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Freud

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

September 13, 2011
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Found Object, Freud, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3).

Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for which the greatest threat is the distorting transformation of its status from a fundament into a goal, from a process that deploys its productions, registrations, and consumptions along typically unpredictable lines, which is to say, from a process that plays, dreams, and associates, as Winnicott understood these terms, into a stagnant and interminable “wreck” (AO, F11, E5) that can only “fantasy” and “dissociate” in its struggle for self-perpetuation and propagation.

This is one of a number of links and relays that I would like to pursue between the presumably post-Freudian project of Winnicott and the supposedly anti-Freudian project of Deleuze and Guattari.

My investment is not in a history of psychoanalytic ideas that hopes to bridge the divide between the French and the British, each a tradition that, for the most part, has thrived on recognising its other only to dispute its legitimacy as fantasmatic and/or mundane, on, in other words, dissociating itself from that other, a history, and by extension a methodology, that would invariably, righteously, grant itself the status of an integration or incorporation that is greater, wiser, or truer than both.

Nor is my investment in exposing and clarifying the ways in which each of these two traditions is, after all and presumably, a metaphor for, or, better still, the metamorphosing outcome of the other. I would much rather spare both my Winnicottian and Deleuzo-Guattarian readers the disappointment and/or irritation of witnessing their distinctive perspectives and strongly held convictions dismissed as the derivatives of some previously or elsewhere more convincingly elaborated views.

Nor do I hope to facilitate a triumphal coupling of the two sets of disparate texts and strategies with the aim of producing a clinical and/or meta-psychological offshoot—-a strange beast indeed—-that is part Winnicottian and part Deleuzo-Guattarian, part post- and part anti-, forever honouring, which is also to say forever hemmed in by, its provenance and heritage.

Nor, lastly, is my investment in a utopian “in-between” that has gripped much of the imagination amongst contemporary readers of both Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari, an “in-between” whose advocates, I suspect, must forever struggle to keep from drowning in the treacherous waters of the Oceanus Britannicus. On this score, and though the notion of a topographical “in-between” seems to be precisely what brings both projects in line with one another, I find the Winnicottian transitional and the Deleuzo-Guattarian intermezzo, when considered primarily as psychological topographies, to be particularly sparse and unyielding. Moreover, and just as the found object for Winnicott is an experience rather than an “object” that needs to be itemised and localised, I would like to suggest that the transitional and the intermezzo are a playing and a bricolage, a basic form of living (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 50) and a handyman’s tinkering (AO, F7, E1) that have little to do with spaces or locations that ought to be mapped, striated, and/or bound, and everything to do with events, processes, and experiences that are lived. Ditto for the “in-between.”

My investment is primarily in re-posing the question of found object and play and of machine and effect, while doubling its data, so to speak. Given two machines, each with its specific set of clinical and theoretical procedures, what can their juxtaposition be used for and what effects can that juxtaposition be made to produce? At stake here is a process that treats of dynamic effects as much as it treats of developmental causes, of potential products as much as of hidden aetiologies, and of eventual deployments as much as of retrograde analyses. Ultimately, my hope in posing this question is that these effects, products, and deployments may not only communicate to us hitherto unexplored yet constitutive theoretical and/or clinical components about either Winnicott or Deleuze and Guattari, but that they may also shed a new light on, if not indeed instantiate desire, and, in the process, allow us to do with that desire, or do with it differently, as much as it does with us.

In positing this reflexive implication, I take my cue from the “machines” I am considering, insofar as each, in its own way, has more or less relinquished as artificial and ineffectual the distinction between the functions of theory and practice, observer and observed, analyst and analysand. Indeed, by the end of his career, Winnicott was quite unequivocal when he declared that psychoanalysis “has to do with two people playing together” (PTS, 38), that such a doing takes place “in the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist” (“Playing”, 54), that, in other words, psychoanalysis has little to do with one subject developing, interpreting, or correcting another subject’s experience according to some externally pre-elaborated path toward truth or health, and everything to do with the playing that occurs “in between” these two subjects. Winnicottian psychoanalysis is therefore as much a practice as it is a theory of transitionality; it is therefore as invested in consolidating and legitimising an Ego, a Self, or a Subject, be it true or false, as a found object could be said to consolidate or legitimise a reality, be it hallucinatory or concrete.

