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Dreams

From Eruption to Frontier to Aevum…

May 25, 2009
Aevum, Dreams, Found Object, Freud, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

Be it in terms of the settling into the depressive position, the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the attainment of ego integration, the cure, or what not, when psychoanalysis prescribes a so-called “healthy” goal for the libido’s development, it also posits the desirability of the point at which the libido’s vicissitudes will have finally come to rest, the point at which Freud’s volcano will have acquired its crowning layer of lava. This, perversely enough, is also the point at which the volcano and, hence, the libido will have gone cold, become extinguished, died. Much to its subject’s chagrin, or perhaps even relief, the libido does die eventually. However, to suggest that the fact of this death is an indicator of health, or that, better still, it is the hoped for effect, if not indeed the mission, of a psychoanalytic cure is, obviously, a conclusion with which Freud would have been extremely uncomfortable.

This, I believe, is why Freud’s writing of the volcano metaphor is itself a volcanic writing. As the waves of lava, and of libido, gradually pile on top of one another and eventually harden, each may consider itself the summit by virtue of the fact that it is the highest and most recent. But each is such a summit only till the next wave erupts and covers it over, till it is nothing but a layer cushioned in between the before and the after, till, in other words, it is reduced to an entity whose time is the time of flow and decay, of the “not yet” or the “not quite,” falsely asserting itself in a hardening that will hopefully seal the crater and prevent the eruption of future layers that are thicker and harder. True to its pen’s volcanic spirit, no sooner had the ink that wrote the self-sufficiency of discontinuous moments and of the aevum dried on the page, that it got displaced by a dread of tempus and a wish for aeternitas, a dread and a wish that lock the fate of such moments to the laws of succession, accumulation, usurpation, to, in other words, Oedipal rivalry. And should such a manoeuvre not be enough to pre-empt any future questioning of these laws, Freud’s pen did not hesitate to retrace its steps back a decade and re-edit a passage from the Three Essays in order to erase any hint of the aevum and confirm that, once and for all, the “instinct” is indeed a “continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 83).

Taken in its entirety, Freud’s thought cannot but both lure and disappoint those in search of a majestic volcano in which each construct, metaphor, and technique is simply a layer that builds on its antecedents and in so doing helps cushion whatever else has yet to come. I hardly wish to rehash the debates surrounding the turns, reversals, breaks, and repressions, regarding, in sum, the vicissitudes of a text and a thought that were over four decades in the making. I invoke the fact of such vicissitudes in order to unsettle one particular (secondary) revision, obviously perpetrated by Freud as much as by his readers, from which both text and thought have suffered: the re-writing of the discovery of an episodic and hence fragmentary libido into a cohesive “intelligible whole” that is the developmental paradigm. Secondary revision, as I have suggested in previous posts, is at bottom an injunction against mutation, transitionality, and finding; it is a prohibition against anything that would undermine its official story, in this case the story of a libido that is traceable, graspable. It would be convenient to think that such a revision is merely a defence against the continued threats emanating from outside the story and the practice, from, presumably, the detractors who have not read enough or analysed enough. But it is the story and the practice themselves that pose the greatest threat to their presumed stability.

“If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 121-22) . Freud’s topography here has to allow that the “instinct” is equally “the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the mind and reaching the organism, as a measure of the demand made upon the body for work in consequence of its connection with the mind,” that, as a frontier, the drive is porous on the side of both the psychical and the somatic, that it is a passage in at least two different directions each trafficking its own set of demands, that its “source” is often as much psychical as it is “a somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct” (ibid, 123). I hope to come back to this question of the drive and its sources later. In the meantime, I single out this passage of Freud’s not so much because it dovetails with the notion of an animated in-between that is the focus of my thoughts and not because it subtly, but perhaps inadvertently, lays the ground for Winnicott’s transitional object, but because it encapsulates Freud’s own long standing fascination with transitionality, a fascination which, by its very definition, questions any and all claims to coherence and completion.

