Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Ego Psychology: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
At the end of my post on trauma and the discourse of bio-power, I argued that if we want a form of psychoanalysis which will allow the subject to choose trauma over fantasy, then we must address the problem of authorization i.e. asking ourselves what authorizes the analysand to say “yes, that is what happened”. It is worth restating here that the reason why we want to achieve this is that it is precisely such a form of psychoanalysis which will meet the challenge of the decline of the discourse of the analyst created by the rise of the universe of capitalism. And, as we saw, the historical reality of the traumatic primal scene undergoes a shift in the trajectory of psychoanalytic theory when traced from Freud to Lacan. Although Freud knew that simply stating the blunt reality of the primal scene was problematic, he desperately tried to secure a place for trauma in the analysand’s biographical reality in the face of Jung’s relativistic thesis of retrospective fantasies. Subsequently, Lacan resolved some of the more symptomatic errors in Freud’s thinking on this question by introducing his theory of logical time and his ideas about a so-called “logic of fantasy”.
If an analysis really did take the form of a detective story, then the analysand would take the “yes, that’s what happened” moment as the conclusion of the analysis. But in Lacanian psychoanalysis, for reasons which we have already explored here, there is no such moment. So what represents the end of an analysis for Lacan? The end of analysis entails a shift in the analysand’s transference, from the figure of the analyst, via the real, onto the cause of psychoanalysis itself – meaning that every analysis is, retroactively, a training analysis. (The detour “via the real” will be explored in a future post.) The fact that the issue of psychoanalysis as a cause should come up in a discussion about the relationship between fantasy and trauma should come as no surprise at all. As we saw in my first ever post, it was in his case study of the Wolf Man that Freud most fully explored the tensions between fantasy and trauma. That same case study is also one of two places where Freud made a historically significant attempt to salvage his theory of psychoanalysis from the divergent ideas of both Adler and Jung. In his introductory remarks to the Wolf Man case, Freud tells us:
This case history was written down shortly after the termination of the treatment, in the winter of 1914-15. At that time I was still under the impression of the twisted re-interpretations which C.G. Jung and Alfred Adler were endeavouring to give to the findings of psycho-analysis. This paper is therefore connected with my essay ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’… It supplements the polemic contained in that essay. (“An Infantile Neurosis”, SE 17: 7)
In his ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’, Freud essentially expels Adler and Jung from psychoanalysis, literally casting their re-interpretations as an intrusive form of theft.
It may… be said that the theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own. But anyone who takes up other sides of the problem while avoiding these two hypotheses will hardly escape a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a psycho-analyst. (“On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement”, SE 14: 16)
Of course, Freud could not have had anything other than a wry smile on his face when he wrote the above words; for he knows that adversaries, such as Adler and Jung, could just as easily write their own Histories of the Psycho-Analytic Movement and put the facts of transference and resistance centre stage. In fact, Freud’s implication is that, because theories (in their development and acceptance) can be stained by repression and transference, then we can imagine that sectarian splits in psychoanalysis are caused by significant individuals (such as Adler and Jung) who have been unable to get beyond a particular transference or overcome a particular repression. This, then, introduces the question of not only who can practice psychoanalysis, but also who can write about it and who can theorise about it. The implication is that what drives sectarian splits in psychoanalysis are the un-analysed remainders of individuals. Basically, we are to believe that Jung abandoned psychoanalysis, not because he genuinely came to believe something else, but because he was not as fully analysed as he could have been and that un-analysed remainder sought expression in his analytical psychology which is merely symptomatic dogma rather than a legitimate difference of opinion with psychoanalysis. Of course, Freud is not oblivious to the potential comedy of different psychoanalytic factions accusing each other of simply being repressed:
Analysis is not suited… for polemical use; it presupposes the consent of the person who is being analysed and a situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate. Anyone, therefore, who undertakes an analysis for polemical purposes must expect the person analysed to use analysis against him in turn, so that the discussion will reach a state which entirely excludes the possibility of convincing any impartial third person. (SE 14: 49)
A Lacanian take on the above two sentences would note that it is not possible to gain a person’s consent to analysis – by virtue of what Lacan calls the analysand’s “extraterritoriality” to psychoanalysis (i.e. the fact that she has not fully experienced psychoanalysis), the analysand cannot be said to meaningfully consent to psychoanalysis because she does not yet fully know what psychoanalysis is… And so then watch how swiftly the cult of Lacan swoops in on its prey: the only way the analysand can complete the analysis is to come to know what psychoanalysis is – and that, by default, makes one a psychoanalyst. Thus, every successful analysis for Lacan is retrospectively a training analysis.
