1
THE LIMITS OF THOUGHT:
PARIS–LONDON BACK AND FORTH
In his Letters on England,1 Voltaire wrote:
A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else. He has left the world full, he finds it empty. In Paris . . . for your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation, the cause of which is hardly better known . . . There you have some appalling clashes . . . Finally, the better to settle if possible every difficulty, he proves, or at least makes it highly probable . . . that a plenum cannot possibly exist, and he brings back the vacuum, which Aristotle and Descartes had banished from the universe.
In this opposition, Descartes’ Paris is a world full of dependent relations, leaving no place for the vacuum, a world where clarity and understanding impose on things their notion of what is evident – one only sees what one understands – and Newton’s London is a world with a spirit emptied of dependent relations, determined to see, even if it costs the extinction of its lanterns, confronting what seems uncertain, doubtful or strange. For psychoanalysts, the contradiction between the worlds of Paris and London forms the limits of one and the same path – namely, the limits of the functioning of our thought. Thinking, it could be said, is an incessant journey back and forth between Paris and London.
The Newtonian conception is more the product of a powerful work of ‘figurability’, akin to that of the dream, than a process of rational thought: the universe is an infinite vacuum of which only an infinitely small part is filled by objects – objects that move across this limitless and bottomless void. Nonetheless, the identity and reciprocity between terrestrial and cosmic bodies, between apple and planet, is absolute – each body stands in relation to all the other bodies and is united with them.
It is understandable that this fine figurability was disconcerting for the scientific mind of the epoch for which any notion of the existence of a connection between distant bodies raised the fear of animism. Newton’s intuition implies the boldness and subtlety of a movement of thought, transforming all the data of the moment into one single unity, bridling the immensity of the irrepresentable vacuum. It is a work of figuration that is independent of reason, just as it is independent of its direct prehension.This induced René Thom (1993) to say:‘But if one looks at the birth of the great scientific theories, one can say that imagination, conceptual construction, have in general preceded the facts of experience.’
In Newton’s universe,‘the clock implies the clockmaker’ remarked Voltaire; a formula that captures both the qualities of Newton’s figurability, which can seem mysterious and worrying, and his need to render his intuition familiar by making God the basis of the reality of gravitation.
The respective particularities of Newton’s and Descartes’ thought, insofar as it is pushed to the maximum of its potential, indicate the limits, the two extremes, of all thinking. Faced with the unknown of the void, Newton finds a solution by retrogressing towards a hallucinatory figurability, while clinging to the familiarity of his idea of God; whereas Descartes, thanks to the materiality of ideas, clings to his secondary thought processes, thereby avoiding the hallucinatory void.
For his part, Freud, confronted with the unknown, resorts neither to God nor to reason; the epigraph of The Interpretation of Dreams applicable to his whole work, speaks volumes in this respect:
Flectere si nequeo superos,Acheronta movebo [If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions].
Freud, 1900: 608
Nevertheless, Freud remained attached to the positivism of the scientific thinking of his time. Like Darwin, faced with nature, he understood the functioning of the unconscious as a mechanism that is at once blind and formidably efficient. In this resolutely positivist spirit, Freud bridled the vertiginous unknown of the unconscious, while clinging to his belief in the materiality of the force of the drives, that is to say, in quantity, cathexis, facilitation, resistance; in the reality of a psychic mechanism. His solution, faced with the unknown, lies on the side of neither London nor of Paris, but in their common denominator: the concrete nature of the theory of the drive is ‘our mythology’. As Michel Neyraut (1997) has said,‘one of the first paradoxes is that the irrational runs behind reason in order to defend it’.
Nevertheless, Freudian drive theory, taken literally, is present at the heart of a topographical conception of the psyche that cannot be separated from the model of an apparatus closed in on itself by the superposition of the poles perception–consciousness. Thus envisaged, the topographical conception requires a ‘progressive’ theory of thinking, a detour via word cathexes; it precludes retrogressive movement, oscillations between the two poles of perception and hallucinatory experience, journeys back and forth between Paris and London. It has no answer to the capacity of thinking to achieve, even in the waking state, a state of perceptual identity, an opening up of the pole of perception to the hallucinatory.1
If the psychoanalyst is satisfied with a reading of Freud’s thought exclusively in the light of its rational order, once confronted with the unknown of the session, he or she will have the tendency to cling to the cohesion of ready-made concepts, to analytic knowledge. In this respect, he resembles the post-Newtonians. He overestimates the efficacy of a mechanism, at the risk of misappreciating the scope and range of Freud’s thought. Spontaneously, he will be reluctant to engage in any reflection outside the two Freudian topographies, at the risk of carrying out a mutilating reduction of the enormous complexity of the analytic session. It is as though any approach ‘extra-muros’ in relation to the edifice of the world of concepts ran the risk of endangering thought, of rendering ideas confused and unintelligible.With the psychoanalyst, as with any man, thought loathes a vacuum.