Similarly, and equally forcefully, Deleuze and Guattari identified the principal task of their analytic orientation (which they termed “schizoanalysis”) as the dismantling of the distinction between a subject that emits a statement and a subject about or on behalf of whom, or which, a statement is emitted (AO, F323-324, E271). In schizoanalysis, there is no subject that imparts to another its accomplishments in knowledge, health, or experience; there is only an analytic machine that is neither an imaginary projection, as phantasy, nor a real projection, as cure, but a recurring factor of production among parts (associations, syntheses, subjectivities) functioning alongside one another and under specific clinical conditions. These are the gears that create new gears alongside preceding ones, indefinitely, even if, or even as they seem to function in discordant or opposing ways. As Deleuze and Guattari have summed it up, “That which makes a machine [the schizoanalytic sine qua non] are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly” (Kafka, 84).

That something may be gained from elaborating a relationship between these Deleuzo-Guattarian connections and the Winnicottian transitional, between, in other words, the machine and the found object, that such a relationship can be productive precisely because it is as fractious and abrasive as it may be smooth, that, in other words, the friction between the presumably incongruous concepts and orientations may set off a spark capable of shedding light on hitherto unexplored territories, these are the principle assumptions motivating the project.

Affect-Time

December 11, 2010
Aevum, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects

This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.

Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love

Affect-Time

I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in the moment where affect, hallucination, and delirium (feeling, seeing, thinking) converge.

One gets the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for a chronological order to the emergence of the subject—post affect, post sensation, and post thought—an order that is at the very least counter-intuitive, if not altogether nonsensical.

Presumably, love, hate, sight, touch, thought, and imagination are events that require an agency by which they may be instigated, an agency that has already acquired the capacity to feel, to sense, or to think. What is nonsensical in Deleuze and Guattari is precisely that which undermines the subject that declares itself sovereign over its various faculties, the subject of reason and fact, of philosophy and technology. This subject sees itself the centre of experience and understanding; it may feel, sense, or think this or that but, surely, it is neither this nor that; it is, in principle at least, greater than both and capable of the repression and/or fulfillment of both. Or so the story goes.

With psychoanalysis, we have come to appreciate the subject as less conscious, less autonomous, less reasonable, as a subject that does not forget, for instance, but as a subject that is founded by an act of primary forgetting, a primary repression, that sets up a complex structure of conscious and unconscious processes that will subsequently endure repression and forgetting. This is a subject that does not enact a forgetting but a subject produced by and as forgetting. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is also a subject that does not enact feeling, thinking, or sensing, but a subject produced by and as feeling, thinking, and sensing.

Hence the “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” that marks the I as a product of the confluence of the three registers affect, sensation, thought. As such, the I is not simply influenced (troubled, pleased, perplexed, or pained) by the changes these registers undergo; it is also re-configured, re-defined, and re-produced by them—radically, differently. She may no longer see herself a woman after a radical hysterectomy in her late twenties; he may doubt his masculinity now that he is sexually attracted to another man; she may experience herself as a doctor differently now that she is an analytic patient; he may have transformed into a new person after his appointment as a university professor; and she may never regain her old self since her last tour of duty. As crises of conscious identity we may witness as well as suffer or enjoy, such turning points bespeak an ongoing process of production, of desiring production, perhaps less patently abrupt, but no less transformative.

Affect, sensation, and thought are no mere qualities or extensions of a pre-existing subject but the ground that makes the feeling, sensing, thinking I possible in a very specific register of time, precipitated by them and belonging to them. As such, the time of the I, the time in which it is created, modulated, and lived is a time of eruption. Ah! So that’s who I am! The exclamation marks a pre and a post to which, strictly speaking, it does not belong. This exclamation, rather, lies on a border between two types of time (the timeless and the timely), an interregnum, if you will, that marks a third time whose laws are distinct from both the timelessness of the eternal Subject (with the S capitalised, of course) and the timeliness of the ever so worldly object. This is a time that shares of both but is neither. This is the time of the I, the time of the verb.

“She sees light,” “he envies her,” and “she contemplates travel” do not depict facts or states of being but verbs that insinuate themselves between two entities, establish their relationship to one another and invest in each its temporary status as either subject or object. As an interregnum, the verb is hardly a bridge that allows the subject to cross over and relate to the object—a bridge that may be as conveniently forgotten as it is crossed. The verb is a weaving that links both sides of the divide, invests them with their particular subjective or objective qualities, defines the gap that separates them, and, in the process, shapes the possibilities of its crossing.

Psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a clinical practice, is replete with references, uses, and deployments of the interregnum. In fact, I would go so far as to say that psychoanalysis is primarily a theory and a practice of the interregnum. Invariably, the psychoanalytic topography is of three simultaneous and yet distinct domains, each with its own set of rules and investments, and of psychoanalysis as a sustained appreciation for and intervention in the second of these domains, occupying the space in between first and third, requiring first and third, and required by them, partaking of both in terms of dynamics and directions, and yet belonging to neither.

I offer three examples from Freud. The drive is the porous frontier between psyche and soma, communicating two sets of demands, mental and physical, in consequence of its connection to both (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 121-22). Nestled in between a primordial hallucination set on immediate pleasure and a survivalist reality subject to the facts of nature, the dream is a process whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of thoughts that have no definite ending (The Interpretation of Dreams, 525). The transference is simultaneously an “artificial illness” and a “piece of real experience” that creates a region between illness and life through which the passage from the one to the other is possible (Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, 154).

What is key about the drive, the dream, and the transference, about, in essence, the three founding concepts and experiences in psychoanalysis, is that they tell not only of a space between two otherwise incongruous realms but also of a set of rules initially borrowed from both realms but made particular by that space. This is entirely consistent with the nature of the interregnum, not as an intermediary kingdom but as an inter-kingdom and hence a kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is multilayered.

In between primordial psychic goo that knows nothing of negation or death, that, in other words, is devoid of opposites, and an ego that abides by a commonsensical reality and its law of excluded middle and declares these selfsame opposites inadmissible, lays an unconscious that thrives in the concurrence of opposites. In between the newborn’s oceanic feeling in which there is no room, and even less need, for subjectivity and the adult’s sense of a coalesced conscious self we encounter an I that is the effect of the conjunctive synthesis, an I that much of psychoanalysis has sadly prescribed as developmental, conflict-free, depressive, oedipal, name it what you will, an I that is rather produced, situational, transitional. It is to this I that belong the drive, the dream, the transference, and, by extension, the affect, the affect as verb. But if this I emerges at the exclamation point that is the interregnum between the timeless and the timely, what then of its time and, ultimately, what of its affect’s time?

Roughly halfway through the thirteenth century, and under pressure to accommodate a growing ontological diversity of angels, pre-Christian good men, and un-baptised innocents, the scholastic philosophers, starting with Bonaventure and wrapping up with Frederic of Freiberg, articulated the aevum as a new category of time. In between aeternitas, an abiding and indivisible being that is always already perfect, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing becoming that is lack and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration. A quality of neither godly nor human, the aevum is the time of the angels who are eternal in their substance but finite in their actions. The aevum is hence always already a concurrence of opposites, belonging to neither side of the divide but partaking of both; it is a “diminished” eternity where time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that simultaneously holds all the parts that make up a world; it weaves them into an infinite moment so that, in fact, they do make up a world, one that is passing from without but is “forever after” from within.

I want to take leave of the Scholastics and suggest that, in marking a territory between the two worlds of being and becoming, perfection and lack, the aevum opens onto a much needed, quintessentially human, third. Between sleep and wakefulness is the world of dreaming; between rest and work is the world of playing; between hallucination and practical reason is the world of free-associating. The time of these worlds is the time that does not pass, “ce temps qui ne passe pas,” as Pontalis titled one of his monographs; it is the time-stop (Tick. Tick. Tick…) that was originally designed to measure the passage of time but instead forces time to stand still, as with the note of a bell or an alarm, a time-stop that displaced the flow of sundials and water clocks as a standard of measure, a time-stop first produced in the late thirteenth century, and hence from the same period when the aevum acquired its theological and ontological significance.

The aevum is the time of the libido, perhaps not Saint Augustine’s but definitely Freud’s. In fact, much as he tirelessly advanced the notion that the drive has a history—a radical notion for his time—Freud also held that that history does not unfold in developmental phases. The passages from narcissism to object love, from so-called repudiated homosexuality to paranoia, from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, from any one bodily locus to another, all happen in a spasmodic, paroxytic fashion. The drive moves through eruptive, discontinuous, and yet self-contained totalities in the style of a vicissitude. Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 131). It is this libidinal stratification that paves the way for psychoanalysis as archaeology, albeit an inverted archaeology, since its object is the unintended (the slip, the dream, the forgotten) rather than the monumental.

The time of the drive remains altogether different from the empirical time that is decay, and the indivisible time that is perfection. The time of the drive is the time of volcanic eruption, of enumerating, in integers; it is the time of the aevum and its vicissitudes. This is precisely why the unconscious does not waft in elegant seamlessness from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts, as Deleuze and Guattari declare in the opening lines of Anti-Oedipus. Here, there, and there again. Tick. Tick. Tick… At each location and within each interval, the components are assembled in such a way as to make sense and to lend sense.

