Psychoanalysis in Context

Paths between Theory and Modern Culture

Anthony Elliott, Stephen Frosh, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415097031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134862290
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

During the last decade and a half there have been dramatic changes in psychoanalytic theory, as well as in cultural, social and political theory. Psychoanalysis in Contexts examines these changes and explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and theory.
The volume brings together leading scholars and practitioners in psychoanalysis to develop a unique rethinking of the relations between subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, sexual difference and gender power, and unconscious desire and political change.
Psychoanalysis in Contexts creates a dialogue between different psychoanalytic approaches to the study of subjectivity, social action and modern societies. It will be essential reading for everyone interested in the future direction of psychoanalytic and cultural theory.

Part I

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity

1

Logic, imagination, reflection

Cornelius Castoriadis

INTRODUCTION

I have elected to speak today about the following three notions: logic, imagination, reflection. Before doing that, however, permit me a few words concerning the title of this colloquium.

‘The unconscious and science’ can be read in two ways. I will not be speaking about the unconscious as an object of science; I will touch upon it, in fact, only indirectly. But there is another aspect, which we can formulate as follows: how, generally speaking, is a science possible, if human beings are essentially defined by the existence of the unconscious, if they are, as Roger Dorey has recalled, split? How, under these conditions, is a science of the unconscious possible—that is to say, how is psychoanalysis itself possible?

The classic response to the question concerning the possibility of science is this: the fact that man is a logical animal (he has or is logos, understanding, reason, etc.) is what makes science possible. Man is zoon logon echon. And Freud himself, in a celebrated passage, evokes ‘our God Logos’, which would be, perhaps, for him, the ultimate culmination of a phylogenetic process—that is, a biologically acquired property.

My response will be entirely different. Perhaps it would have aroused Freud's indignation, but I believe it is faithful to the nerve centre of his inspiration and research. First let me summarize it so as to provide a guiding thread through the labyrinthine intricacies of what will follow. Simply put, logic is what we share with animals— even with living beings in general. Yet animals have no science. True, we are separated from them by consciousness. But, as I will show below, consciousness as such does not lead to science, either. Man's distinguishing trait is not logic, but imagination, and, more precisely, unbridled imagination, defunctionalized imagination. As radical imagination of the singular psyche and as social instituting imaginary, this sort of imagination provides the conditions for reflective thought to exist, and therefore also for a science and even a psychoanalysis to exist.

FREUD AND THE IMAGINATION

Freud's contribution to the question of the imagination's relation to reflective thought, or reflection, is riven by a deep antinomy. In German, imagination is Einbildung, a quite honourable word, especially since the time of Kant, who made it into a central concept of the Critique of Pure Reason. Now, if one checks the Gesamtregister of the Gesammelte Werke, the general index to Freud's complete works in German, one will find that the term Einbildung appears only twice,¹ and both times in contexts of no great import, for they concern the ‘Imaginings’ of the neurotic. (‘Imagination’ does not appear in the index to the Standard Edition.) By way of contrast, one will note that the terms Phantasie and phantasieren, which appear very early in Freud's writings (the letters to Fliess are full of them), cover four and a half pages of the Gesamtregister.

At the start these terms possessed a very narrow acceptation. As Freud says in a letter to Fliess (1897a:247), phantasy—Phantasie—and phantasying— phantasieren—‘are derived from things that have been heard but understood [only] subsequently’; and, he adds deliciously, ‘all their material is of course, genuine’. There is nothing in Phantasie, in phantasy, that the subject has not already perceived beforehand; here phantasy is a matter of reproduction. The goal of phantasies is defensive, and they ‘arise from an unconscious combination…of things experienced and heard’ (Freud 1897b:248; 1897c:252; 1897d:255, 258). Later on will come the idea that Phantasien are ‘detached fragments of thought processes’ (1911:222).²

Everything happens as if these ‘phantasies’ were only the product of a recombinative activity, and therefore in no way originary or creative. And when Freud is confronted with the problem of ‘originary phantasies’ which have no ‘actual’ real source (in life), he will seek a mythical ‘real’ source for them, in phylogenesis. What we have here is the old conception, in psychology, of imagination as pure combinatory of elements with which the psyche has already been furnished from elsewhere; that is, by the perceptual apparatus or, as Freud says in his Project For A Scientific Psychology (1895), by the system of psi neurons.