In fact, we can cause even more trouble for Lacan by arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is really an inverse mirror-image of the ego psychology school which he despises so much. Take for instance the following from Freud’s paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”:
[T]he special conditions of analytic work do actually cause the analyst’s own defects to interfere with his making a correct assessment of the state of things in his patient and reacting to them in a useful way. It is therefore reasonable to expect of an analyst, as part of his qualifications, a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness. In addition, he must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher. (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, SE 23: 248)
Of course, to the Lacanian, this sort of statement by Freud anticipates the worst tendencies of ego psychology to attempt to ‘normalise’ analysands; and, to that end, most Lacanians probably write off this sort of passage by noting that Anna Freud’s book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, had been published a year before Freud’s paper. We thereby dismiss these ideas as little more than the attempt of a proud father to push forward his daughter’s career. (In fact, Anna’s book is actually referred to in the paper.) But what if we were to push the Lacanian interpretation of Freud to its extremes and claim that what Freud is really saying here is that “model” and “teacher” are dialectically-related in such a way that all successful analyses are, retrospectively, training analyses? Of course, Freud believed no such thing explicitly, but the implications are there in his writings, waiting to be constructed in the name of theoretical consistency. The result of such a reflection, however, is that Lacanian psychoanalysis and ego psychology are revealed to be two sides of the same coin. And instead of confidently declaring their knowledge and understanding of the repressed traumas which have been haunting them, Lacanian analysts confidently produce contributions to psychoanalytic theory. This is precisely the point at which speculative materialism should intervene: something has gone wrong here if psychoanalysis begins with the promise of finding the trauma in the analysand’s personal history and ends up abandoning that search and replacing it with contributions to psychoanalytic theory. In its Lacanian incarnation, this is a practice marked by finitude.
Dr Meillassoux, Or How I Learned To Kill An Unconscious God
There is something fitting about the fact that this post is being written in an internet cafe (a couple of hours before I hit the cinema), with a sense of urgency which – although I’ve always viewed it as essential to my project here – has thus far been absent from the plodding style of my first few posts. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was because few people interested in speculative realism were trying to develop a consistent theory of the relationship between speculative realism and psychoanalysis. But in the last few days, it appears that things are starting to happen on that front. And the fact that some people (perhaps, in fact, all of them) seem to be taking psychoanalysis and speculative realism in a somewhat different direction to myself still doesn’t deter me from writing (though it may deter many from reading!).
The year is 1979, and I am going through a long, narrow passageway in a suburban housing estate on my way to school. At four-and-a-half-years-old, this is the first time I have ever walked to school alone. In the passageway, I come across a dead bird lying quietly on the ground. This bird interests me, because it’s a chick and it hasn’t yet grown feathers, so it looks purple and pink and fleshy. In fact, this dead bird interests me so much that I decide to reach out and touch it. And I almost do touch it – until I am stopped by a mysterious voice which echoes through the entire passageway: “Mark, don’t touch that!” Scared witless by this mysterious voice, which seems to belong to some omnipotent gaze which not only sees me but also sees my desire, I run off into the distance and never look back…
A few years later, I am recalling this event during a family gathering, explaining how – for a while – I really believed that I had heard the voice of God. Except I couldn’t have – for I was raised an atheist by my atheist parents. And, in any case, despite having had first-hand experience of God, I still failed to develop any religious belief whatsoever. It was then that I learned the truth of this event: my mother had been secretly following me to ensure that I made it to school safely, and it was she who had shouted out that mysterious prohibition.
