Oedipus’ unconscious guilt (which is
literal—he is not at first conscious of his guilt) stands figuratively for our
own unconscious guilt. “Like Oedipus, we
live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been
forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek
to close our eyes to the scene of our childhood” (IoD
365). This last sentence has many
resonances. Freud points out in a
footnote to a later edition that it is this part of his theory that has
provoked the most embittered denials, fiercest opposition and the most amusing
distortions (100 year later we are often led to suspect that this is still the
case). Thus the blinding scene is a
metaphorical indication of the vicious resistance to the insights that
psychoanalysis offers. Freud also,
significantly, likens not the myth itself but the action of the play to the
processes of psychoanalysis. He says
that it “consists in nothing other than the processes of revealing, with
cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to
the work of a psycho-analysis” (363). It
places Freud firmly within the canon of arguments about false-consciousness
(along with Plato, Descartes, Marx and Wittgenstein). But we need to ask, what is the so-called
“Nature” that the Oedipus myth actually represents (the truth behind the false
and blinded consciousness). Freud’s use
of he word Nature
in fact already illustrates how he is replacing the traditional biological
ground of sexuality (the cultivation/husbandry ground) with an alternative in
the Oedipus complex.
The Phylogenetic
Hypothesis
Freud
returned many times to the question of innate disposition and perhaps the most
outrageous, yet most consistently held, version is the hypothesis of phylogenesis,
which follows a somewhat Darwinian trend.
Here, at its most extreme, the argument suggest that in human
pre-history a great tribal father was
actually killed by the jealous horde and that all of us are born with traces of
this pre-historical guilt carried through the genetic phylum (like hair-colour in the chromosomes). One thing is constant here. There is a constitutional anxiety (the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaarde had in the
previous century coined the phrase “anxiety over nothing”) that is related
unconsciously to a desire for the death of the father and a desire for union
with the mother.
Sexual Difference
It
is Freud’s account of the Oedipus Complex and its
modes of resolution that really grounds the psychoanalytic theory of sexual
difference. As such the theory is
diagnostic only in so far as it attempts to lay bare the underlying structures
that lead to certain tendencies in the relations between people. Unlike the traditional notions there is no
sense of what men and women should or should not be like, how they should live
in terms of their sexual differentiation.
It attempts, instead to find out how people come to be as they actually
are in the first place.
In classical
psychoanalysis the father represents a third term which must break the imagined
dyadic unit of mother and child. Until
the “father” interrupts it, the mother-child unit—a perfect self-contained
dyad—is asocial. The father stands for
social symbolisation.
In terms of this structure the distinction between men and women exists
but it only has meaning symbolically. Lacan provides the following witty
diagram, based upon the story of the two children, a boy and a girl, in a train
who, on arriving at a station see this sign:
The
boy exclaims, “we are at Gentlemen.” The girl responds by saying, “no we’re not,
we’re at Ladies.” The two doors indicate
the ways in which boys and girls are given the choice of two alternatives—each
of which has intractable meaning in terms of the other—as to where they each
are in the social topography. The doors
are themselves just signifiers as are the different sexes. Sex (male and female) is always subject to
identifications, which tell me who I am in terms of my gender. In traditional terms sex would be the empirical
dimension of sexuality and gender
would be the transcendental structure
or system that gives us its meaning. As
we have already indicated, however, the distinction between the empirical and
the transcendental is already extremely problematic, so we are going to have to
find some way of dealing with the difference
itself.
Lacan’s version of the triangulated Oedipus complex
(mother—child—father) combines Freud’s theory with structural linguistics,
developed as we have seen particularly from the theories of Saussure,
Levi-Strauss and Jakobson. The relationship between the child and mother
is imagined in the infant’s unconscious as something that was once
self-contained and entirely satisfying but has since been broken up. The post-break-up (which is a psychoanalytic
version of the fall from grace, mankind now banished from its eternal Garden of
Eden) is in fact the child’s beginning.
Its prehistory is nothing but an imaginary desire. In other words the child’s experience begins
with a feeling of something having been lost.