What we call imagination thus turns out in fact to be lacking in psychical status, it being referred back to a derived and secondary activity. We have here an enormous paradox, for it could be said, on the other hand, that Freud's entire life's work deals with nothing but the imagination. The patriarch of the movement, one of whose mouthpieces is the review entitled Imago (founded in 1912 by Hans Sachs and Otto Rank), the man whose work would be incomprehensible if in the imagination one did not see a central, constitutive power of the psyche, does not want to know anything about it. There should be something surprising about this, but this sort of misrecognition, this veiling (of the imagination) is far from unprecedented. What we witness here is the repetition of a gesture, more than two millennia old, which had already been made by the first discoverer of the imagination himself, Aristotle (in his treatise De Anima), and which was reproduced by Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason places the productive imagination (produktive Einbildungskraft) near the centre of the faculties of the psyche in his first edition (1781), but whose second edition, published seven years later, curtails the role of the imagination, subordinating it to the understanding (see Castoriadis 1986/1978).

In fact, a book could be written about this antinomy in Freud's thought as well as about the history of the battle which rages between, on the one hand, those terms which at first appear to him indubitable and which become increasingly problematic—namely this sort of trinity or trinomial of reality, logic, pleasure, the psychical apparatus operating more or less logically vis-à-vis a reality given to it, so as to avoid displeasure (this is the first formulation of the pleasure principle as found in the 1895 Project) or to maximize pleasure—and, on the other hand, the imagination; that is to say, the elaborations, perhaps even the phantasmatic and fantastic creations, of the psychical apparatus. An assessment of this battle cannot be drawn up in a few lines, but one of its results is already certain: Freud, who from the beginning to the end of his work in fact spoke of nothing but the imagination, of its works and its effects, obstinately refused to thematize this element of the psyche. Moreover, the motive for this covering up (of the imaginary element) seems evident to me. To take the imagination into account seems to Freud incompatible with the ‘project for a scientific psychology’ or, later, with a ‘scientific’ psychoanalysis—as for Aristotle, perhaps, and certainly for Kant, the imagination ultimately had to be put in its place, a place subordinate to that of reason. And Freud's last arguments against (physicalist or behaviourist) scientism in matters psychological, as true as they are, could be endorsed without hesitation by a rationalist philosopher. Such a scientistic psychology, he had said, would be incapable of explaining ‘the property of being conscious or not’ (1923:18), this ‘fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description—the fact of consciousness’. Quite justified sarcastic remarks rain down upon the proponents of American behaviourism, who ‘think it possible to construct a psychology which disregards this fundamental fact!’ (Freud 1938:157). Let it be noted in passing that, while psychoanalysis does accord and has to accord the ‘fundamental fact’ of consciousness its place, psychoanalysis is far from being able to ‘explain’ it.³ As I will try to show, it will not even be up to the task of elucidating this fact so long as it also ignores the fact that consciousness implies imagination.

Appearances to the contrary, there is for Freud a strict logic of the unconscious. The appearances in question relate, among other things, to the celebrated statements that the unconscious knows nothing of time and contradiction (‘There are …no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty [in the Unconscious]…. Reference to time is bound up…with the work of the Cs system’ (1915a:186, 187)) and that dream-work ‘does not think, does not calculate or judge in any way at all’ (1900:107). It is this logic, which is supposed to preside over the operations of the unconscious in themselves, that, in the abstract, psychoanalytic theory and, concretely, psychoanalytical interpretations during therapy aim at restituting. We need only recall the formidable deployment of arguments and syllogistic (even arithmetic) reasoning present, like an effective midwife, each time dreams, slips and parapraxes are interpreted.

When one considers not only Freud's (‘scientific’) point of departure and horizon but also, as we shall see, certain inherent necessities of the thing itself, there is nothing surprising about this fact. Let us recall The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)—which, I have always thought (and recent studies have shown quite clearly), provided, right to the end (even though Freud disowned it), the invisible skeletal structure for his work, and, in a sense, rightly so. Now, ontologically speaking, the model of The Project reduces the entire psychical world to the following equation:

psyche=	(1)	infrastructural network (neurons)+
	(2)	energy+
	(3)	‘traces’ (stored or actual representations)+
	(4)	physiological laws regulating the circulation, etc. of these traces as well as of their energy ‘charges’.