Many years later, I am on the analyst’s couch, speaking of this event which seems to have played such a formative role in the course of my life – although it is only psychoanalysis which has made me aware of its influence. One of the themes – the state of being on-the-way-to-school rather than actually-at-school – seems to have haunted my life. I am a PhD drop-out who won’t give up on studying and writing. This state-of-being threatens to disconnect me from life, isolating me from my academic and non-academic friends alike. But then, one day whilst on the train for a visit to the seaside (alone), I am thinking about this speculative realism which I have heard a little about and which seems to be a scholarly exercise which also takes place (largely) outside the so-called “academy”. In fact, at that point, I know little of what Meillassoux says except his widely-circulated claim that whilst God does not exist now, it is possible that God may exist in the future. In a weird kind of panic, I break my train journey to Brighton in Central London for one reason only: to make a mad dash into a bookshop to purchase Meillassoux’s After Finitude. I read it in one long day, by the seaside.
At one point in After Finitude, Meillassoux makes an accusation against the whole of post-Kantian philosophy. We have, says Meillassoux, abandoned the Absolute. On this point, we are absolutely guilty. And when the metaphysics of finitude reigns in our universities, the abandoned Absolute is bought cheap on the street corner by a whole host of evangelical fundamentalisms and New Age mysticisms. But this accusation of Meillassoux’s had a personal ring to it also: for I too abandoned the Absolute back in that passageway, en route to school. It matters little that I was actually mistaken, the fact is that I heard the voice of God and chose to ignore it in favour of the pseudo-atheism of the culture around me.
And this is where, for me, an exploration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and speculative realism begins: the question of God. In Seminar XI, Lacan says that the true formula for atheism is that God is unconscious, not dead. And even if confronted with a militant Meillassoux, insisting that such talk is guilty of failing to claim the Absolute for Reason, Lacan would probably shrug his shoulders and agree. In Seminar XX, he quips that the problem with Jung is that he only ever spoke “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” In other words, if you resist Lacan’s reading of Freud and – specifically – his “logic of fantasy” and theory of logical time, you will indeed be able to excavate all sorts of interesting artefacts which allegedly belong to the unconscious. (In fact, I think in the ecrit “Field and Function…” Lacan actually makes a joke about this, pointing to some ludicrous examples. I’ll look this up when I get home.) But none of this searching for empirical artefacts will result in a clinically effective psychoanalysis. There is no subject who, at the end of her psychoanalysis, marvels at what she has discovered about herself and pats her analyst gratefully on the back.
In broad terms, my solution to this problem is as follows… We should start to reflect on the metaphysical and the historical context behind our symptoms simultaneously. All symptoms imply a metaphysics (in fact, Zizek himself points out that symptoms can, indeed, be Lacanian, Jungian, Kleinian etc, depending on the analysand’s theoretical background). And our symptomatic choice of metaphysics is a historically-determined fact (for instance, my choice of psuedo-atheism over religion). Meanwhile, instead of Lacan’s logical time, we think about how Meillassoux’s speculative materialism quite literally returns us to Year Zero i.e. 1781, the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. That’s the thing about Year Zero – it can return. Time travel, to my mind, is not a case of individual subjects moving between times but, rather, periods moving across the bodies of individuals. It is this event – the return of Year Zero in contemporary philosophy – which will allow us all, at the level of our individual symptoms, to reclaim the Absolute.
Freud: Lamarckist, Hegelian or Something Else?
To some readers of Lacan, what I have posted thus far in this blog must be approaching toxic levels of nonsense. After all, doesn’t Freud himself point out that there is no single trauma as direct cause? Is not the point to be made about the Wolf Man case study that the trauma of the primal scene “insists” (as Lacan says in Seminar XI) throughout the chain of traumas which the Wolf Man also brings to the analysis (the threat of castration by his nursery maid, the seduction by his sister at age three and a half, and – most importantly of all, of course – the dream of the wolves). This insistence of the initial trauma is what justifies our describing the primal scene as primal i.e. primary, the first in a series. We must address this issue before continuing much further in our investigations.