The symbol of this loss is like a third term that has come between the
mother and the child—the father who (in a literal version) comes home from work
at the end of an otherwise perfect day ordering his dinner and smelling of pipe
smoke and the intrusive outside. Lacan
calls this “third term” the symbolic
because it “symbolises” all relations. Freud had called this third term “the
father,” perhaps because of the specific nature of his own upbringing, his
dreams, and the dreams of most of his patients (who were mostly bourgeois
Europeans). But the father is just a
symbol too (anything can represent it). Symbolisation works because we make imaginary
identifications, which are based upon proximity and immediate experience (the
contiguous axis, or metonymy). What we imagine to be the case is always to
be understood symbolically and that makes it seem real (the paradigmatic axis,
or metaphor). Symbolisation thus
acts as an introduction to the world that is at the same time an introduction
of lack. The introduction of a
meaningful element disrupts the perfect unity of the imaginary relation, which
only has the sense of a perfect unity by virtue of the meaningful element that
excludes perfection. The experience of
lack is therefore the very thing that gives us the sense that there was
something to lack in the first place—it gives meaning to my partial relations
and opens my experience to the other—which, of course, I cannot experience at
all. The real in Lacan’s theory is a plenum.
A plenum is something
complete in itself, so full that nothing need be added to it. However because experience is determined by
the relation between the symbolic and the imaginary (Lacan’s complicated
version of the transcendental and the empirical) the plenum is figured only as an impossible outside. It can therefore appear as a horrifying
mysterious thing (enter the house of horror) that sometimes threatens to break
open the illusion (our social reality) brought about by the symbolisation
of our imaginary desires.
Lacan
was so taken by the similarities between Freud’s theory of the unconscious and
structural linguistics that he was able to come up with some fairly systematic
concordances. At the risk of over-schematising (which Lacan attempted to resist, though his
theory encourages it) we might chart them in the following way:
|
Symbolic |
Imaginary |
Real |
|
Father |
Mother |
All |
|
Paradigm |
Syntagm |
The Impossible |
|
Metaphor |
Metonymy |
Literal language |
|
Condensation |
Displacement |
Death |
|
Relation to the Other |
Relation to the object |
No relation |
Under
the Symbolic we find the system of
differences between signifiers that determines their meanings, which Lacan relates
to the metaphorical dimension of figurative language (this stands in for that
and excludes it). He felt that Freud’s
explanation of the dream-work allied metaphor to the process of condensation
(which puts different images together under the single sign of a metaphorical
nodal point). Under the Imaginary we find proximal
identifications that indicate the relations of individual desire, which Lacan
relates to the metonymic dimension of figurative language (this stands in a proximal and inclusive relation to that).
He felt that Freud’s explanation of the dream work allied the movement
of metonymy to the process of displacement (which in a disguised way displaces
from an object of immense intensity to an object of relatively trivial
significance). Metonymy tends to exclude
the meaningful aspect of language for the sake of being-next-to while metaphor
privileges the meaningful aspect of proximal signs by giving them meaning,
thrusting signification underneath them, under the symbolic “cut” of the bar between
signifier and signified in Saussure’s diagram of the sign.
S S
S æ S
Under
The Real, in contradistinction to
these runaway overdetermined signs, lies the impossible experience of the plenum.
The real stands for literal meaning (as opposed to literal uses of
meaning, which are always possible). In
so far as no experience of the real is possible (experience is the consequence
of the interaction between imaginary identifications and symbolic signification)
it stands for the impossible. The ideal, beyond signification, which stands
in for the fact that there is no real
relation, is the non-relational possibility itself, or just death. We can fairly clearly see,
I think, that relations of any kind are only possible through certain kinds of
signification. In terms of desire, the
proximal relation (I just want to get next to you) blots out signified meaning
in favour of contiguous relation (pure chance in its
extreme form, which is a little disconcerting for those who are waiting for Mr Right). This is
perhaps best experienced as a kind of jouissance
(the French term denotes ecstatic enjoyment) or petit-mort (little death,
a colloquialism for orgasm). In terms of
the symbolic, relations are overdetermined by many permutations of social
identification, including gender, class, position, status etc. Anything like a real relation is of course
impossible, as is a pure symbolic or pure imaginary relation. Everything seems to appropriate bits of
everything else like a perpetually shifting system of parasites with no
non-parasitical host. Everything to a
certain extent depends upon something of its others.