Though he did not explicitly identify the frontier as a central dimension till the mid 1910s, Freud had been quite taken by that frontier from his earliest days. Consider, for instance, the dream book as it elaborates a topography that belongs to the dream as much as it does to the psyche and its three systems (conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious). The essence of a dream lies in the distortions it performs as, again, “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work” in consequence of its connection, in this case, with reality (as stimulus and/or residue) and the unconscious (as wish). The space of the dream is hence the Zwischenreich, as Freud writes in a letter to Fliess, that is not so much an intermediary kingdom but the inter-kingdom (the interregnum) and hence the kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. The “inter” here is temporal (as a transitional phase between the end of one reign and the beginning of another), spatial (as a border territory created by two adjoining provinces ostensibly obeying the laws of neither), and procedural (as a translation or mediation between two otherwise incongruous systems). This is the inter-kingdom of the dream that is nestled in between a seemingly ever lasting and ever gratifying hallucination and a harsh survivalist reality. We find ourselves here not only in the “facilitating” space of the transitional as Winnicott understood it but also in the realm of the aevum. For what is a dream but a diminished hallucination that grows “like a mushroom out of its mycelium” and whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of latent thoughts that “cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite ending” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 5-525)? Such thoughts do not accrue into an ever higher, or reach into an ever deeper, organisation. Freud himself insisted on the necessity of over-interpretation as a clinical disposition that, contrary to what its “over” (or “über” as in “Überdeutung”) may suggest, makes manifest such a meshwork and, in so doing, betrays the hegemony of an overarching and immutable meaning. It is in this context that Freud wrote his by now infamous metaphor of the dream’s “navel” as a tangle of thoughts that cannot be unravelled at the spot where the dream is supposed to reach down into the unknown (ibid). Freud here tangles up two distinct thoughts: the first is that the multitude of interpretations brings the interpreter face to face with the limit of interpretation (the “unknown”); the second is that, since interpretation is the process that reverses the dream work, the “unknown” is less the spot into which the dream reaches and more the spot from which it emerges.

Though its images may appear chaotic and incomplete, the latent time of the dream is no different from the time of the aevum. It has a beginning but is without end. Interpretation brings to light its “succession of meanings” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 4-214) and clarifies the vicissitudo of its infinite series of thoughts, each as a consistent and useful totality in its own right. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Intelligibility – Ownership

April 21, 2009
Dreams, Found Object, Play, Possession, Repetition, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

If the found object must begin as animated and vital and only later can it move on to become irrelevant and inanimate, an object properly speaking and, hence, potentially a possession, then property and its corresponding experience of privacy may not be entirely childish but instead the effects of a process of concretisation and a rendering static, a “this is mine and you may not have it, use it, or change it” that the subject brings to bear on the object. I am expanding the references of “subject” and “object” beyond “child” and “teddy bear”; I have in mind any subject, regardless of age, and whatever object it may “find”—be it a toy, a body, an idea, a work, a grouping, or a property.

To my mind, this process of concretisation runs parallel to the systematising secondary revision Freud had identified in the work of dreams. Indeed, the principal function of secondary revision is to lend cohesion to the otherwise fragmentary content of a dream, “to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 641). Secondary revision moulds the material offered to it “into something like a day-dream” (ID, 633) (∗); it re-writes, corrects, and edits that material so as to produce a definitive and self-evident story, the “official” story as it were, whose pleasure depends on its ability to pre-empt the need for any further explanation, and hence any further work, by either the dreamer or anyone else for that matter. This is a story whose pleasure lies in the fact that it does not stimulate(∗∗), that it does not produce other, which is to say different and hence unsettling and potentially transforming, stories. Therein lies secondary revision’s status as a form of censorship; it is a revision that may not be revised and a process whose aim is not only an “intelligible whole” but also a consolidation of that whole and a prohibition against anyone else to “have, use, or change” it, to dismantle it and, in so doing, to expose the richness of its underlying disorder and unintelligibility or, equally dangerously, to introduce into it the opportunity for new and unforeseeable uses or transformations, disorders or unintelligibilities. Ultimately, secondary revision is an injunction against mutation, and hence against transitionality and against finding.

It seems to me that secondary revision and private property are meant to secure the wish for, respectively, an incontrovertible intelligibility and a possession beyond doubt; together, they secure and authorize the ownership of intelligibility and the intelligibility of ownership. Utterances such as “this is so” and “this is mine” are not statements of fact but “demands” (∗∗∗) that are designed to eliminate any and all room for movement, for fragmentation, and, most importantly, most threateningly perhaps, for loss. Everything fits at the end of a revision; if the story is to be told again, the same elements must be recounted in the same order and in the same tenor, otherwise the result is a threatening distortion if not an outright falsehood (including the falsehood of a claim to ownership). Similarly with possession, its story ought to be clear as to where and to whom everything belongs so that it may both enforce the right to exclusivity and pre-empt the disorder of theft (including the theft of intelligibility).