In my opening post, we saw that Freud concludes the Wolf Man case study by raising two problems, one of which was:
If one considers the behavior of the four-year-old child towards the reactivated primal scene, or even if one thinks of the far simpler reactions of the one-and-a-half-year-old child when the scene was actually experienced, it is hard to dismiss the view that some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time. We can form no conception of what this may have consisted in; we have nothing at our disposal but the single analogy – and it is an excellent one – of the far-reaching instinctive [instinktiv] knowledge of animals. (Freud 1918: 120)
In Seminar XI, Lacan folds Freud’s lack of certainty on this point back into the dialectic of the primal scene itself:
[A]fter all, why is the primal scene so traumatic? Why is it always too early or too late? Why does the subject take either too much pleasure in it – at least, this is how at first we conceived the traumatizing causality of the obsessional neurotic – or too little, as in the case of the hysteric? Why doesn’t it arouse the subject immediately, if it is true that he is so profoundly libidinal? (Lacan: meeting of 19th February 1964)
To ask why the primal scene is always either “too early or too late” might be to suggest that there is a right time, a perfect moment, for the primal scene (which Lacan seems to equate here with the subject’s introduction to sexuality). But Lacan’s point is that the primal scene only seems too early or too late from the perspective which thinks of sexuality as natural, whereas Lacan (famously) views human beings as “dis-adapted”. This dis-adaption is traumatic, in the strict sense that trauma then becomes bound-up in a relation of either too much (obsessional neurosis) or too little (hysteria) enjoyment.
We can tell by the way Freud makes reference to the “instinctive [instinktiv] knowledge of animals” in his formulation of the problem that he is not (yet) Lacanian. And, to Lacan’s credit, he never attempts to hide this. Lacan makes it clear that he is not impressed at all with Freud’s Darwinism, nor his Lamarckism. But the closing comments in the Wolf Man case study are of interest here, for they present Freud’s Lamarckism as a form of Kantianism:
[T]he phylogenetically inherited schemata, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience. I am inclined to take the view that they are precipitates from the history of human civilization. The Oedipus complex, which comprises a child’s relation to his parents, is one of them – is, in fact, the best known member of the class. Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodeled in the imagination – a process which might very profitably be followed out in detail. It is precisely such cases that are calculated to convince us of the independent existence of the schema. We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual; as when in our present case the boy’s father became the castrator and the menace of his infantile sexuality in spite of what was in other respects an inverted Oedipus complex. A similar process is at work where a nurse comes to play the mother’s part or where the two become fused together. The contradictions between experience and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an abundance of material. (Freud: Ibid. My emphasis.)
Lamarckism, we should clarify, is the hypothesis that an organism can pass along to its offspring characteristics it acquired during its lifetime. Freud is claiming, then, that schemata like the Oedipus complex, are not generated through experience, for (as he says above) they “are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience”. Instead, they are inherited. But, of course, whether they come from experience after all or are inherited as Freud claims, both possibilities take place in linear, chronological time. Lacan’s method of avoiding Freud’s Lamarckism is to introduce the dialectic of logical time. As he again says in Seminar XI:
The description of the stages, which go to form the libido, must not be referred to some natural process of pseudo-maturation, which always remains opaque. The stages are organised around the fear of castration.
(Remember, to illustrate his point that the Oedipus complex is phylogenetically inherited regardless of – and, indeed, sometimes in contradiction of – individual experience, Freud, like Lacan, points to the fear of castration when he mentions the fact that the Wolf Man’s “father became the castrator and the menace of his infantile sexuality in spite of what was in other respects an inverted Oedipus complex.”) In any case, Lacan goes on:
The fear of castration is like a thread that perforates all the stages of development. It orientates the relations that are anterior to its actual appearance – weaning, toilet training, etc. It crystallizes each of these moments in a dialectic that has at its centre a bad encounter. If the stages are consistent, it is in accordance with their possible registration in terms of bad encounters. The central bad encounter is at the level of the sexual. This does not mean that the stages assume a sexual taint that is diffused on the basis of the fear of castration. On the contrary, it is because this empathy is not produced that one speaks of trauma and primal scene. (Lacan: meeting of 12th February 1964)
So let us break this down. Lacan speaks of the fear of castration as retroactively structuring stages in infant development which, in terms of historical order, occurred before the threat of castration. Once again, we are in the presence of the logic of fantasy and the theory of logical time. And it is precisely because the sequence is structured by logical time, and not linear time, that the primal scene remains primal; otherwise, as Lacan says, the trauma would be “diffused” down a linear, chronological sequence of stages.