As
far as the Oedipal Triangle is concerned it is possible to map a Lacanian triangle over a Freudian one, in the following
way:
FREUD (OEDIPUS) LACAN (SOCIALISATION)
Lacan and the theoretical imagination
We
should say something about Lacan’s style.
In most people’s minds the difference between literary text and
theoretical text could not be more marked.
Literary texts are full of images, narratives, concrete situations,
sometimes wildly imaginative sequences, or they are formally structured pieces,
like different types of poem. Theory is
a dry discourse, with long, technical sounding terms, full of abstract ideas,
objective and perhaps coldly scientific.
It often seems difficult if not downright perverse, to apply these
coldly scientific systems of ideas to the multifarious and rich fund of personal
experience. Lacan’s style suggests that
he is concerned to enliven scientific discourse with the metaphorical fecundity
of literature. But, at the same time, he
seems to want to use the descriptive clarity of scientific formulations to
suggest, metaphorically, the otherwise indefinable and sometimes inexplicable
aspects of the ordinary common experiences.
As the contemporary psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written:
“Psychoanalysis began as a kind of virtuoso improvisation within the science of
medicine; and free association is itself ritualised
improvisation. With the invention of
psychoanalysis Freud glimpsed a daunting prospect: a profession of
improvisers. And in the ethos of Freud
and his followers, improvisation was closer to the inspiration of the artists
than to the discipline of scientists.”
So we can already glimpse the point of psychoanalysis for critical
theory: a confluence of separate traditions—scientific and artistic—produces
something new—psychoanalytic theory.
Returning to Freud
“We are not following Freud, we are accompanying him. The fact that an idea occurs
somewhere in Freud’s work doesn’t, for all that, guarantee that it is being
handled in the spirit of the Freudian researches. As for us, we are trying to conform to the
spirit, to the watchword, to the style of this research”
Freud
is, on one level, replying to an ancient prejudice—that which derives human
experience from consciousness. For
Freud, consciousness is an effect of instinctual neurological or biological
drives. The hypotheses
of two principles of mental functioning distinguishes between that of pleasure, which wants immediate
satisfaction, and that of reality,
which puts off the satisfaction of desire for a more appropriate and safer moment. We are not, on this model, born rational and
responsible, nor do we learn rationality and responsibility—these are simply
terms that describe the instinct for survival in negotiation with the instinct
for the reduction of unpleasant impulses.
Freud later modified his hypothesis of two principles and reduced them
both to a single, rather frightening one, called the death instinct. For him
what is typical of instincts is that they tend towards an absolute reduction of
all disturbing impulses (even pleasure aims for this). On the one hand the
death instinct aims for immediate cessation of dangerous impulses yet, on the
other hand, it tones this drive down as a dangerous impulse itself. So in the complex reality of social existence
this death instinct can be understood as both the law (the symbolic) and
(imaginary) desire in a kind of negotiation.
The game that we now know as Fort-Da, which was played by Freud’s grandson, exemplifies
the kind of strategies that the unconscious employs to contain the sense of
loss that operating in a social world imposes.
The mother—as the sole source of comfort and sustenance, leaves for work
and is absent for very long periods of time.
The infant plays a game with a cotton reel on a string, shouting “Fort”
(gone) when it is on the other side of the cot’s curtains and “Da” (here) when he reels it back. Symbolically the cotton reel stands in as a
substitute for the mother (oh the power of fantasy). And the reeling-in that the child repeatedly
practices stands for the imaginary control he has over a contingent and
arbitrary exterior. The reality
principle, of course, concerns the child’s ability to tolerate the truth of the
outside—oh no, the mother really is absent and this cotton reel is just a
cotton reel. The process of mourning
after the death of a loved one is very similar.
It is this process that allows us to now explore the increasingly
influential work of Melanie Klein.