My hypothesis is that neither property nor revision need be reduced to the expression of an unshakeable repetition compulsion or a primordial death drive (∗∗∗∗) ; rather, each may very well be the fulfilment of a wish to preserve a certain state and protect against anything that might threaten its stability (∗∗∗∗∗) . In light of this, the found object’s eventual loss of meaning (TOTP, 233) is never truly definitive and its relinquishment is hardly an outright rejection nor is it evidence of an irrevocable abandonment as with secondary revision’s finality, its “once and for all.” Much as the found object’s meaning is eventually displaced onto newer objects, its reappearance can, and often does, trigger a charged fund of memories of people and places, thoughts and activities. This object is relinquished not so much when it becomes utterly irrelevant or when its destruction is of no consequence to its finder but rather when its destruction is not a looming danger, when the other to whom it is relinquished is trusted, invested with the hope, and entrusted with the responsibility not to destroy it and along with it those parts of its finder that have become intertwined (“woven”) into it. Perhaps then the subject’s possessiveness, its “this is mine and you cannot have it, use it, or change it”, ought to be understood as a “this contains, and hence is, part of me and I don’t trust you (or at least not yet) not to destroy it and me in the process.” When given over to the other, the object is liable to manipulation and transformation, to mutation; and while the subject may be confident that the found object can survive its own aggression, it may be less than certain that the both of them together can survive the aggression of that other.
________
(∗) We shall revisit this daydreaming effect soon enough under the Winnicottian heading of phantasying and its logic of the dead end.
(∗∗) While this may sound highly counterintuitive, it is precisely in terms of such a stasis that Freud understood pleasure.
(∗∗∗) Freud is very clear on this quality of secondary revision; see The Interpretation of Dreams, 642.
(∗∗∗∗) In a topographical context, secondary revision belongs to the system of the pre-conscious; it is hence far removed from the strictly speaking unconscious workings of any such compulsion or drive.
(∗∗∗∗∗) Short of adopting Freud’s principle that the libido is pleasure-seeking and that stability is the guarantor of survival and hence the epitome of libidinal pleasure, the question as to why stability is so desirable remains unanswered.

Work – 3

May 1, 2008
Dreams, Freud, Machines, Play, Productions, Work

        it seems to me that the roots of the psychoanalytic distinction between work and play can be traced back to Freud’s two principles of mental functioning (reality and pleasure) that regulate the workings of, respectively, the conscious and the unconscious. Work is presumably part of a cluster that includes reality, survival, and efficiency while play belongs to the realm of pleasure, fantasy, and disorder. Psychoanalysis, with its focus on the unconscious and its commitment to free association, would then be the ally of play and creativity contra work as the most evil of fates.

        This, to me, is a little too quick. There is a fair bit of “work” going on in the unconscious, “work” that may have nothing to do with repetition or drudgery: the dream-work and the work of mourning are two classic examples here. These are highly productive processes; they effect change and have little to do with the leisure that has come to define “play.” To put it differently, I see no reason why the workings of the conscious (a logical syllogism or a cost-benefit analysis for instance) should be considered closer to “work” and hence less “pleasurable” then, say, condensation or secondary revision.

        I think the distinction between work and play seems self-evident only from the point of view of a structure that has already privileged the one at the expense of the other (either work gives meaning and play is frivolity or work is servitude and play is creativity).

        Might it not be more useful here to think in terms of different qualities of work and processes of production, of different types of investments and effects instead?

Work

April 26, 2008
Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work

        Freud grounded psychoanalysis in terms of a collaborative uncovering of the unconscious as dynamic and over-determined. That such uncovering occurs in a fraction of the time “psychoanalysis” occupies or that it necessitates much preparation does not deny it its status as the core and defining element of the practice; if anything, it reinforces it as the however infinitesimally small but not any the less defining marker of a practice that is singular and specific, a practice that is irreducible to this or that of the modes of relating with which we are already familiar.

        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.

        However, and by the standards of not only this or that of the various leading orientations in psychoanalytic theory or practice but by those standards that the discipline itself has held as its foundational and distinguishing mark, repetition could not be any further from the either the truth of the unconscious or, for that matter, the history of its science. As regards the former, and even at those times when the unconscious is trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios, it is still, and however minimally, an unconscious that dreams, phantasises, mourns, defers, displaces, remembers, thinks, and compromises; it is still an unconscious that works. It is a machine that affords a rest only once in its lifetime, in that very same ground where it finds its final resting place. Otherwise, it is in constant movement. As for the science of the unconscious, it has managed to thrive precisely because many of its practitioners, famous or otherwise, have resisted the institutional demands and methodological requirements for repetition and homogeneity.

Of Revisions and Caricatures

April 19, 2008
Dreams, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire

        Freud argued in Totem and Taboo that the efects of secondary revision are not exclusive to the dream-work; they are in fact evidenced in any realm of thought that requires unity and intelligibility as markers of its systematic aspirations. Freud writes:

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.

        This, fortunately, is not the fate to which psychoanalysis must be doomed. While the abundance of its caricatures in the popular mind is a symptom of hostility and defensiveness, it is also a sign of the discipline’s own intensely disavowed and split off comedic power. As I see it, the collective and clinical task at this point is to reintegrate that power, not as aim but as tool.

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