From Freud To Kafka

The Paradoxical Foundation of the Life-and-Death Instinct

Philippe Refabert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367102685
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429914126
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book takes the reader on a captivating journey leading from an erroneous founding assumption inherited from Freud, to the proposal of a principle better suited to allowing the psychoanalyst to accompany the patient out of his impasse. The founding assumption of the book, already questioned by many analysts among whom Sandor Ferenczi figures as a brilliant forerunner, was the author's starting point in re-examining the basic precepts of psychoanalysis. Reading Kafka made the author conclude that this masterful storyteller describes borderline situations, so familiar to him, better than anyone. An avid reader of Freud, Kafka suggests that the human capacity to bear a paradoxical position between life and death is not given to the child naturally, at birth. Kafka seems to say that giving life is easy, but that giving it the necessary support in the form of the trace of death is more problematic.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

A misunderstanding between Freud and the man from the country

One means that Evil has is the dialogue.

—Franz Kafka, “The Third Notebook” (1917)

Tired of sitting on a stool and counting the lice in the gatekeeper’s fur coat while waiting to be admitted to the law, the man from the country went to see a psychoanalyst.

At the start of his psychoanalysis, he was very enthusiastic. The analyst found that his dreams had meaning, and his interpretation of them seemed irrefutable. The man was particularly grateful for these interpretations since they admitted him into a brotherhood where everyone seemed to know what was meant when notions like “the unconscious” or phrases like “the desire to kill the father” were used. He had to admit that, in truth, his inhibitions were related to a repressed desire to penetrate his mother. The incestuous desires he shared with Oedipus were so powerful that they paralysed him. In addition, he lived in fear of reprisal from his father, a formidable rival after all. In short, the man from the country dreaded the consequences of his desire.

But things soon took a strange turn on the couch: he fell asleep. One day, he told his analyst that the words the latter spoke did not enter his ears. This statement had serious repercussions. He learned that the Oedipus complex could be reversed and that he himself was a case in point. His problem took on a completely different meaning—the reverse meaning, in fact. What he wanted was to be penetrated by his analyst, and his inability to enter the law was related, he must understand, to his desire to be penetrated by his father. He accepted these explanations, which seemed valid. He was amazed to see that his analyst could solve all problems by using the notion of the Oedipus complex and of psychic bisexuality. This combination was a master key that could unlock all the mysteries of the unconscious. On the couch, he slept more and more. One day, he awoke with the sensation of having female sex organs. He spoke of this sensation right away, seeing it as a worthy prize to offer his analyst, an expert on psychic bisexuality. Such was his existence on the couch.

On the outside, he was still sitting on a stool before an open door. To help pass the time, he did what many others had done since Freud: he replaced the stool with an armchair and changed from being one-not-analysed to being an analyst.

Another man from the country, very much like himself, came to see him and put him in such a state that he had to look for another analyst for himself. This second psychoanalysis made him see that his oral sadism was so great that it changed into its opposite and that the resulting masochistic tendency, prematurely fixated, prevented him from being admitted where he wanted to be. This analyst was indulgent and counted on the passage of time to wear down his patient’s aggression.

In the meantime, the patient developed an interest in the study of texts. He discovered that Freud had made the ego into a Pandora’s box, and that his theoretical child was a perverse polymorph governed by a multitude of unconnected drives: homosexual, sadistic, masochistic, voyeuristic, exhibitionist. His own case, that of the man from the country, was an illustration of uncommon sadism. His studies led him to conclude that those of Freud’s disciples who still believed the primary and the primitive to be synonymous could not really help him. He could see that Freud had made man heir to a whole store of drives, all clamouring to be satisfied. This line of reasoning in which ontogenesis reproduced phylogenesis was of no help to him and did nothing to change his position vis-à-vis the law. His reaction to the treatment remained negative.

He decided to see a third analyst. This one used the significant scanning method, in other words, short sessions. No more ready-made interpretations and universal recourse to Oedipus. This time, to his great relief, there was no inflation of meaning. Things followed their course, but after a few months the man from the country was surprised to experience a feeling of melancholy and a growing desire to kill himself. He took refuge in a psychiatric hospital. There, comforted by the walled-in garden and the kindness of the people around him, he was inspired to write a story he called “The Bridge” (1931a), which starts:

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. (…) So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once constructed, can cease to be a bridge.

One day the bridge heard someone approaching and prepared to hold him up. He promised himself that he would help the person cross over to the other side. But when the “someone” came, he started by prodding the bridge’s bushy hair with his stick, and then caused the bridge wild pain by jumping with both feet on the middle of his body. Who could it be, the bridge asked himself?