We should note the way in which the Kantian inspiration behind Freud’s Lamarckism is overcome by Lacan’s Hegelian-inspired use of dialectic. Freud says, remember, that “the phylogenetically inherited schemata, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience.” By correcting Freud in the same manner that Hegel corrected Kant, Lacan repeats a scene from the history of philosophy and therefore effectively reintegrates Freud back into that history. This is the price Lacan pays for avoiding Freud’s Lamarckism. And the consequences are terrible. In The Fright of Real Tears, Žižek – in order to defend Freud against claims that his elevating of a handful of case studies to make universal claims is unscientific – actually makes the Hegelian argument that Freud’s case studies are “exceptions which prove the rule”. But, as a close reading of the end of the Wolf Man case study makes clear, this is not how Freud thinks of it at all. Yes, the case studies are interesting because they present histories in which the schemata triumph over individual experience (thus raising the possibility that it is only through such cases that the schemata can be grasped and understood). But to move directly to a Hegelian reading of this aspect of Freud without first investigating the more or less explicitly Kantian intentions in Freud’s own understanding of the same business is simply untenable.
So is this a necessary price to pay if we want to read Freud today? What if we can do it another way? What if Freud’s work were to be taken in another direction completely – one in which Freud could only be brought into contact with the history of philosophy at the cost of reducing everything in that history, from Kant onwards, to rubble? In other words, what if we were to correct Lacan in the same manner that Meillassoux corrects Kant?
Trauma and the Discourse of Bio-Power
In an article (“Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse”) recently published in the International Journal of Žižek Studies (Volume 2, Number 4), Levi Bryant (who, incidentally, writes his own very fine blog) argues that Žižek’s work refers to a fully coherent “universe of discourse” – the universe of capitalism – which was only ever partially sketched out by Lacan. The starting point from which the universe of capitalism is generated is the discourse of the capitalist:
$ → S2
↑— —↓
S1 // a
This fifth discourse discussed briefly by Lacan (in both his 1972 address to the University of Milan and Seminar XVIII) sits rather awkwardly alongside the other four discourses he explored in detail in Seminar XVII. Those four discourses – of the master, the hysteric, the university and the analyst – sit together in an elegant universe of discourse. The algebraic symbols (S1, S2, a, $) are rotated by quarter turns to produce the individual discourses, with functions (agent, other, production, truth) assigned to the different positions to represent relations between the terms. In any one universe of discourse, there are only four discourses. Bryant explains that
[F]or each universe of discourse there are exactly four discourses and no more. The relations between the four terms remains identical for each discourse in a universe of discourse. Between the four positions of the formal structure of discourse and the four variables that can occupy these positions, there are 24 possible discourse and 6 possible universes of discourse… Lacan proposed five discourses, the four belonging to the universe of mastery and a fifth called the “discourse of the capitalist” that cannot be derived in the universe of mastery. The discourse of the capitalist thus suggests an entirely new universe of discourse populated by 3 additional discourses not discussed by Lacan (Bryant 2008: 43).
It is precisely the work of naming and explicating these 3 additional discourses which Bryant takes upon himself in order to produce what he calls:
The Universe of Capitalism
Discourse of the Capitalist Discourse of Bio-Power
$ → S2 S1 → $
↑— —-↓ ↑— —-↓
S1 // a a // S2
Discourse of Critical Theory Discourse of Immaterial Production
a → S1 S2 → a
↑— —-↓ ↑— —-↓
S2 // $ $ // S1
Of course, simply producing this universe on paper, in the form of these algebraic symbols, is in itself a pointless exercise – an empty formalism. The persuasive force of Bryant’s paper is contained in his claim that Žižek’s reflections on contemporary society and politics confirm the co-existence of these four discourses within a coherent universe of discourse. And, in fact, Lacan himself claimed in 1972 that the discourse of the capitalist had replaced the discourse of the master (out of which, the universe of mastery is spun in an analogous fashion to the universe of capitalism). Bryant demonstrates how Žižek’s work addresses the effects – especially the political effects – of the disappearance of the discourse of the master: the decline of grand collective political projects and the impotence of populist political protest (Ibid: 24-5). This theme will be familiar to most readers of Žižek.
