Passion for the Human Subject

A Psychoanalytical Approach Between Drives and Signifiers

Bernard Penot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429917165
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Each one of us has to be born "inter urinas et faeces", as St. Augustine so strikingly put it. More recently, Freud's 1915 discovery of 'instincts' - that is, 'drives' - and their 'viscitudes' leads us further to envision a human subjectivity that would have nothing mataphysical about it. The baby's "feeling of himself" first arises in the midst of the earliest interactions with his parental partner, establishing his 'drive monatges' whose acomplishment forms a circuit latching on to something in the first other. In the course of these early interactions, the 'new subject' evoked by Freud will gradually take on its own qualities, accoridng to the signifcations that it can grasp in the primordial partner's messages, responding to the baby's manifestation of needs. One of Lacan's key ideas is that 'signifiers' are percieved first of all in the Other. The Freudian subject may then be defined as 'an agent of corporeal energy caught up in a signifying relation with his parental other (already a subject)'.

CHAPTER ONE
The drive circuit as generator of subjectivation

One day we're going to have to accept that the most subversive part of Freud's thought is that it upsets the theory of subjectivity by placing at its origin the myth of the drive, by making the subject into the subject of the drive ... at times leading the drive, at other times being lead by it.

André Green (1989)

If Freud generally avoided the use of the term "subject" in his work, it is probably because he was wary of its established usage in philosophy to designate a supposedly pre-eminent instance of the psyche—that very same conscious ego that has been dethroned by Freud's attempt at decentralizing the psychic apparatus, which is the foundation of his metapsychology.

There is, however, one remarkable exception to Freud's avoidance of this term. In "Instincts¹ and Their Vicissitudes" (Freud, 1915c), he repeatedly and systematically refers to the notion of subject when evoking a certain kind of destiny (vicissitude) of basic pairs of drives: that in which the turning around upon oneself (upon one's own body) combines with reversal into its opposite. This is a reversal of the aim of the drive—that is, the satisfaction sought in an active or a passive way. Freud also mentions here another kind of reversal, of content, found in the single instance of the transformation of love into hate—which he will later examine separately.

Let us see at what point in this key text Freud needs to have recourse to the notion of subject. It is precisely when he is determined to describe this ordinary destiny of basic drive pairs, the combination of the two above-mentioned complementary movements: the turning around of drive activity onto one's own body, and the reversal of an active mode of satisfaction into a passive one (to get oneself looked at, to get oneself taken in hand). It is in describing this reversal of satisfaction into a passive mode that Freud introduces the presence of a subject. But it is striking that he places this "new subject", as he calls it, outside the own-person (an "extraneous subject"), the agent of a gaze or of his handling. The subject within the own-person is then supposed to be in a sort of suspension.

Freud proposes to illustrate this by means of a first antagonistic drive pair that he calls sadomasochistic—for he seems unable to avoid using the psychiatric terminology of perversions when dealing with basic instinctual life. He evokes the first activity of the newborn: a violence against whatever is within his reach, which is objectively sadistic but innocent insofar as its degree of subjeetivation is minimal; he notes that "the infliction of pain plays no part among the original purposive actions [of the drive]". Afterwards, the child's "sadism" tends to take his own body as an object, a practice that Freud qualifies as auto-erotic. Freud subsequently describes a third phase where the drive seeks satisfaction in a passive mode for which he coins the term masochistic. "An extraneous person is once more sought as object; this person, in consequence of the alteration which has taken place in the instinctual [drive] aim, has to take over the role of the subject" (p. 127).

This is the first appearance of the term subject, by which Freud clearly intends to designate the outside agent of a drive activity, a sadistic one in this particular instance, which strives to satisfy the masochistic demand of the person. Strachey remarks in a footnote what he calls a "confusion in the use of the word subject".² "As a rule", he says, "subject and object are used respectively for the person in whom an instinct... originates, and the person or thing to which it is directed.... Here, however, subject seems to be used for the person who plays the active part in the relationship—the agent [of drive]" (p. 127, fn). Freud, considering at that time an "original sadism", goes on to speak of a "passive ego [Ich]"—he will even speak of an "own-object"—giving in fantasy [sic] to "the extraneous subject" the sadistic position that he (ego) had first occupied.