“A child, a dream, a wayfarer, a suicide, a destroyer?” He turned around to see who it was. But a bridge to turn around! He had not yet quite turned around when he began to fall, he fell and was torn and pierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at him so peacefully from the rushing water. (Kafka, 1931a, p. 411)

This exercise helped him understand what he would have liked to say to Freud and his disciples. He had wanted to tell them that by locking up the oedipal tragedy in the theory of primal repression, by fencing in the ego, Freud had supposed that the man from the country, and everyone else as well, had the ability to turn himself around. He had supposed that every child naturally inherits the ability to make decisions such as the one which consists of saying “I want to take this into myself, I want to keep that out.” He had given the child a self-reflective capacity located somewhere between an “I” which takes in and an ego which feels, an “I” which sees and an ego which is seen. Freud had presupposed self-awareness by turning primal repression into a frame with an opening and a closing. Not only did he give the child a clearly defined ego, but also, right from the start, an “I-ego” in which the “I” not only retreats into the background when the ego is busy feeling pleasure or displeasure, but can also count on the support of the ego in order to act, take the initiative, and cross boundaries.

So this was it! The man from the country finally understood what had bothered him about his first analyst, who interpreted his master’s teachings too literally.

In truth, this analyst expected the analysand to testify that everyone could be like Oedipus, able to judge himself, conduct his own trial, and accept his incestuous and parricidal intentions without killing himself or going mad. But the witness, exhausted by the heavy responsibility thrust upon him, kept falling asleep.

When a solitary man suspended over a ravine is a bridge unto himself, he is not equipped to turn around. Like Narcissus, he cannot see his own reflection without the risk of drowning. He has no alternative system that would allow him to place the emphasis on the “I” or the ego alternately without losing substance. And so, the man from the country understood that Narcissus was not self-sufficient by choice but by necessity, and that the myth of a primary Narcissus could have disastrous effects. The man from the country decided to relegate this fictional, self-satisfied, self-reliant character to his positivist philosophy function.

More time passed. One day, the man from the country discovered that contrary to what he had believed, Freud had written that displeasure is not necessarily related to increased tension, nor is pleasure always related to its decrease, but that both pleasure and displeasure are characterised by a sort of excitement which could well be rhythm (Freud, 1920g, p. 160). He remembered a dream he had had.

(… A) frail, tubercular equestrienne on her swaying mount is driven round and round the ring before an unflagging audience by her pitiless, whip-swinging ringmaster for months on end without interruption, whirling about on the horse’s back, blowing kisses, ducking and weaving from the waist, and this act, together with the continuous blare of the band and the roaring of the ventilators, goes on and on and down the endless grey avenues of the future, accompanied by the fade and swell of bursts of applause that are really steam hammers—until a young spectator in the gallery runs down the long flight of steps between the rows, bursts into the ring, and calls: Halt! through the fanfares of the constantly accommodating orchestra. But given (…) that no one, not even the rider seems to notice that the frantic ride is over … the young man in the gallery, laying his face on the balustrade and sinking into the closing march as into a heavy dream, weeps without knowing it. (Kafka, 1919, p. 401)

The man from the country concluded that Freud, preoccupied as he was with his sexual discoveries, had not taken the time to ask himself where Oedipus had found the resources necessary to build a selfreflective system in which the “I” and the ego are at the same time separate and inexorably linked, and which made him able to judge himself.

He concluded that Freud did not take into account Oedipus’ childhood at Polybius and Merope, and might have thought that it was in the Corinthian nursery where he was placed that his hero had early sustained exposure to the conditions necessary for developing the paradoxical system of reflection that made him able to turn around. Just as had been the case at the start of physics, at the inception of psychoanalysis, Freud had focused his attention far from the origin. He had supposed that the self-reflection which enables man to see himself, to feel, to think, to mirror his own image, was a natural gift. Where Descartes invoked God to legitimise his “I think”, Freud referred to an inherent capacity for judgment and self-reflection.

Things were becoming clear to him. By undergoing psychoanalysis, the man from the country had signed a bill of change with Freud, but he fell into lethargy on the couch when his psychoanalyst, loyal to the master, tried to cash it in. An edict hidden in the foundations had excluded him from the field of psychoanalysis—a field its founder had created within a built-in spatial and temporal fence. And the man from the country kept trying to show his analyst that in his world a merry-go-round kept turning day and night in a field without fences. Therein lay the source of their misunderstanding and their failure to see eye to eye. These psychoanalysts wanted to introduce sense where the man from the country suggested there was no sense, and that this absence of enclosure had nothing to do with sense, unless one wanted to speak of an original flaw in the conditions of sense-making.