Bryant adds that the disappearance of the discourse of the master also implies the disappearance of the three other discourses belonging to the same universe of discourse: that of the hysteric, the university, and the analyst. Again, the decline of these discourses is something which Žižek has written about or at least alluded to when, for instance, he discusses the decline in the efficiency of interpretation in clinical psychoanalysis and the emergence of a bloated network of diplomas and certificates in further education. However, there is a weakness in Bryant’s paper at this point, for he relates the discourses of the hysteric and the analyst back to their political, rather than clinical, functions. For instance, he tells us that “the protest politics of the discourse of the hysteric has also become ineffectual and has largely disappeared” (Bryant 2008: 24-5). There is nothing wrong with focusing on the political dimension of the discourse of the hysteric, especially given that it is usually this dimension which Žižek himself focuses on when writing about hysteria. The problem only really emerges when Bryant writes:
One of the burning questions of the entire body of Žižek’s work is that of how a politics of global social transformation is possible in the wake of the rise of the discourse of the capitalist. As I hope to show, capitalism is accompanied by the emergence of a new discourse [the discourse of critical theory], similar to the discourse of the analyst in the universe of mastery, that engages with precisely this problem (Ibid: 25)
In last week’s post, we explored the question of trauma versus fantasy. And it is my claim that, when considered in conjunction with the rise of the discourse of the capitalist, our answer to the question of trauma versus fantasy will come down on the side of trauma rather than fantasy. Before exploring this further, let us not miss the implications here: a new emphasis on trauma rather than fantasy will involve a rejection – perhaps only partial, but a rejection all the same – of Lacan’s theory of logical time (for, in my view, it is precisely the emphasis on fantasy rather than trauma which makes the theory of logical time worthy of consideration). And this would be, then, a return to Freud against Lacan.
The first thing we have to take note of is how we can identify analysands as somehow being “subject to” one or other of the two universes of discourse explored by Lacan and Bryant. For instance, if we momentarily put to one side Lacan’s theoretical formulations of hysteria, and consider only those classic fin-de-siècle hysterics who were so familiar to Freud and his colleagues (i.e. patients whose bewildering physical symptoms could often be dissolved if the hidden logic behind their symptoms was psychoanalytically uncovered); today these subjects are mostly observed in parts of contemporary society where the universe of the master seems to be functioning largely intact. I am thinking, of course, about evangelical Christianity where, under the influence of a stand-in for the master (for instance, a charismatic preacher), a subject suffering from hysterical symptoms (but who believes their paralysis, or whatever, to be a genuine physical illness) is momentarily cured. Classic, Freudian hysteria seems, then, to thrive in those individuals who are more fully subject to the universe of the master than those postmodern subjects who are, by contrast, subject to the universe of capitalism.
This is where I disagree with Bryant’s implication that the discourse of critical theory somehow replaces the discourse of the analyst as the discourse which can most effectively reflect upon the question of social change in the universe of master. For how will the discourse of critical theory enable subjects to think through their own individual relation to the universe of capitalism? Of course, one might argue that, unlike in the universe of the master, it simply is not possible to explore how one’s own unconscious symptoms are caught up in relation to the universe of capitalism. I, however, am not so pessimistic. Even though I accept that it is a little bit messy to hold open a space for psychoanalysis in a universe of discourse which apparently has no space for it, I think there is a role for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis here. The way to hold onto that role, however, is to pretty much forget about Lacan’s “logic of fantasy” and to return to the Freudian dream of finding a place for discussing the role of external trauma in neurosis. The irony is that, when looking at the universe of capitalism, this opportunity is staring us right in the face: it is called the discourse of bio-power.