At this point in the development of his thinking, Freud conceived of this passive-masochistic attitude as secondary—that is, as resulting from the turning around/reversal of the original sadistic impulse. He says: "A primary masochism, not derived from sadism in the manner I have described, seems not to be met with" (p. 128). But in later works about masochism (1924c), Freud expresses what he calls "an opposite view". In sum, we can see that Freud's three phases of drive activity reprise the three classical grammatical moods of verb conjugation: active, reflexive, and passive.

He then invites the reader to consider a second pair of opposing drives: the one whose goal, he says, is "to look and to display oneself", which, he immediately adds, would become scopophilia and exhibitionism in the language of perversions.

In his description of the turning around/reversal destiny of this new drive pair, Freud once more employs the term subject in speaking of the third phase, when there is a passivation of the goal—the satisfaction of being looked at:

Here again, we may postulate the same stages as in the previous instance:—(a) Looking as an activity directed towards an extraneous object, (b) Giving up of the object and turning of the scopophilic instinct [drive] towards a part of [one's] own body; with this, transformation to passivity and setting up of a new aim—that of being looked at. (c) Introduction of a new subject to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at by him.

[1915c, p. 129]

Once again, Freud uses the term subject to designate the agent of an external gaze upon oneself.

I think three considerations can be derived from the functional schema Freud proposes through these two basic drive pairs.

1. First, both illustrate in a striking way an essential characteristic of drive: that its exercise is always active by nature (drive is "a piece of activity", he says) even when its goal is passive satisfaction (to be looked at, to be handled). Freud's formula "one displays oneself" expresses very well this idea of implicit activity; and I think that the English formulation, to get something done to oneself, also captures the active nature of such a search for passive satisfaction—and designates by the same token the so-called feminine position in both sexes.

These considerations should help to counter Strachey's abovementioned objections (and in a footnote). Freud shows an external subject that must satisfy the own-person's drive activity when its aim is a passive satisfaction. He thus shows how this so-called "passive" moment of drive vicissitude plays a decisive role in the new person's subjective appropriation. But beyond this, it leads us to consider that no subject can be constituted alone at any moment.

Drive interaction and its subjectivating function implies the participation of at least two subjects. I would say that it is fundamentally and from the beginning an intersubjective experience and, as such, necessarily implies a third referential term.

It is to the credit of Andre Green (1980) that he was able to promote this idea of drive passivation, which plays a key role in the process of genuine subjectivation. In fact, these two terms are neologisms, in French as well as in English. But their interest is that each one can be coupled with another more usual, less ambiguous, word connoting passivity, giving the pairs passivity/passivation and subjection/subjectivation. The terms of each pair are related but not synonymous, since the more usual words connote passivity, while their cognate neologisms dynamically express how drive activity may be directed towards passive satisfaction. Thus in the first pair, passivity/passivation, the second term does not express pure passivity but, more specifically, how drive activity can be directed towards a passive goal; while in the second pair, subjection/subjectivation, the second term implies a process of appropriation of the drive movement (whereas subjection connotes dispossession), a way of assuming and experiencing the drive activity as one's own—a movement accomplishing, in sum, the opposite of rejection or disavowal (Penot, 1998). From this perspective—a very fertile one in my opinion—it may be seen that the Freudian subject must proceed from the drive interplay, lest it be merely a false self or a defensive reaction formation.

2. But we must note that, in the two examples he gives, Freud starts by locating the subject outside: it is an extraneous person, he says, outside one's own-person. This external subject, agent of the activity of looking at or taking in hand, clearly corresponds here to something other than what is conventionally referred to as an object of the child's drive activity. Freud even speaks at this point of the "giving up of the object". It is striking that he places what he calls a "new subject" outside the physical person, as the agent of a gaze upon the latter or the agent of his handling—the subject within the person itself apparently being at that moment in a sort of suspension.

Already, in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1950 [1895]), Freud had evoked the primordial function of aiding the newborn, performed by a person he calls (in the style of the gospels) the neighbour [Nebenmensch], the one who accepts to be the agent of the maternal function.