Thanks to this misunderstanding, he set up camp on the border of the country to which he was seeking entry. There, encouraged by the trust placed in him by passers-by asking him the way, by what he learned from his successes, and, above all, from his failures, and enlightened by the texts of the illustrious men who had passed on the torch before him, Sandor Ferenczi, Michael Balint, Nicolas Abraham, Jacques Lacan, Donald Winnicott, Harold Searles, Robert Langs, and some others, he undertook to find a path of his own to the founding principles, while contributing to building the “road that walks by itself”, to borrow the phrase used by Charles Nicolle to refer to infectious diseases.

CHAPTER TWO

Oedipus’ answer to Freud’s enigma

The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

—Franz Kafka, “The Third Notebook” (1917)

The Oedipus complex is the founding myth of psychoanalysis. Starting with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Freud placed it at the centre of a field constructed on terrain conquered from both medicine and religion; he was to maintain the central position of this myth until his death. In fact, he would establish the universality of the principle that every child is a budding Oedipus in fantasy—a principle which defies all theoretical restructuring (1900a, p. 263).¹ Freud sees Oedipus’ tragedy as consisting of the reaction to the two typical dreams of incest and parricide he considers constitutive of the human psyche. If Oedipus is taken as a model for every child, psychoanalysis becomes a scientific field, a coherent set of concepts and ideas.

Oedipus first appeared in the correspondence between Freud and Fliess in September 1897 (Masson, 1985, p. 15). Up until then, psychoanalytic technique was being created, symptoms were given meaning, but no theory of normal psychic activity had been elaborated. That year, Freud made a decisive founding gesture by asserting that the origin of psychic life is not to be found in material or spiritual determinism, but rather in the tension created in the child by language and its ensuing cohort of questions, and most of all questions related to differences between the sexes and between generations.

Maintaining that every child is a budding Oedipus constitutes a break with all materialist perspectives, and especially that of Fliess. The latter, Freud’s close friend and confidant, and for many years his only intellectual interlocutor, was convinced that human life is ruled by the rhythms of feminine and masculine cycles (Fliess, 1909, p. 1).² Like certain modern neurobiologists, Fliess explained the contingencies of human existence using the hidden laws of matter. It might be that he showed himself to be more rigid and superficial than others regarding these principles; whatever the case, Freud violently rejected this materialist determinism, replacing it with a myth.

In January 1899, when Fliess, puzzled or perhaps annoyed, asked what happens in early childhood, Freud replied: “Nothing.” No particular event takes place; rather, the child carries within him a “sexual impulse” which will develop into a life story optimally and universally illustrated by the legend of Oedipus. Possessing language, and especially speech, the child is an inventor of stories. Using the events of his own history, he will write particular variations on the major themes provided by primal fantasies.³ Thus, at the start, the child is both author and actor in a drama where characters desire each other, exchange words, investigate, condemn each other, and inflict injury or death. To the question of what is there at the origin, Freud replies that a fiction is germinating in the child. Through Oedipus, Freud audaciously intends to found a new scientific field on a fiction.

At the same time, Oedipus allowed Freud to oppose Jung and, beyond him, all spiritual perspectives of psychic life.⁴ Jung believed that the forces of good and evil are engaged in a conflict bearing no relation to particular individuals. It is not possible to assign an origin to the unconscious; the living psyche, existing since all eternity, manifests itself in human dreams naturally (Jung, 1963, p. 157).⁵ This notion is what allows Jung to declare in peremptory fashion that dreams are neither dead content nor second-hand forms of life, but rather the expression of this psyche which carries divine and demonic forces. Most of all, this psyche takes no account of generational discontinuity, and death is no obstacle to it. When Jung dreams of a knight in twelfth-century armour, he identifies him as a knight of the Holy Grail returning to take up his interrupted quest. Thanks to Jung’s dream about the knight, the quest for spirituality, for the “numinous” as he calls it, was going to be taken up again.⁶

Jung disregards discontinuity between generations, as well as between animal and mineral realms. In his view, the spiritual knows no boundary and can manifest itself in the mineral, vegetable, animal, or human realm indifferently. An incident he describes in his autobiography illustrates the relation between these realms. In 1909, in the course of a conversation with Freud, Jung asks the latter for his opinion on parapsychology and foresight. Freud answers that he gives no credence to such phenomena. But, just then, the cupboard starts to squeak; Jung seizes the opportunity to point out that the cupboard is trying to make a point, and te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PART I
• PART II
• APPENDIX Schreber’s transsexuality as catastrophic healing and method of survival after the destruction of the paradoxical system
• REFERENCES
• INDEX