Freudian Passions

Psychoanalysis, Form and Literature

Jan Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914010
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Freud's thinking about the unconscious has always been seen to be more about representations than affects. When it came to the passions of the transference and the demands of his hysterical patients, Freud was always more interested, wanted to move the focus away from the transference, and onto dreams. Hidden wishes more than manifest ones were what captured his imagination and style. This book returns to the repressed theory of passions in Freud's own thinking, arguing that the repression, fixation and rhythmic movement of affects make up the roots and branches of psychoanalytic thinking. We can think of Freud's unconscious affects as a tree, with the most passionate and primitive affects that make up the core of our psychic life, moving and branching out into more elaborated emotions and representations. So what moves this tree: the house of our first passions? How we move the tree of our affects, or leave it, is integral to Freud's understanding of sexuality and the Oedipal Complex.

Chapter One

Passions in search of form

What questions do our passions raise for psychoanalysis? For Freud, passions are our life, and death drives, that unhappy marriage between our affects and representations; the love we can bind and the sexuality we cannot bear or formulate. Our unmanageable passions have a history that predates psychoanalysis. In one sense the very word passion belongs to an older vocabulary that psychoanalysis came along to deconstruct or explain. In Freudian language we have affects which can lean towards biological instincts or rest on their representative qualification in relation to feelings, emotions, moods, and drives. And yet passion evokes that vital capacity which makes us feel alive; makes life worth living. Moreover, passion is always directed towards something. We could call that something an object, but before the object exists, or after it is destroyed or lost, passion is in search of a form in which it can be dressed and carried. Are passions, then, our desires? In some ways, yes, but passion suggests a more passive relation. We suffer our passions, they are something that seems to visit or invade our very being, whereas desire suggests a more active relationship to our wants. Desire, perhaps, involves the ego’s participation; we might need to loosen or lose our egos to find our desire, but the ego has not disappeared. Whereas in a blind passion, whether that is in terms of love, lust or hate, we are literally beside ourselves. Passion, here, has driven us to a place beyond the ego and all reason, to the madness that resides at the heart of love. So we could say that passionate affects are the part of our desires that are on the move in search of form. And our desires are the travel of those passionate forms seeking further elaboration.

Psychoanalysis as literature and a means of reading, translates, carries, and performs our passions. It can explain, along with literature, not just how we read and translate the world around us, but also how we read each other in relation to our personal history, and how we read in order to move towards our future, to something new. Reading is not necessarily seeing, nor is it confined to language. We can read a person like a book, so the saying goes, suggesting it’s easy. But reading books, as any reader knows, can be done in an infinite variety of ways. Roland Barthes is probably the most famous literary critic to suggest that readers are also writers, that texts don’t belong to authors. Texts and writing can’t be confined to the author’s life, and are indeed born after their death, in relation to the wider public circulation of their translation. In a similar way we can say that within the genre we call the family, there are sub-genres of mothers, fathers, and siblings. For the child, pleasure and the sense of a personal self entails the repression and translation of desire into the genres we call mothers and fathers. Too much sameness, or too much difference, results in a dead genre, or mother, and so the ingredients for pleasure in the family are the translation of secrets into genres: the recognisable forms that mediate desire and yet keep it circulating. Passions without forms to translate and communicate them to another, remain incestuously prohibited and blocked off. Without this transfiguration of affect and passion into genre, genres become repetitive and stuck; the same old pattern or script. We can see this repetition of sameness in the transference; and the analyst’s task is not simply as Freud realised in his classic essay Remembering, Repeating, and Working- Through, to get the client to remember repressed drives or to “abreact” the emotions attached to them. “Working through the resistances” is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from hypnosis in Freud’s opinion because it effects more lasting change.

And this is, I suggest, because in hypnosis, symptoms are washed away, only to return once our defences are erected, more forcibly than before. Symptoms, here, are not respected as they are in analysis, as the bodily forms and spaces through which we seek to speak and relate our passions. Symptoms are inherently relational, they are our forbidden desires on the move, seeking conversation, demanding to be read in similar and yet different ways. Reading in psychoanalysis, and in the analytic session, translates secrets and our symptoms into genres that can give living form to our desires. The Oedipal complex explains how we identify with and desire both parents, and it is this sameness and difference that makes our mothers and fathers into 'alive' genres, where we can re-find our first loves and yet fashion them differently, again, and again. The daughter needs to find her unique mother and yet also locate her as a mother within a succession of mothers, referring the girl on to her future, symbolic identity. In psychoanalysis we are used to the idea of a phallic genre and the need for the child to desire beyond the mother to what is called the father’s language or law. But the mother also needs to belong to a genre, although I will suggest, as other feminists have done historically, that the mother’s language is poetic and gestural, rather than linguistic.

