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Freud

Work – 2

April 29, 2008
Freud, History, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Re-Parenting, Winnicott, Work


        The following is partly in response to Ktismatics’ comments on a recent post.

        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.”

        More …

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.

Freud’s Oedipal Bind-2

March 30, 2008
Double Bind, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Oedipus, Sophocles, Speaking Desire

        In one sense at least, and as far as Oedipus is concerned, Freud could not have been any more inconsistent for having remained silent about a presumably blinding truth while advocating speech as the principal instrument of insight.

        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.

To be fair to Freud, again, his was not a singular or idiosyncratic betrayal. We are all invariably confronted with an immense and seemingly infinite network of meanings and words, characters and dynamics, that we hastily reduce to what we, at any given point in time, find manageable and/or useful. We devise systems of reference along whose axes we can begin to pin a sense and a service. We select; we bracket; we prioritise; we abstract; we interpret. Faced with the other alternative, the one that is all too keen to deploy the multiplicity of meanings and values as a justification for upholding the futility of any and all intervention, Freud’s often seems the only responsible route for us to take.

Freud’s Oedipal Bind-1

March 26, 2008
Double Bind, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Oedipus, Repetition, Sophocles, Speaking Desire

        Though reverential, Freud’s investment in the Sophoclean script as a founding principle of psychological activity is not without its ironies. Freud understood the myth as a representation and, in so doing, broke his own golden rule of never mistaking manifest content for latent thought or symptom for process. Much more significantly, though, Freud thought he had apprehended Oedipus on the street, in the bedroom, and on the couch. In the process, he demythologized and made common that which he had spent an entire life revering. And by making the myth common, he found himself as implicated in its dynamic as his next-door neighbour, and in ways that may not have been entirely explicit for him. By solving the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus had precipitated both his access to the Theban throne and his subsequent destitution. Perhaps the solver of psychological riddles had detected in his hero’s downfall what lay in wait for him should he too speak the truth of desire.

        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.

        It is no surprise that, with time, Freud’s Oedipal identifications found refuge in yet another mythological entanglement. While speaking Oedipus, the psychoanalyst began to live the logic of a Sisyphus, barely glimpsing the open landscape of relief only to have to wearily give it up and descend the slopes of blindness he had just scaled, and begin all over again. Caught in the logic of such hopeless repetition, no wonder his analysis had become interminable. Meanwhile, and yet again, Freud’s reenactment of this second myth illustrates, and in the strictest of psychoanalytic ways, the extent to which our conscious experiences of fate and punishment are often grounded in covert but no less potent choice and collusion.

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