The Psychoanalytic field

        The method of free association was Freud’s response to one of the most challenging tasks with which psychoanalysis has had to grapple over its history: the elaboration of a system of contact, traversal, and translation between the primary and secondary processes as two ways of thinking, and hence as two ways of being, that are radically alien to one another.

        In their elaborations of the unconscious, Lacanism and Ego Psychology seem to stand on the opposite ends of a conceptual scale that pits the ineluctable foreignness of the symbolic against the domesticity of development. One recognizes the effects of such theorizing in the tone of the texts as well: from the turgidly undecipherable to the rigidly banal. What a shame it is to have reduced the workings of the unconscious to the structures of language or the chronologies of development, and to have colonized the former with the disciplines and strategies of either of the latter.

        While relying heavily on Klein’s notion of unconscious “phantasy,” Winnicott articulates the fact of an in-between that facilitates and organizes the passages between subjective and objective, self and other. Neither a hallucination nor a concretization, the “transitional” object is the site of infantile illusion and, by extension, adult creativity. It is neither simply given nor autocratically created; it is a found object in the sense that, while belonging to an external reality, it is invested with the qualities that suit the momentary psychodynamic purposes of the individual that “finds” it. It becomes “transitional” at the very moment of its finding.

        Of all the principal figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, and in spite of the ideological restrictions of his parental metaphors, Winnicott is perhaps one of the most faithful of Freudians. Rather than upon the uncovering of history, the enunciation of truth, the resolution of conflict, or the mastery over anxiety, it is upon the capacity to “find” and re-deploy creatively one’s own objects, in other words to play, that Winnicott bases his principal mark of health. Instead of merely a tool for analytic inquiry, the capacity to associate freely has now been clearly identified as the goal of that inquiry and, ultimately, as a necessary strategy for “healthy” living. (I think there is a bridge here between Winnicottian play and Deleuzo-Guattarian bricolage.)

        This makes a lot of sense to me. And yet, rare indeed are those that undertake an analysis because they want to “play.”

        That such uncovering leaves open the questions of “efficacy” and so-called “therapeutic value,” that, in other words, the uncovering does not necessarily make people “feel better,” assuming we already know and agree on what the expression actually means, the way doctors and parents are presumably supposed to make patients and children “feel better,” may be a concern for those attempting to justify the practice in the eyes of a culture grounded in the principles of expediency and comfort. But it is precisely the work of such a culture that psychoanalysis has been designed to counter. This is no less true nowadays than it was in the time of Freud. Sadly, the practice has become increasingly consolidated around the safety and satisfaction certain objects may bring to the process of reproduction and less around the complexity and unpredictability of our desires.

        It is for this reason that, I believe, the parental metaphor has continued to hold great sway over the profession. Unlike all the other models that have enjoyed varying degrees of success (I am thinking of friendship, education, witnessing, or even healing) parenting comes closest to elevating repetition from a basic physiological need and/or a pathological compulsion to the status of a stable and overarching principle of psychic life.

The secondary revision of the product of the dream-work is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one… [A] system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one (Freud, 1953, 95).

        Unwittingly, Freud may very well have been predicting and facilitating the course of the criticism the intellectual function of his own apparatus was soon to suffer. Indeed, his appraisal of a system’s need for unity and intelligibility applies equally to metapsychology as it does to the structures of which it speaks. The psychoanalyst’s view stands here in stark opposition to Ockham’s razor as the principle of theoretical parsimony that has dominated much of the West’s scientific inquiry and the aesthetic standards of its formulations from the early Renaissance onwards. Interestingly enough, psychoanalysis too has often found itself loath to resist such a principle. No matter its internal struggles and divisions, the discipline has invariably sought to extract from the richness of its subject matter as basic and as universal a set of dynamics and categories as it possibly could. For Freud, it was the unconscious as a process that negotiates the pleasures and pressures of the libido; for Klein, envy and gratitude provided the major keys to the psyche’s workings and possible transformations; for Lacan, registers and mathemes were the code words by which the practice of the cure may be assessed and validated; and the list goes on.

