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Work - 3

Posted in Dreams, Freud, Machines, Play, Productions, Work on 1 May 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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?

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Work

Posted in Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work on 26 April 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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.

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Of Revisions and Caricatures

Posted in Dreams, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire on 19 April 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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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Oedipus — A Directorial Note

Posted in Aristotle, Dreams, Freud, Laughter, Oedipus, Productions, Sophocles, Speaking Desire on 22 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Aristotle argued that tragedy’s audience is treated to an experience of emotional stimulation rather than historical education. While in many respects unavoidably imitative, tragedy’s highest value and pleasure lie in its ability to occasion the excitement and catharsis of its audience’s fear and pity (Poetics, 1449b/25 and 1452b/30). Firmly planted in his culture, Aristotle was drawing on the Athenian understanding of tragedy as Dionysian. The domain of the god of wine and ecstasy ran the gamut from orgy to performance; intoxication was his means, purgation was his goal. The philosopher was also echoing the dictates of a Hippocratic culture that understood illness as excess in the humours and treatment as their purgation.

        Freud will trail closely tragedy’s Athenian dynamic as he will come to identify pleasure’s basic principle in terms of an economic discharge of tension rather than a hedonistic consumption of object. Indeed, for Freud, the charge of the libidinal drive is bound to, intensified by, and subsequently cathected through its object much as, for Aristotle, an audience’s fearful and/or pitiful tremor is caught up in, heightened by, and subsequently released through the drama it witnesses on the stage.

        An Acropolis, a La Scala, and a Hollywood are much less the stagings of truth and morality and much more the sites of Dionysian manipulation, transformation, and release. The unconscious too is such a site; we have come to know its productions under the headings of dreams, slips, and phantasies. Such productions point to the so-called truth of their subject only insofar as they illustrate the latter’s individual qualities as, if you will, writer, director, and producer. When presented with such stagings, the threads clinicans are most interested in picking up and following lead not to their historical or ethical worth (Are they true? Are they morally acceptable?) Rather, it is the unconscious processes and investments by which they have been produced and shaped that form the bulk of the analytic material.

        I hold this observation to be perfectly in line with the classic Freudian appreciation and use of a dream’s imagery for instance, an imagery that is much less a representation or an account of a truth as it is the product of an unconscious mise en scène that is itself the focus and concern of the clinical inquiry.

        Indeed, and once he thought he had established the universality of incest and parricide, once, in other words, he had identified what he considered to be the inevitable components of primary phantasy, Freud was much more invested in uncovering the particular ways in which an analysand weaves, structures, and negotiates the components than in their (dare one say it?) quotidian content. The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality that psychoanalysis brings its participants is hardly in their investment in what has become a joke of a myth (“Doctor, please tell me something I haven’t already heard, read, or been warned you would say!”) The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality lies in uncovering the dramatic style each analysand adopts in staging the myth, in his or her poetic scriptwriting and directorial techniques, in his or her idiosyncratic modes of excitement and catharsis, the grounds on which they are erected, and the purposes they are made to serve.

        Of the myth and its tragic truth very little is left of analytic import, at least as the myth of origin whose repercussions are necessarily and exclusively tragic.

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Oedipus — Take Two

Posted in Antigone, Dreams, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles on 14 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Look out for the noble and upright king who, because of his pierced ankles, has to hobble his way across the stage. Make sure not to miss our hero’s hyperboles for everything about his words and deeds is in line with the basic structure of humour as exaggerated non-sense. Note the sympathy you feel for him as he heaps his misdeeds and confusions one upon the other, à la Lucy Ricardo, desperate for the clear-minded and practical interventions of a Creon, his Ricky. (Might there be a psychoanalytic import to the implicit homosocial contract between king and brother-in-law here?) Keep track of our hero’s familial lines as they progressively blur beyond recognition: his children are his siblings; his brother-in-law is his uncle; his daughter will soon plan to marry the man who is both his nephew and cousin; many of Jerry Springer’s most outlandish of scenarios could only dream of such twists and complications. Last but not least, do not overlook Jocasta, Antigone, and Euridyce’s final suicidal gestures, sacrificial and redemptive only from the point of view of a modernity that has been thoroughly Christianized; to their original, almost exclusively male, audiences, they remained pitiable and laughable.

        Was the classical Athenian theatregoer any more resistant to the temptations of laughter and hooting than the modern day viewer of television talk shows and situation comedies? Was he any blinder to the absurdly comedic, was he any more aesthetically refined, any more sensitive, any nobler, any less moralistic, any less adolescent? Hardly. Are we then disavowing our own insensitivity and adolescence and setting ourselves up as the nobler ones by recasting the Athenian drama and distilling it down to what we have conveniently declared as its purest and loftiest? To me, that would be more likely.

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Falling Back Onto

Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Dreams, Freud, Schizoanalysis, Subjects on 5 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Before preceding any further, another note on the translation is in order.

        Most critical and most misleading in the English rendering is the translation of “se rabattre sur” as “to fall back onto.” The learned footnote on page 10 of the English text lists the various meanings of the verb “rabattre” and evokes, whether intentionally or not, the very same mechanisms Freud had identified under the heading of regression in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: temporal, formal, topographical. Indeed, the translators of Anti-Oedipus have in mind a return to a preceding position or state as they interpret “rabattre:” as a rotation followed by a reverse rotation, as a retreat, or as a reduction.

        But, and if production “falls back onto” recording, and recording, in turn, “falls back onto” consumption, which, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the site where “something in the order of a subject is discerned” (16), this would imply a logic of depth through which that subject grounds the syntheses of the unconscious. This could not be any further from the French original.

        Deleuze and Guattari use “rabattre” in its reflexive form, “se rabattre sur,” which means to come to or to reach something: the subject is not the ground for but rather a product of the interactions between body without organs and machines; the subject is, in other words, a product of consumption, recording, and production.

        I think it is important to qualify the effect of translating “se rabattre sur” as “falling back onto” as in itself a falling back onto and a regression, ironically, to the very theory the text is disputing.

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