We might think of the mother as more of a genre mix, as it is the lived form of our love for our mothers that carries us forward to participation in the cultural symbolic. And by this, I mean maternal form as an allegiance to the real of the mother’s body, but its other side links up with what psychoanalysis has called the phallic desire that travels beyond the mother to the cultural world. So maternal form will be in rhythm with the body, but is also a continuing presence in relation to Oedipal conflicts allowing us to bear the ongoing frustration of those different desires.

Maternal form would then be a means of mediating our opposing desires, translating the sameness and difference of the Oedipal stage, enabling the primary passionate forms in relation to the mother to be broken up in a generative manner and translated into more active desires within the cultural and social field. Where the phallus opposes the mother’s body, you will always choose between being a victim and perpetrator, one or the other—in a condition of divorce. It’s the difference between your parents arguing (sometimes terribly), and “father” beating “mother” up. In families, between couples, arguments can be won and lost: understandings, guile, comings and goings are all involved. Bodily gesture and language join up as different languages that on some basic level still recognise and relate to each other. But what kind of conversation, we might ask, are we in when we are simply being kicked or punched? Maternal form adds something to the stand-off between the phallus and the maternal body; it translates that sadomasochism in its creation of ego routes and shapes, moving us from the original attachment drives in relation to the mother, towards more erotic fashioning of the self within a wider cultural world.

Maternal form

Lived form in relation to the mother is how our passionate affects become rhythmically and unconsciously distributed and intimately engaged with other personal and non-personal objects. Lived form, as Susan Langer understands it, is a “significant form", in that it gives shape and expression to what we feel, through non-verbal and aesthetic symbols that are pre-verbal and occur before the advent of language and what we would now call the Lacanian Symbolic. If living form is the bodily and artistic symbols that express the pre-Oedipal and imaginary relationship with the mother, then it is this form that replicates itself within the shared Oedipal genres that agree and organise conventions and exchange within our culture. In this book I want to explore how affects are in search of the living forms associated with the early mother. In other words lived form expresses and helps to sublimate the bodily drives in the realm of the imaginary before the advent of language and the Symbolic.

My argument for maternal lived form is indebted to the different understandings of the unconscious forms or idioms that are communicated between mother and child in the work of Christopher Bollas and Kenneth Wright. Both Bollas and Wright develop ideas of a maternal aesthetic that follow Winnicott in understanding how the child’s early self, and being, is elaborated through a generative maternal object, that can accurately reflect her babies moods, but also allow those affectual drives to use and alter her. Developing Langer’s notion of significant form to an understanding of the reciprocal attunement between mother and baby, Wright suggests that the mother’s ability to identify and respond to her infant’s changing affects and rhythms is an unconscious mirroring that transforms and returns the child’s patterns with her own particular form, expressing the child’s experiences in similar but different ways. But this is not simply mimicry:

She does not copy the baby’s behaviour, but grasps its experience,which she then replays it in a way that bears her own stamp.(Wright, 2009: p. 146)

For Wright, the resonant forms that become elaborated in the holding relationship between mother and child (in all their vocal, visual, and kinetic diversity) are integral to the developing life of the self or ego. It is Wright’s use of aesthetic form in relation to Langer’s thinking that interests me, the idea that inherent to the imaginary is an ongoing sublimation of affects in relation to the mother that is carried through the non-verbal presentational symbols that directly express lived feeling and experience. Langer writes, “everything actual must be transformed by imagination into something experiential” (Langer, 1953: p. 258). It is the virtual powers of art, poetry, and music that make them able to express what we feel, because it is only through this symbolic illusion that we can really experience them. The first passionate forms of the child are related to his mother and his immediate environment, and the mother is a virtual form for the child in an uncanny and a poetic sense. By this I mean she must be enigmatically alien, and yet a similar semblance and form that the child can use symbolically and analogically to bring his feelings to life, constructing the multiple changing shapes of his ego. The child’s passionate drives imitates the form of the mother, just in the way she returns her child’s affects with her particular form attached. But this mimesis between the two is never simply mimicry, there is always a vital improvisation at work, through the rhythms of the senses, that makes these forms analogous: similar but not the same.