        Whether axiomatic or real, explicit or concealed, I would like to suggest that one of the main motivating factors, or “reasons” as Freud wishes them to be, behind such a pursuit of systematic unity and simplicity is the discipline’s long-standing thirst for recognition as a member in our modern day version of the Greek Pantheon: Science. The price for such recognition cannot be overestimated. Much like the dramatic storm around which it has organized its practice and much like the blind hero around whom it has mounted its own clinical and intellectual storm, psychoanalysis has remained largely blind to the material and psychological paucity of its understanding of the psyche and, by extension, of sexuality, as tragically Oedipal and nothing but.

        For the most part, the psychoanalytic profession persists in its refusal to acknowledge that for it to do justice to the panoply of human passions it must recognize itself, as both a method and a community, as subject to them. Instead, it often discourses on sexuality in the most un-seductive of styles and on desire in the most un-desirous. Humour it virtually ignores; humility it has yet to discover; auto-irony it finds intolerable. Sadly, it stands alone as did Antigone, tragic in her certitude but no less comedic in her zeal.

        Two aspects of the example of Antigone are instructive on this point: the first is political the second psychological. Her father’s daughter, Antigone thought that she too could circumvent the laws of the state in favour of a heavenly commandment to which she declared herself subject. To her mind, she also became that commandment’s enforcer, protector, and agent. Initially its tool, she subtly but steadily transformed herself into its master; subject to it, she became its subject. Anarchist, resistance fighter, or proto-feminist she may have for her modern readers become, for most of her Athenian audiences she, like her father, would have probably remained the blasphemous pretender to a seat at the Olympian high table; her hubris would have been a trigger for her audience’s indignation, dismissal, and pity. Quite likely, her death would have been seen as the product of a misplaced and disgraceful sense of allegiance rather than a lofty sacrifice since, and to the mind of her contemporaries, suicide was cowardly self-indulgent and she was but a woman, irrational and unenviable. On the other hand, Creon’s final torment at his loss of honour and family may very well have been the play’s climactic moment and the worthiest of its audience’s compassion and sympathy. On this score, and while his restaging may have served specific political purposes at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not escape the trap of casting the intransigent and overly self-assured as resistor when she could have been equally cast as fascist.

        The other aspect to Antigone’s scenario worth noting here is that, sadly, her psychological structure has completely eluded much of the current analysis of the Theban trilogy. Let us pause for a moment and consider the following: Antigone is the product of incest; her father was a murderer and her mother had committed suicide; her two brothers failed at containing their sibling rivalries and eventually killed one another; and much of her adult life was spent ministering to a man toward whom she must have felt some hint of revulsion. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that, as one might say these days, she had “baggage?!” Would it be even remotely possible that, as someone who had lived in the midst of and been shaped by so much unmitigated hostility and destruction, she could only come to act on her envy toward Creon as the one relative who was not manifestly implicated by the oracles and their damned and damning prophecies? She is carried away by her rage at her (grand-) uncle; she will trigger a chain of events that will leave him weak, sexless, and childless. She will effectively castrate him. True to her name, Antigone is portrayed as not only the one without progeny, but also as the woman who will arrogate for herself the manly power to bring an entire family’s lineage to its end. She will effectively embody that vision of femininity men have reviled and women have fought against.

        In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book? What qualifies someone like me to diagnose it in an interesting way, so as to avoid making amateurish or pop-postmodern pronouncements? … Does any case study, short of one that inaugurates an entirely new world-historical Regime of Signs, show what a historical event is qua event, or show in general how the now captures the ‘why?,’ or how the ‘why?’ captures the now?” (154). Lampert’s poetic modesty does not preclude scholarly rigour; it reinforces it. Witness not only his illuminating digressions on Hume, Hegel, Bergson, and Derrida but, and much more encouragingly, his sense of responsibility to detail: 4 arguments for intratemporality, 13 for the pure past, and 2 for the dark precursors of the future; 4 major genealogies of the syntheses of time, 4 similarities and 6 differences with Derrida on dates, and 7 confrontations with Hegel on that selfsame topic; 13 layers to Alice’s obsession with size, 12 features to discuss in relation to the question of why an event occurs when it does, 5 senses of “falling back into history,” and 4 elements to the theory of consistency.

        Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9).

        Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well. This is why Lampert’s text is neither an introduction to one aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought nor is it an exhaustive account of that aspect. It is rather a plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari deployed the practice in the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a plateau that revisits and repeats, which is to say rearticulates, the as of yet unarticulated—or perhaps that which is beyond articulation—becoming.

        I would like to take a moment and consider not Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History but Lampert’s History of Philosophy. I am convinced that Lampert is qualified to “diagnose” (and this is his term), and has indeed diagnosed, the genuine philosophical event “Deleuze-Guattari.” This is why I would like to invite him to deploy his philosophy of history as a measure and an understanding of his history of the philosophy of history, of his history of philosophy tout court, with all of its attendant simultaneities and serialities. If the past never actually dies, if, as Lampert affirms, “an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous … [and] the past is a real place on the body” (9), what then is the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s own past on their philosophical body? What, for instance, is the status of their long standing investments in psychoanalysis, intellectually, as with Deleuze from his Presentation of Sacher Masoch to Difference and Repetition, to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and clinically, as with Guattari the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole freudienne, and institutional psychotherapist at the La Borde clinic? I pose this question of the so-called “past” because I am not sure how to reinterpret Lampert’s deployment of the double dating of any event—that the first time it appears is when it appears for the second time—without Freud’s nachträglichkeit or Lacan’s après coups. I am also not sure how to re-assess the discussion in Difference and Repetition without Deleuze’s treatment of Freud’s elaborations on the pleasure principle and its beyond as a founding mechanism of repetition. I am even less sure how to understand the syntheses of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus as the “motor of history” without reference to the laws of the dynamic unconscious (condensation and displacement) and their structuralist renderings (metaphor and metonymy)?

        There is nothing triumphal about such an observation since Freud’s was not a logical inconsistency, let alone a clinical hypocrisy. Freud’s was the deep-seated psychological ambivalence one lives through and witnesses daily, on the couch, in the bedroom, and on the street. What the ambivalence does however is betray the sway of not a single myth but that of a host of Olympian characters crowded inside a Pandora’s box from which the psychoanalyst falsely hoped he could retrieve only those scripts he had deemed useful. Alongside an Oedipus, a Dionysus, and a Sisyphus, one can also find an Adonis born out of incest but suffering none of the trials of an Antigone, or a Thamyris blinded by the Muses for his mortal vanity rather than for his poetic blunders, or even a Nemesis countering the careless and haphazard fortunes bestowed by a Tyche. The reference to Nemesis here is not to her modern day collapsing onto a logic of opposition and enmity but to her original place in the classic Greek lexicon as a nymph-goddess of redress symbolized by the wheel of transformation from peak to pit, and back again.

        While swearing allegiance to some of the gods, demi-gods, and dramatis personae of ancient Athens, Freud had in fact refused to acknowledge and suffer his idols as multiple, impetuous, and violent.

        Perhaps this, amongst all the other by now familiar reasons, would shed yet a different light on why the young Freud, so eager to prove his legitimacy and originality, did not press the Oedipal issue as much as he might otherwise have with his mentor and sounding board. One would expect that the radical discovery of incest and parricide as universal psychological bedrock would have merited more than its three measly references (dated 15 October, ’97, 5 November ’97, and 15 March ’98) in a Freud-Fliess correspondence that had lasted an additional seven years beyond the initial mention. This, amongst yet other equally familiar reasons, would shed further light on why Freud never committed himself to a comprehensive account of the myth’s dynamics and echoes. Instead, he offered but a smattering of observations and hypotheses hinting at his insights while sparing himself the fate of his accursed hero and model.

        Such explanation and light cannot but be analytically hypothetical in nature; they treat much less of Freud’s conscious processes than of the unrecognized and hence unresolved inhibitions his Oedipal axioms could not but have produced. For his part and to his credit, Freud could not have been any more consistent: he believed his hero’s entanglement in an exhausting and yet unavoidable circle of causes and effects to be the fate of one and all. One can only begin to imagine the frustration, if not the fear, of a researcher caught in the vice-like grip of a truth he so desperately needed to speak but whose logic dictated that its utterance be the ground for silence and its sight the ground for blindness.