Bio-power … refers to a social relation in which an immense system of practices comes to act on the bodies and minds of subjects, giving them form to optimize production. Such power is embodied in the schools, military, churches, prisons, mental institutions, continuous on the job training, the perpetual development of new workplace procedures and protocols, etc., all of which emerged around the time that capitalism itself came into being and which have continued to mutate and intensify ever since… If, then, the master-signifier (S1) now appears in the position of the agent in the discourse of bio-power, then this is because this social relation aims at mastery of the bodies it acts upon ($). The dream of bio-power is a completely regulated body that could function as a gear in the machine of production without friction, waste, or remainder. (Bryant: 27)
What is described here is effectively a discourse in which real external trauma takes place in real time, rather than logical time. Of course, such traumas always took place (Lacan, at least, never denies that) – but they never before belonged to a discourse. To illustrate my point, let us take an example from cinema: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is such a widely-seen film, I am assuming I am safe in revealing the “spoilers”; so let us remind ourselves of the plot: a young man decides that he would rather forget a traumatic relationship with his ex-girlfriend, so he undergoes a medical process (described as “technically brain damage”) to destroy all memory of the relationship, along with all the physical evidence (photographs et cetera) which are cleared out of his apartment. Of course, the imperfections in the process generate a crisis in the post-op subject who has to reconstruct his history in order to uncover the trauma. The trauma, of course, is nothing less than the brain damage he subjected himself to. There are many other films in which such traumatic subjective splitting, whether it be through memory loss (in Eternal Sunshine) or cloning (as in Duncan Jones’ recent film Moon), plays a major part in the plot. And although they are pieces of entertainment which generally rely on fictional scientific processes (although it turns out that the prospect of a Spotless Mind may not be as far-fetched as it once seemed), they essentially comment on a discourse: the discourse of bio-power.
So what role can the discourse of bio-power play in the psychoanalytic clinic today? In Lacan’s day, if an analysand’s dreams, fantasies and free associations settled upon a primal scene, the question/assertion: ‘So that’s what happened!?’ was (perhaps rightly) deflected/reflected by the Lacanian analyst into a theoretical “logic of fantasy”. To deflect this question is, for some analysands, no longer necessary. The discourse of bio-power allows the analysand to say: ‘Yes, that is what happened!’
But this, in turn, raises the problem of authorisation i.e. from what source does the analysand find the authorisation to say ‘Yes, this is what happened’? It is here that Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism will become indispensible to our investigation.
The Wolf Man and Trauma
This blog will begin by bringing one of the youngest movements in philosophy – speculative materialism (or speculative realism, as it is also known) – into contact with one of the oldest problems in psychoanalysis: namely, the problem of the relation between fantasy and trauma. In Freud’s oeuvre, this problem, although present in many of his works, finds its clearest expression in his case study of the “Wolf Man”. Following the analysis of this patient’s symptoms, dreams and fantasies, Freud hypothesizes the existence of a primal scene in his infantile prehistory. At around 18 months old, Freud claims, the patient witnessed his parents copulating; his infantile belief that what he witnessed was anal coitus in addition to an identification with his mother’s side of the act (in other words, being penetrated anally) resulted in the appearance of psychosomatic abdominal symptoms and a disturbance of appetite. Thus, the unconscious fantasy of anal coitus is at the root of the Wolf Man’s neurosis. But, in the same case study, Freud explicitly questions the role played by primal scenes in the actual triggering of any particular neurosis. Why? Because, as Laplanche and Pontalis put it, Freud was “evidently disconcerted by Jung’s thesis of retrospective fantasies” (The Language of Psychoanalysis, Karnac, 1988: 113) which posit their own origins and which can then lure both analyst and analysand into a false belief about how some infantile trauma supposedly triggered the neurosis.
Rather than accept Jung’s “disconcerting” thesis of retrospective fantasies – a thesis, let us note, which disregards the role of trauma completely – Freud, in the Wolf Man case study, opts for a theory of “deferred action” (nachträglich). The way in which Freud introduces this idea is, however, quite suspect. In the main body of his text, Freud writes:
He had been sleeping in his cot, then, in his parents’ bedroom, and woke up, perhaps because of his rising fever, in the afternoon, possibly at five o’clock, the hour which was later marked out by depression. It harmonizes with our assumption that it was a hot summer’s day, if we suppose that his parents had retired, half undressed, for an afternoon siesta. When he woke up, he witnessed a coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated; he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance. (Freud 1918: 37)
At this point, Freud adds a footnote which reads:
I mean that he understood it at the time of the dream when he was four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the impressions when he was one and a half; his understanding of them was deferred, but became possible at the time of the dream owing to his development, his sexual excitations, and his sexual researches. (Ibid: 37-8)
In fact, the content of this footnote (i.e. that he did not understand the scene at the time of observation) should really be in the main body of the text, where Freud is detailing what actually happened at the time, whilst it is the footnote which should read “but he later understood the process as well as its significance”. The effect (and probably the intention) of Freud’s obfuscation here is, I would claim, to bind fantasy to trauma in such a way that we still hold onto the belief that the primal scene really happened and that it had an effect, even if deferred. Although Freud’s footnote serves as an important and necessary clarification, it can be read in a symptomatic way: the revision in the footnote is necessary for Freud to avoid Jung’s criticism, yet its presence also allows the original (but now problematic) assertion of the causal trauma of the primal scene to slip through as a kind of “stowaway”, much in the same way that repressed wishes and ideas slip through as stowaways in Freud’s theory of dreams and jokes. By reading this footnote in a symptomatic way, we can argue that Freud is simply desperate to maintain some sort of connection between neurosis and the external world. The desire to establish such a connection takes Freud into new territory: that of primal fantasy. As Laplanche and Pontalis note, “when apparently on the very point of abandoning his search for a solid basis in a reality that has turned out upon inspection to be so shaky, Freud introduces a new idea – that of primal fantasies: the idea of a substrate, a structure which is the fantasy’s ultimate foundation, and which transcends both the individual’s lived experience and his imaginings.” (Laplanche and Pontalis, Ibid: 113-4) We will return to the question of primal fantasy in later posts.