And it is through these analogous forms the designs of the ego begin to grow and travel. And yet there is more to this story than just these ideals, what Bersani would call, inaccurate replications of the mother’s and the child’s forms. For the child’s affects are always in excess of the available forms to frame it. Our passions always overspill into a world that is alien and to some degree un-digestible to the self. In his essay On Narcissism Freud asks,

what makes it necessary at all for our mental life to pass beyond the limits of narcissism and to attach the libido to objects? The answer which would follow from our line of thought would once more be that this necessity arises when the cathexis of the ego with libido exceeds a certain amount. (Freud, 1914b: p. 85)

When passions become too much for the ego they overflow to the objects that exist around them. A strong ego says Freud, protects us from becoming ill, but, “in the last instance we must love in order not to fall ill” (Freud, 1914b: p. 85). We might say that repression bolsters the ego in the boundaries it erects between the self and the world, but this mastery does little to elaborate our excessive passions.

Repression of our desires is always in relation to the ideal ego or self, who forbids and fixes what we feel for our first love objects. What we can’t have we will forever want, and repression ensures that we will always be running back home in pursuit of these ideal desires. Freud makes clear in On Narcissism that repression and sublimation are different things, if the construction of the ego ideal,

heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repressions; sublimation is a way out, a way by which those demands can be met without involving repression. (Freud, 1914b: p. 95)

Some alternative must be found to repression, if our passions are to travel and become shaped into liveable experience. In psychoanalysis, the transference follows the familiar ego lines and boundaries that take us back to the scene of what is repressed, and yet the transference is not to wean someone from what they feel, but to provide new shapes in which the ego can elaborate its loves. Symptoms run back to the excessive fixed passions of our past, but they are also in search of new forms of conversation, and the transference is how we allow our affects and passions this elaboration in terms of a search for more relational forms.

We might think of this early expression of maternal form and feeling in relation to Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic; a poetic chora that precedes the symbolic but is also heterogeneous, playing alongside the Law, and helping to mediate the bodily drives with language and the stand-off between the maternal body and phallic prohibition. Lived form, what I call maternal form, has a more intimate relationship with the bodily drives than language. Whereas language represses the drives, maternal form mixes with them and unconsciously translates and communicates with them telepathically. Without maternal form, we have a repression of the body through language with no sublimation! Consequently, maternal form predates the Symbolic but is at work mediating and translating the passions associated with the mother’s body. Julia Kristeva makes clear in her book Black Sun that the unconscious is not structured through language, but;

like all imprints of the Other, including and most particularly those that are most archaic, ’semiotic', it is constituted by preverbal self- sensualities that the narcissistic or amorous experience restores to me. (Kristeva, 1987: p. 204)

In Lacanian thinking the body is only available as a repressed entity, and Kristeva’s understanding of the semiotic is different, in that it brings the material body back as something that has to work at the level of the imaginary and the symbolic. This brings Kristeva’s work much closer to what Freud saw as a necessary sublimation or mediation of the drives, a sublimation that I contend is not just achieved through repression, a fixed ego ideal or castration through language. Of course Kristeva’s work moves from an emphasis on the semiotic aspects of the maternal body to the nature and necessity of its abjection.

As Kelly Oliver’s brilliant reading of Kristeva makes clear, rejection and negation of the maternal body occurs in the pre-symbolic, a gestural expulsion which Kristeva locates in Freud’s Fort Da game. Negativity moves through the symbolic, Kelly informs us, “because it moves through the corporeal” and this pre-symbolic negation of the mother’s body shows how this body, “acts not only as a lack but also as an excess” (Kelly, 1998: p. 56). It is this excess of the maternal body characterised as both semiotic and abject that makes up some of the most interesting aspects of Kristeva’s thinking. And yet these excesses, the poetic, and the thing repulsed, are always structured for Kristeva in relation to a repressive Oedipal Symbolic. In this book I want to concentrate on an excess to the maternal body, the Freudian passions, that are carried by a telepathic maternal form that is non-discursive and anterior to the Symbolic. This maternal telepathy can be in touch with reality without necessarily being conscious. The imaginary, in other words, is not simply fantasmatic, but has a relation to reality and the material body, carrying living forms and primary symbols that shape our affects and move them into a more friendly less punitive relationship between the ego and its ideal. So, here, maternal form is not repressed under the Symbolic but partakes of a different kind of sublimation of sexuality, one which is non-repressive, reduplicating the primary identification with the mother in ways that form and de-form, shape and re-shape the ego.