3. The question remains: which of the three phases of drive activity (active, reflexive, passive) comes first? We saw that in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes", Freud emphasizes his own conviction that "it can hardly be doubted that the active aim appears before the passive, the looking precedes being looked at", (p. 129)

In his later work, however, Freud's convictions on this issue would vacillate. Most notably, he was to argue the opposite opinion, nine years later, in "The Economical Problem of Masochism" (1924c), where he presents primary masochism as a consequence of the condition of the human infant's prematurity. Freud does not fail to point out this change of opinion in a footnote to a new edition (in 1924) of "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915c). Nevertheless, this remarkable theoretical fluctuation concerning the primacy of sadism, or masochism, or of auto-eroticism, appears to me to be in itself symptomatic: an indication of the pivotal role these reversals of position in drive activity can have in the process of subjectivation. This leads one to consider that the degree and richness of a person's subjectivation may be determined by his/her ability to experience a smooth passage from one position to another, to develop subjective enjoyment within an exchange that is not merely a search for release.

The drive circuit

It is precisely in view of this crucial question that Jacques Lacan undertook, beginning in the mid-1950s, his examination of Freud's work. Lacan's seminar "The Partial Drive and Its Circuit" (1964) can shed some light on this issue. He first argues that any drive is sexual (even if it belongs to the register of orality or anality) and, moreover, necessarily partial (even if it is genital), in view of sexuality's biological end: procreation. Having said this, he insists on using Freud's text to show the kind of "back and forth" by which each drive couple tends to take shape following a three-stage path.

Here, Lacan has the simple idea of representing the drive's accomplishment as making a circuit, a loop, wherein the three positional modes argued by Freud succeed each other, forming a retroactive trajectory going around the incidental object that is its obscure aim (the lost first object). What then becomes clear for Lacan is that the satisfaction of the drive will reside more in the degree of accomplishment of this loop, the richness of its circuit, than in any attempt to actually possess or master the object itself. This reminds me of what the Greek poet Cavafy says of the Odyssey in his poem "Ithaka":

Ithaka gave you the beautiful voyage ...
it has nothing else to give you.

Is this not the same idea—of an object serving as a pretext, as the cause of an adventure—that lies behind the many cycles of the Grail quest? That the journey itself is the aim....

Lacan considers that it is not as it grasps its incidental (manifest) object that any drive can be satisfied; indeed, it is when the object is in its grasp that the drive learns that satisfaction cannot be derived from the object, because "no object of need can satisfy drive". What drive seeks above all is something from the primal other. This is particularly true of the oral drive: "The mouth opening up in the register of drive (activity)", say Lacan, "is not going to be satisfied with food". This is what we keep learning from bulimic patients: no food ever gives satisfaction in the drive quest, which is always aiming for the lost-lacking object.

But, one might ask, what primordial lost (or failed) satisfaction is the bulimic's oral drive indefinitely in quest of? I would say it is probably seeking to be allowed to experience the satisfaction of feeling delectable, as an infant, in the eyes of the mother, a way of satisfying the drive for oral satisfaction in a passive mode, without being destroyed by it. In other words, it seeks to be in a position of oral passivation in relation its object. But the danger of assuming the passive position of object of the mother's oral drive, first experienced in infancy, can induce a defensive exercise of oral drive activity, lowering the goal for satisfaction to the level of the de-metaphorized object of alimentary need.

Bulimic and anorexic patients usually illustrate this kind of failure to experience a genuine, enriching process of oral drive passivation—and, of course, the way this process can make the experience of romantic love more dynamic. The treatment of Vera (chapter 2) seems to me to exemplify this. Vera could gain a certain freedom and enrich her capacities for exchange through the re-actualization, in the transference relationship, of her repetitive, defensive need to reject a form of oral dependence on her object that she experienced as degrading and dehumanizing. To overcome this blockage, she had to (re)experience the reversibility of active-passive int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Introduction
• 1 The drive circuit as generator of subjectivation
• 2 Oral drive functioning and subjection
• 3 "A Child Is Being Beaten": the three stages of the subjectivation of fantasy
• 4 The misfortunes of Sophie, or the bad subject to come
• 5 Adolescence of the Freudian subject
• 6 Foreclosure of signification and the suffering subject
• 7 The key role of the phallus signifier in the subjectivation of sexuality
• 8 Sublimation, latency, and subjectivation
• 9 Unexpected drive subjects in the session
• 10 The logical stages of subjectivation
• REFERENCES
• INDEX