Clearly, elements (1), (2) and (4) could not escape the empire of logic. The status of element (3) (‘traces’) will be discussed below.

Introducing ‘psychical instances’, each one acting on its own account as well as in conflict with the others, changes nothing. It even tends to efface the ‘contradictions’ of the unconscious; these contradictions become mere conflict and opposition between instances, each one aiming at ‘its own’ ends but all of them obeying the same logic. If the psyche furnishes us with alogical products, it is that we almost always observe mixtures, compound products, ‘compromises’, as is said in The Unconscious (Freud 1915a:186),⁴ dreams providing us with the most dazzling example of all this. At the limit, and ideally, the multiple ‘contradictions’ between the attributes of an element of a dream, or between the significations of an image or an oneiric story, seem to dissolve when each atom of meaning is imputed, through a one-to-one correspondence, to the conflicting instances which have necessarily cooperated in the production of the dream and which have concluded in the dream-text their strange compromise. It would no longer be the unconscious, then, that would be contradictory; now the subject, or the psyche in toto, would become merely the place where the battle of desires and mutually incompatible prohibitions is engaged. It is important to note in passing that this (scientific strategy of) reduction, even (of) trivialization, of necessity forms the major part of the work of interpretation (which, in the case of a mindless analyst, risks becoming nothing but that).

Obviously, Freud would not have been Freud if he had remained there. What lies beyond is introduced by the invasion into his schemata—and already into The Project—of an element, the radical imagination of the psyche or the psyche as radical imagination, whose implications, as we have said, he will resist throughout his life and whose character he will never make explicit. I must limit myself here to indicating, without any logical or chronological order, a few of the breaches by means of which the imagination invades the reality/pleasure/logic trinomial and explodes it from the inside out. Logical expository order here would be, in any case, impossible to achieve since the elements I am now going to treat in succession are closely imbricated each within the others.

Let us begin with dreaming. A dream is a group of representations, the interpretation of which passes by way of associations between representations. The associative path is inevitable but it is not determinable. This fact may be expressed by the absence of a one-to-one (biunivocal) correspondence between the ‘signifiers’ of the dream (the representations of its manifest content) and its ‘signifieds’ (its latent representations and the desires they make real). I am leaving aside here, as secondary, the problem of ‘symbols’ stricto sensu. The result is a multivocal (and, truly, indeterminate) correspondence between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, one of whose sides Freud has brought out: the overdetermination of what represents ‘something’, of what is there for something else; at the same time, he leaves us in the dark as to what must be called the symbol's underdetermination and even about the oversymbolization and undersymbolization that always exists in a dream. There is always a signifier for several signifieds (overdetermination), but this signifier as well is not the sole one possible for these signifieds (underdetermination); a signified can be indicated by several signifiers (oversymbolization) or can be indicated only ‘in part’ (undersymbolization) (see Castoriadis 1984/1968:23). Clearly, the Rücksicht an Darstellbarkeit, the taking into account and even the exigency of figurability, which is constitutive of dreaming, not only does not close the questions thus raised but constitutes their condition. (The situation is in fact analogous to the delegation of the drive via representation, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz des Triebes, which we will discuss on p. 21.) That which cannot be made into a figure must become figurable and be made into a figure. But how? By the creative—and indeterminable, because creative—work of the imagination as instaurator of symbolism, of the quid pro quo.

This creative character of the imagination may remain masked when we stay within the circle of representations and the representable. I note once again that the term ‘representation’, Vorstellung, is of absolutely cardinal importance for Freud; there is, so to speak, not a single page of text written by Freud where one fails to encounter it. This should put the French psycho-Heideggerians, who have spent the past quarter-century making fun of it, in their proper place. If one holds to the traditional view, which Freud himself seems to have adopted most of the time, these representations themselves appear to be reducible to the simple combination of elements, already furnished by the perceptual apparatus, by means of tropic processes—metaphor, metonymy, antonymy, etc.—and ‘sym...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Psychoanalysis in Contexts
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
• Part II The dynamics of difference
• Part III Modern conditions, psychoanalytic controversies
• Index