Understanding Psychoanalysis

Matthew Sharpe, Joanne Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317492948
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Understanding Psychoanalysis" presents a broad introduction to the key concepts and developments in psychoanalysis and its impact on modern thought. Charting pivotal moments in the theorization and reception of psychoanalysis, the book provides a comprehensive account of the concerns and development of Freud's work, as well as his most prominent successors, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan.The work of these leading psychoanalytic theorists has greatly influenced thinking across other disciplines, notably feminism, film studies, poststructuralism, social and cultural theory, the philosophy of science and the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. Analysing this engagement with other disciplines and their key theorists, "Understanding Psychoanalysis" argues for a reconsideration of psychoanalysis as a resource for philosophy, science, and cultural studies.

part I
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis

one
Where it was: Freud's biology of the mind

From the pleasure principle to the reality principle

In the decade following Breuer’s treatment of Anna, Freud confirmed for himself Breuer’s claim about the curative value of analysands’ recollections in a number of other cases of female hysteria (Emmy von N, Lucy R, Katherina —, Elizabeth von R) (CH). Eschewing Breuer’s reliance on hypnosis, it was in these cases that Freud developed the method of free association and, a fortiori, clinical psychoanalysis. But why might the spoken expression of forgotten traumatic incidents be a therapeutic experience for individuals? It is one thing to do something; another to know what you have done. Such an unexpected clinical finding, Freud saw, could be made sense of only by a far-reaching account of the mind. Yet the categories of Freud’s metapsychology did not come to him all at once, by the time of his first theoretical writings in the early 1890s. Freud would continue to revise them until well after the traumas of World War I.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, the youngest son of a pious Jewish wool-merchant, and the only son of his father’s second wife. At the time of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O (1880 – 82), Freud was beginning his professional life as a physician in Vienna. Freud’s training as a physician, as well as the unquestioned cultural prestige the natural sciences enjoyed in late nineteenth-century Europe, pointed him in the direction of his earliest writings. In these texts, as throughout the ensuing decades, Freud proposed that what the psychoanalytic clinic revealed about the human psyche could be theorized in the terms of a biological account of the mind.

Recall that Anna O described the effect of the talking cure as like chimney sweeping. Implied in Anna’s description is the idea that somehow mental energy, held in by restrictive forces, is released by the spoken recollection of earlier trauma(s). As Jonathan Lear comments, Anna’s idea, however flippantly intended, influenced the theoretical formulations of the young Freud, and thereby psychoanalytic metapsychology (Lear 1990: 35–6).

KEY POINT A précis of the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology

Here the young Freud postulates that observable psychological phenomena depend on the neural structure of the brain. The Project posits three “systems” of “neurones”, separated by “contact barriers” (which restrict the passage of energy (Q) from each neurone to those adjacent to it in the neural network):

• The “Φ-system”: neurones involved in perception of the external world, through which the Q involved in receiving external stimuli flows without resistance.
• The “Ψ-system”: neurones which resist, and retain permanent traces of, Q as it flows through them. The Ψ-system is the part of the brain involved in memory. (Interestingly, Freud locates what he will call the ego here (see below).)
• The “Ω -system”: a much more enigmatic postulate, the Ω -system contains no Q, but by registering the workings of the other systems, supplies the qualitative dimension of conscious experience (what it is like to be conscious): what philosophers of mind today call qualia.

In everyday speech, we call people who are angry or anxious “pent up”. When they express themselves in angry words, gestures or actions, we say they are “blowing off steam”. The young Freud’s founding metapsychological wager draws on the mechanistic sciences of his day which argued that, at base, the behaviours of all living organisms can be understood according to a kind of universal principle of “blowing off steam” (PMH: 8).

In several key texts, Freud asks us to consider the case of “an almost entirely helpless living organism” (IV: 119). Such organisms have only the most basic abilities to respond to their environment. The stimuli the organism receives from the external world activate its nervous system, and generate reflex responses. However, if at any time these stimuli become too great, the organism must either remove (itself from) the source of stimulation, or perish. The nervous system of even such an organism, claims Freud, “is an apparatus having the function of abolishing stimuli which reach it, or of reducing excitation to the lowest possible level... ” ( I V: 120). This function of reducing nervous “excitation” is what Fechner named the biological “principle of constancy” (EPM: 159). What we call the pain of any organism, Freud adds, is the qualitative affect of a quantitative overstimulation of its nervous system. This overstimulation produces a heightened tension inside it, and the reflex impulse to reduce the offending stimulation. Fechner’s principle of constancy, Freud for this reason argues, can be renamed “the pleasure principle”. Pleasure involves at this very basic level the release of painful, pent-up tension within the organism.