Not surprisingly, the aevum is the time of the transference as well. Freud warns that the transference comes about “suddenly” and is “bound to surprise” the clinician; whether as love or hate, its extraordinary powers will recast the entirety of the analytic relationship and give it a new meaning that may potentially “blow away” the success of the work (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 176). The dream too operates along these lines and it is only as an effect of secondary revision that its images acquire a semblance of chronological sequence or order, a semblance of meaning, no less conjunctive than the Deleuzo-Guattarian synthesis but much more prone to ossification than Deleuze and Guattari think it ought to be.

What, then, of the affect? Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, the affect’s time is tracked not through quantitative changes (more and less) but through abrupt and abruptly redefining vicissitudes, through “a circulation of states” of conquest, capture, and offshoots as Deleuze and Guattari say (A Thousand Plateaus, 21). Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, to, in other words, an aevum driven by the concurrence of opposites rather than their absence or inadmissibility, the affect requires its other, even and especially its most oppositional other. It does so neither out of tolerance or maturity nor out of a reasoned recognition of or a resignation to conflict, but because it is specifically alongside that other that it may begin to breathe, to make sense.

Love does not exist without hatred, not only because love stirs a dependence that inflicts a wound on one’s sense of autonomy and in turn generates a hatred toward the beloved whose very presence now speaks a narcissistic injury, not only, as with the familiar refrain, because the pleasure of desire makes manifest the pain of lack, but mainly because love is neither decaying nor perfect, neither timed nor timeless, but rather both decaying and perfect, timed and timeless, because the fabric of love is a connection (“and… and… and…”) “forceful enough to uproot the verb ‘to be’” (A Thousand Plateaus, 25), because it is the I as interregnum that loves the other and in so doing hates itself as conscious and coalesced, deprives itself of what it holds dearest under the banner of generosity, surrender, and sacrifice without which love would not be possible. Whoever thinks angels are “angelic,” that theirs is the time of beatitude and innocence, has it completely wrong.

I close by ceding to Goethe whose Faust put it thus:
One impulse art thou conscious of, at best;
O, never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces
(Faust, 1, 2)

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.

Winnicott the philosopher

April 12, 2009
Culture, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Winnicott

Freud often considered himself as one of those scientists committed to empirical authority. He, for instance, judged “Meschugge” (∗) and “delusional” (∗∗) the truths of a psycho-mythology that projects all manner of illusion onto a realty, a future, or a god. And yet, Freud also insisted that knowledge of such projections and mastery of their subtleties must be considered among the subjects required for training in psychoanalysis, subjects “which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature” (The Question of Lay Analysis, 349). “Unless he is well at home in these subjects [Freud declared] an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material” (ibid).

It seems to me that Winnicott’s expansion of play onto “the whole cultural field” so as to include these very same processes reverses a movement in Freud’s thinking. Whereas Freud wanted to bring cultural anthropology to bear on the individual’s earliest interactions with its familial surround, to situate, expose, and interpret the latter in light of the former, Winnicott wanted to trace the origins and dynamics of cultural experience back to the playful interactions between, say, mother and infant or analyst and analysand. What unites both analysts is the assumption that some universal principle is invariably at work here: for Freud, it was libido, Oedipus, or the repetition compulsion as it predates and structures the history of any particular individual while for Winnicott it was the ubiquity of play in the life of the species, a play of which psychoanalysis is only a most recent and highly specialised form (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 41).

To enter the domain of universal principles is to cross the threshold that separates the empirical from the theoretical, the clinical from the philosophical. While Freud has been firmly inscribed in the annals of twentieth century theory and declared one of its richest and most controversial sources, Winnicott, and especially among his English-speaking followers, is yet to be accorded much relevance beyond the therapeutic and the parental.

Perhaps there is some room to consider Winnicott’s contributions in the context of his philosophical surround and to think, among many other possibilities no doubt, the reverberations between his notion of play and Bishop Berkeley’s pronouncements on relationality or David Hume’s investments in the imagination, between his understanding of the found object and Friedrich Nietzsche’s metamorphoses of the spirit or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s meditations on language games. Perhaps then there is some further room to consider Winnicott as not only an inheritor to a theoretical lineage that extends beyond the clinic and the nursery but also as one of its contributors. Perhaps.
________
(∗) see the letter to Fliess dated 12 December 1897.
(∗∗) see the “Historical Truth” section of Moses and Monotheism.

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?

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