In a sense, despite what we have said, we can also understand the good reasons why Freud is so desperate to directly connect neurosis with trauma. For if there was no theory of anal coitus at the time of the event, how are we to explain the abdominal character of the Wolf Man’s symptoms (if we are to maintain their psychosomatic status)? Or, rather, how could we, in the absence of such a fact, prevent the emergence of a defense of psychoanalysis which would rather absurdly state that straightforward physical illness can retroactively posit its own psychosomatic origins? A compelling solution to this problem is provided by Lacan’s “logic of fantasy” (the title of his Seminar XIV). This logic of fantasy is most explicitly detailed by Freud in his paper ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, where he detects three stages in a beating fantasy which he claims regularly appears in psychoanalysis. In the first stage, the fantasizer witnesses her father beat another child. In the second stage, the fantasizer is beaten by her father. In the third stage, the fantasizer witnesses a father-substitute such as a teacher or some other figure of authority beating several children. Freud writes:
[The] second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less necessary on that account. (Freud 1919: 185)
Lacan’s “logic of fantasy” holds that the second stage exists as a logical supposition – to reject the existence of the second stage because it never actually “took place” is to fail to realize how the notion of “taking place” itself implies the existence of some transcendent container (such as linear time, as opposed to what Lacan claims fantasy operates within i.e. what he calls “logical time”). What is interesting here, however, is that in discussing the case of the Wolf Man, Freud does indeed imply the existence of a transcendent container when, at the end of the case, he writes:
There remain two problems, of the many that it raises, which seem to me to deserve special emphasis. The first relates to the phylogenetically inherited schemata, which, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience. I am inclined to take the view that they are precipitates from the history of human civilization. The Oedipus complex, which comprises a child’s relation to his parents, is one of them… Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodeled in the imagination – a process which might very profitably be followed out in detail. It is precisely such cases that are calculated to convince us of the independent existence of the schema… The contradictions between experience and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an abundance of material… The second problem is not far removed from the first, but it is incomparably more important. If one considers the behavior of the four-year-old child towards the reactivated primal scene, or even if one thinks of the far simpler reactions of the one-and-a-half-year-old child when the scene was actually experienced, it is hard to dismiss the view that some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time. We can form no conception of what this may have consisted in; we have nothing at our disposal but the single analogy – and it is an excellent one – of the far-reaching instinctive [instinktiv] knowledge of animals. (Ibid: 119-20)
It is clear from this passage that Freud views the problem rather differently from Lacan. Without Lacan’s concept of the Real, Freud is still anxious not to allow his theory of deferred action to become the equivalent of Jung’s retrospective fantasies, with no reference at all to trauma or the external world. For this reason, the issue of whether there was indeed ever an infantile theory of anal coitus in the imagination of the Wolf Man is subsumed under the broader question of whether the primal scene actually took place. Meanwhile, it is precisely because he does have a particular understanding of the Real that Lacan confidently concerns himself with securing the existence of the theory of anal coitus as a stage in the fantasy, rather than securing the existence of the primal scene as an actual event. We might even go so far as to describe the relationship between Freud and Lacan on this point as something of a Žižekian “parallax gap”.