However, while it is true that Freudian thought is fundamentally a theory centred on representation, it is no less true that it is open to perspectives enlarging its scope and range beyond representation.
One of these is the idea that thought in the form of word-presentations is not the only form of thought that exists; there is also ‘unconscious thought’, just as there is hallucinatory ‘visual thought’ in the form of the dream. For thought is not only an instrument for grasping reality; in the last resort, it is ‘a substitute for a hallucinatory wish’ (Freud, 1900: 567).
From this point of view, an attentive reading reveals a long path of negativity in Freud’s work. Not only with the rather noisy introduction of the death drive, albeit in continuity with the dialectical principle of the theory of the drive; but also, after 1914, in a discreet vein but one fraught with consequences, with the ‘Wolf Man’ (1914–18) and the ‘Metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams’ (1917a [1915]), in which Freud was concerned with hallucination, including negative hallucination.Then, with Mourning and Melancholia (1917b), the texts on ‘Neurosis and psychosis’ (1924c), ‘Negation’ (1925b), ‘Fetishism’ (1927a),‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’ (1936), one can follow the thread of the path of negativity leading to ‘Splitting of the ego in the process of defence’ (1940 [1938]) and the notion of ‘negative reactions to the trauma’ in Moses and Monotheism in (1937b).The key notions, then, are less the usual ones of drive–repression–phantasy, limiting the theory to one axe Unc.–Pcs.–Cs., than those of object–reality–disavowal, forming a metapsychological complement, a new paradigmatic axis: drive–negativity–thought.
In fact, the upheaval introduced by the death drive – the turning point of 1920 – does not reside so much in the notion of death working on us from within, as in the notion of a death drive, an indispensable precondition for being able to think about a realm beyond primary and secondary processes.This was the way Freud found of taking the first steps towards conceptualising negativity.
But how, then, are we to conceive of a metapsychology, capable of oscillating back and forth between two poles, which would embrace the negative, by definition irrepresentable, the immediateness of figurability and the detours and torments of the world of representations? Such a theory would stand in need of appropriate concepts, commensurate with certain retrogressive movements of thought in the session bordering at times on the traumatic perception of the void, disturbances, ‘accidents’ of thought, the irruption of an enigmatic figurability, giving rise to changes of direction in the course of the analyst’s thinking.
2
THE NEGATIVE DUALITY OF THE PSYCHE
On duality
Classically, the Freudian topographies – Cs., Pcs., Ucs. or ego, superego, id – are thought of as proceeding from the most superficial to the deepest strata and there will be no difficulty in agreeing that the corresponding graph would comprise a vertical axis along which the circulating element does not undergo a transformation – representation remaining representation. It is the topography that qualifies representation sometimes as conscious, sometimes as preconscious or unconscious. These were the foundations of the metapsychology of 1915. While we understand the cardinal role of this axis for Freudian thought, if we want to envisage the study of the oscillations and changes of a qualitative order, notably during the regressive states that do not fail to occur during analytic work, then it is necessary to add to this vertical axis one where the elements constituting it would not be differentiated in terms of their displacement, their greater or lesser distance from consciousness, but in terms of a qualitative order, independent of their topography.The same content will have a different status depending on the quality of the investment (S.E.‘cathexis’):1 representation, perception or hallucination – the qualities of investment depending on the complex dynamic of the modes of intelligibility, in their relations with reality testing.
A theory that favours the vertical axis will lay emphasis on psychic places, resulting in a conception of psychic functioning based on the psychoneurotic model of organisation – a model in which the vision of an essentially autarchic psyche dominates.This is true of the psychical apparatus of the first topography. But, for a theory that is primarily concerned with transformations, a model cannot so easily be found in Freud; for verticality is present even in the second topography. However, in the aftermath of 1920, Freud’s thought moved away from the model of the dream as wish-fulfilment in favour of an openness towards the world.The principal reason for this was the discovery of a neurosis with an exclusively external aetiology, without topographies, representations, or repressed infantile wishes playing the slightest role – namely, traumatic neurosis, where hallucinatory repetition is identical to traumatic perception. From this point on, it proved indispensable for Freud to take into account the principles governing the vertical axis as much as those pointing up the distinction between representation and perception. On the vertical axis, characterised by displacement, a content is defined by its localisation in one place alone, whereas, on the new axis, the same content can find itself in two distinct places, but endowed with different qualities, for instance, those of representation and perception.This view of reality presupposes that the intrapsychic and the world, representation and perception, are not, in the last analysis, the autonomous identities they would seem to be.