All this mechanistic biology has the most telling relevance for human psychology, Freud maintains. The reason is that the newborn human infant is evidently almost entirely under the sway of the pleasure principle, very like our “almost entirely helpless living organism”. Attended to nearly constantly by its carers, it at first has no sense of the distinction between itself and the outside world. When needs do arise for it, as Freud intriguingly posits in The Interpretation of Dreams, infants seem capable from very early on of “hallucinating” their satisfaction (ID: 565–6). Infants do this by recalling the “mnemic images” of earlier satisfaction(s), whenever a new source of pain arises. Freud’s newborn, like a Leibnizian monad, thus has no doors and windows – its wishful thoughts, coupled with the instantaneous attendance of its carers, omnipotently sate its instinctual needs.

Yet all good things must come to an end. The child is forced to discover that the external world does exist. The external world imposes itself upon the child as the sum total of things which the child cannot “dream up”. If the child is chafed by its clothing, for example, no amount of wishing will remove this somatic source of pain. Something in the child’s environment must be altered. In a “realist” refrain central to Freud’s thought up to such later texts as “Civilization and Its Discontents” (see Chapter 7), growing up for Freud involves learning to cope with our constitutive inability to instantly get everything we want. Due to the recalcitrance of the external world to its every whim, the child must develop what Freud calls the “reality principle”, a principle that significantly modifies (although it does not negate) the impulsive demands of the pleasure principle.

KEY POINT The development of the "reality principle" (TPM: 219–25)

• Faced with this “other world”, the perceptual system develops, charged with the need to register the child’s external environment: “the ego periodically sends out small amounts of cathexis into the perceptual system, by means of which it samples the external stimuli, and then after every such tentative advance it draws back again” (N: 239).
• Alongside perception, the child’s faculty of memory develops as a further function of the need to avoid painful experiences in a world obstinate to being controlled by wishful thought alone. If the presence of a certain object has overstimulated it, the child retains its “mnemic image”, so it may avoid this source of pain next time.
• Memory would avail the infant of nothing if it did not also develop muscular control: control over its body, so it might fight or flee from the threatening, overstimulating things.

External things place demands upon the nervous system of the infant. But by developing perception, memory and motility, it becomes capable of recognizing, fleeing or fighting these demands. However, in an absolutely basic principle of psychoanalysis, Freud’s realism about the harsh intractability of the external world is matched by an even harsher view about the potential dangers to the human being of their own, internal drives. If psychoanalysts are popularly depicted as tiresomely asking analysands about how they “feel” about things, rather than events, the basic reason is this. According to Freud’s biological understanding of the mind, our drives, like external objects, place a “demand for work” upon our nervous system: when we feel hunger, there is a rise in internal tension which, if it becomes keen enough, is painful. Our first ideas, Freud maintains, are the “representations” (Vorstellungen) of these instinctual needs. However, like Oedipus, who can only try and fail to flee the words of the oracle that has stated his destiny, so each of us can only fail if we try to fight or flee from our own drives. If we flee, we take them with us. If we snuff them out, we damage our own selves thereby (IV: 119–21).

The child can sate its internal needs by obtaining appropriate objects, or its first others might get them for it. Yet satisfying objects can be scarce. And children are capable of experiencing more than one instinctual demand at a time. The insistence of internal demands in potential contradiction with what the child can readily obtain, for Freud, underlies the development of a further, higher capacity.

KEY POINT What is called thinking?