Paul Federn’s understanding of the way that the ego has many different boundaries is instructive. He argues that the ego has many boundaries that are flexible and moveable, and that the bodily ego feeling associated with the ego is “compound” being made up of motor and sensory memories but also with the somatic organisation. Bodily ego feeling “is not identical with the somatic organisation, with the unity of correctly ordered perceptions of one’s own body” (Federn, 1952: p. 27). Ego feelings can coincide with our perception of our body, but there are plenty of ego states where we transcend or dissociate from the experience of our bodily boundaries. Federn talks of the bodily ego feeling as a mental one, and when we are awake these things feel synonymous, but there are times, in Federn’s view, for example in dreaming or falling asleep, or in particular hypnotic states, where it is easy to see how distinct our mental and bodily ego’s are.

Didier Anzieu develops Federn’s understanding of the ego’s moveable boundaries to conceptualise “a skin ego” (Anzieu, 1989). For Anzieu, the ego is a skin ego covering the psychic organism and beginning as part of an envelope with the mother. Thus it acts as,

a containing, unifying envelop for the Self, as a protective barrier for the psyche; and as a filter of exchanges and a surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible. (Anzieu, 1989; p. 98)

Although the first skin ego is established by touch, there is also an early sensory sound envelop with the mother, and these skins give way to visual envelopes supporting the psyche as it develops. Thinking about our different skins is a rather wonderful way to encapsulate the embodiment of different selves that are initially enveloped in relation to the mother’s body. The skin ego returns us to the early sensorium that is the bedrock of Freud’s thinking. Steve Connor is disconcerted with the therapeutic emphasis in Anzieu’s work on the suffering and repair of the ego’s skin. The “model of the skin as a case or container is just not extensive or various enough to account for the psycho-social life, or lives of the skin", Connor writes. Being happy in one’s skin is the ability to live “the skin’s multiplicity, its many foldedness” (Connor, 2004: p. 92).

One way of thinking about Anzieu’s skins and Federn’s ego boundaries that does not return them simply to a model of suffering or repair is to understand them as different descriptions of living maternal forms associated with an early unconscious communication between mother and child. Federn suggests that ego feelings (be they memories, affects, or perceptions of somatic or external reality) are not predicated on consciousness, and when ego feelings are absent we become aware of them as estranged sensations. Something is affectually lacking in the ego’s experience. “Whenever there is a change in ego feeling cathexis", Federn writes, we sense the “boundaries” of our ego.

Whenever an impression impinges, be it somatic or psychic, it strikes a boundary of the ego normally invested with ego-feeling. If no ego feeling sets in at this boundary, we sense the impression in question as alien. So long as no impression impinges on upon the boundaries of ego feeling, we remain unaware of the confines of the ego. (Federn, 1952: p. 64)

Or another explanation would be that without the ego’s boundaries and forms, our feelings, affects, memories and perceptions can’t be experienced as something lived. We feel strange and dissociated when ego feelings have shrunk away, or moved beyond the available boundaries and forms which can carry and express them. Anzieu ends his book on The Skin Ego with an example of the hysteric, who lacking an adequately protective and holding skin, is subject to one that is overly excitable and stimulating. Like Masud Khan’s famous grudge, this hysterical personality is caught up in an endless sadomasochistic seduction which is actually a demand for more ego capacity in relation to holding maternal care. This argument, that the hysteric is in search of protective maternal care and not desire, is part of a long oscillation in psychoanalytic thinking that makes the hysteric too full of desire, or too empty; too much of a child stuck auto-erotically to the mother, or too frustrated in relation to a paternal naming or symbolic place she desperately wants and rejects.

Unconscious reading

Passion in relation to the ear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One Passions in search of form
• Chapter Two Unconscious reading of mothers and flowers
• Chapter Three Rhythms of the unconscious
• Chapter Four Symptoms, ’sense and sensibility'
• Chapter Five All about our mothers: melodrama’s maternal form
• Chapter Six Sympathies beyond the self in Daniel Deronda
• Chapter Seven Rhythm of affects and styles of the ego, in To the Lighthouse
• Chapter Eight Dreaming lilies
• References
• Index