A graph with two axes, where the vertical axis has an intrapsychic tendency and the horizontal axis accords priority to the role of reality and the object, would be better equipped for studying certain notions and limit concepts, as well as for conducting the analysis of borderline patients for whom one of the major difficulties is their inability to distinguish between what belongs specifically to them and what comes from the object. The mechanisms of Freudian projection, Kleinian projective identification and Lacanian foreclosure could then be envisaged from a wider perspective and not just in terms of their relation to what is repressed or disavowed.
The interdependence of representation and perception is not, as Freud sometimes asserts, just a matter of reproduction. Our theoretical hypothesis on this is akin to the notion of duality as it is currently envisaged in quantum physics – as far as we have understood it, at any rate, while not having any special knowledge of it:2 the disconcerting property, as much of matter as of energy, of being able to present itself under the double nature of corpuscule and wave. In quantum physics, depending on the conditions of observation, it has become possible to have two contradictory definitions of the same object.The problem raised by quantum objects is that their nature is nothing other than what is revealed by the method of observation and thus it depends closely on the conditions of observation – that is to say, what is revealed of the object is the fruit of the conjunction between its nature and the procedure of observation employed. The dual relationship between the microscopic object, invisible and undetectable by our sense organs, and the macroscopic instrument of observation, confined to temporo-spatiality, requires that a certain rational mode of thinking be challenged, or even abandoned, in favour of other forms of logic that elude our preconscious organisation. Only a considerable effort of abstraction, a primordial abstraction (see Chapter 4), makes it possible to distance ourselves from the immediate experience of our sense organs, to the point that quantum physicists are tempted to define reality, that is, their own quantum reality, by parameters which they describe more as ‘mental’ than ‘material’, the latter no longer having any real meaning for them. Thus, the acceptance by the scientific community of the existence in the same object of study, the particle, of a corpuscle–wave duality representing a radical breach between the object and its representation, obliges us to reconsider what our instrument of observation, our sense organs, propose as being identical with the familiar sense we have that something is self-evident. Let us recall, though, that Freud had already warned us of this in a succinct way at the end of his work in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938b): ‘Reality will always remain “unknowable” ’ (p.).As early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he had asserted that reality could in no case simply be raw material emanating from the sense organs:
Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves towards any perceptual material with which it meets in just the same way in which the function we are considering [i.e. secondary revision] behaves towards the content of dreams. It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole.
S.E.V, 499
To the extent, he would add in 1912 that, ‘if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one’ (S.E. XIII, 95). How, then, can we avoid the necessity of rethinking the notions we take as most self-evident, perception and representation, and in particular the notion of object-representation?3
This loss of the unity of representation, implied by the astonishing corpuscle– wave duality, evokes, for the analyst, a duality of quite another order. With all due caution, we are not far here from the child’s capacity for thinking, evoked by Freud (1900) in connection with a child in mourning, which it would be wrong to reduce to mechanisms of splitting and denial: ‘I know father’s dead, but what I can’t understand is why he doesn’t come home to supper’ (p.). This is a quality of the child’s way of thinking, not a deficiency. Here we are in the register of animistic thinking, specific to the young child, who, confronted with the object’s absence, and following the failure of the purely hallucinatory solution, will resort to such a dual mode of thinking ‘there . . . not there’, resulting in an evolution towards the symbolic form (the wooden reel game described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Moreover, as in quantum thinking, there is no possibility of linking the two statements rationally.While not wishing to distort our comparison by an excess of analogy, let us simply point out that in both cases – in quantum and animistic thought – a duality is sustained by a negative – namely, the lost perception of a strongly invested object: the father for the child, the macroscopic object for the physicist. It is necessary to be able to continue to think when our sense organs and our usual temporo-spatial means fail us. It is also worth pointing out that the notion of duality is not employed here as a binary relation or conflictual duality, but as the duality of one and the same object. This possibility has led Catherine Chevalley (1990) to say of the corpuscle–wave duality:‘there would no doubt be some advantage to be gained from considering, within the long tradition of philosophy, the question that arises once again here of knowing how to treat two contradictory statements concerning the “same object”’.
Hegel and the addâd
In a day and age when science had totally disinvested the notion of the Newtonian void, the young Hegel was already complaining about the rationalism fragmenting the world and separating ideas such as sacred and profane, faith and knowledge, mind and nature, individual and community. He saw in these ‘polar oppositions’ the cause of an unfortunate ‘split’ (Entzweiung) between ‘ab...