• When needs persist, and objects cannot be obtained, the infant must develop the capacity for the “binding of psychical energy”. It cannot achieve pleasure by instantly jumping to conclusions, or actions. On top of the capacity for action, it needs now to learn to hold back action, “tolerating an increased tension of stimuli while the process of discharge is postponed” (TPM: 221).
• Thinking, then, is “an experimental kind of action” made possible by this new capacity. “Do my ideas match anything in the external world?”, the child begins to ask. Or, more precisely – drawing on its stock of memories – “do my remembered ideas about how the world is correspond to what I can perceive now?” (see Chapter 5).
• Secondly, the child learns to make elementary hypotheses. “If I do x,” it wonders, “what then?” And, considering the options, “what if I instead acted in ways y or z? Which outcome might be more satisfying in the long run?”

With the development of thinking, our little child has become a strategist. It can now play off different drives, and defer impulses to act on the basis of calculations as to where greater satisfactions lie in the medium to longer terms. From monadic immersion in the “pleasure principle”, it has become capable of what our economists call “rational choice”, aiming to maximize pleasure, over time, in the conditions of a world it did not create.

Can a psychical agency serve three masters?

Alas, Freud does not preach good news for our reality-testing child. For what happens, he asks, if the satisfying of one of its instinctual wishes, for whatever reason, involves courting other dangers? As every fairytale depicts, the hero cannot save the princess without slipping by the guards and humbling the villain. Likewise, becoming a civilized adult means restraining or renouncing many of the drives with which we are born. As we shall examine in Chapter 2, many infantile drives are deemed distasteful or immoral by our societies, and so are incapable of satisfaction without censure: from unrestrained bowel movements to unchecked displays of affection towards siblings. In Freud’s understanding, then, the human psyche always stands under the threat of becoming overburdened. We are all torn from very early in our lives between at least two masters. On one side, there are the demands of our drives or “libido”, which would ideally brook no dissatisfactions. On the other, there are the demands of social reality, which check the abandoned acting out of all our fondest wishes.

The ego is Freud’s name for the part of the psyche that takes on the difficult profession of trying to keep both these “masters” content. The ego “occupies an intermediate position between the external world and the [individuals’ drives] and...a t t e mpts t o h umour all its masters at once . . .” (NP: 147). In developmental terms, the ego is “that part of the psyche which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world acting through perception-consciousness” (EI: 25). It is the psychical bearer and agency of perception, memory and motility, representing “what we call reason and sanity” (ibid.) against the imperious, inconsistent demands of our libido. In common parlance, Freud’s ego is the “self ” we all think of ourselves as being: in control of who we are, what we say and do, and who or what we do it with.

But what, Freud asks, will the good little ego do when it comes to those libidinal drives whose satisfaction would involve conduct prohibited by its elders, and accordingly court punishments or the loss of love?

KEY POINT Repression and its relation to the unconscious

Freud’s answer is that the offending instincts will effectively be struck from the conscious record. The child’s developing ego wants to know nothing about them. The problem is that:

• at this point of its development, it knows only how to respond to threatening external things – by fight or flight. Accordingly, it makes what philosophers call a “category mistake”, responding to its own prohibited wishes as if they were threatening objects in the external world. Unable to fight, it tries to flee them. This is the psychological process that Freud calls “repression” (R: 146–7);
• and, as we have reflected, to flee one’s drives is as impossible as Oedipus’ flight from his own destiny. Repression in Freud’s understanding is thus always failed repression;
• the repressed wishes do not disappear, as the good little child hopes. These wishes remain “in the back of its mind”, or, to (re)introduce Freud’s paradigmatic term, these repressed wishes become unconscious.

The unconscious wishes are from this point kept at a distance from the demands of external reality. Accordingly they revert back to the exclusive sway of the pleasure principle and of fantasies that, like the infant’s earliest hallucinations, stage their fulfilment without need to change the external world. Freud calls the repressed unconscious drives of individuals the id. When rendered in English, this looks innocuous enough. But in German, what Strachey translates as the id is the neuter pronoun “it” (Es). Having repressed its illicit drives, these drives appear to the ego like an “it”, Freud is indicating. From the perspective of the ego they seem a “foreign body” (PMH: 7) – or, as Lacan will capitalize it, some alien Thing. As we shall see in Chapter 7, the origin of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: on understanding psychoanalysis
• part I Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
• part II Freud's children
• part III Psychoanalysis and its discontented
• Chronology of life and events
• Questions for discussion and revision
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index