Reading Freud

Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory

Tony Thwaites

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780761952374, 9780761952367
• eBook ISBN: 9781446235164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural theory has found a renewed interest in psychoanalysis, bringing many new readers to Freud and his work. This book is an introductory guide to Freud and brings together for the first time:

• an overview of Freud?s work which enables the reader to see quickly where, and in which texts, Freud develops his main ideas
• a guide to reading Freud, and to what can be done with the complexities of his texts
• an examination of what recent cultural theory draws from Freud, and of why psychoanalysis is of interest for it
• a discussion about the Freud revealed by recent cultural theory
• an extensive selection of extracts from Freud?s texts, with commentary.

This book is the definitive guide to the content of Freud?s texts: what?s there and where to find it. It will have wide appeal to students new to Freud in cultural studies, literary theory, philosophy and sociology.

ONE UNCONSCIOUS

The slip

Early writings:

Freud–Fliess correspondence (1887–1904), ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1887–1902) and Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–95)

I: Unconscious and conscious

The hypothesis

Cathexis

Displacement and condensation

Repression

Remains and the reality principle

Opening the field:

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)

Metapsychological papers:

‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), ‘Repression’ (1915), ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’ (1917) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)

II: Ego, id and superego

Problems with the model

The second topography

A new topography:

The Ego and the Id (1923)

III: The inhuman

The human machine

The inconstant subject

The non-existent unconscious

The slip

You are at a party, say, in the middle of a conversation. Suddenly, to your horror, you realise that the words that have just this moment left your lips mean something else altogether. You have just quite unwittingly said the very last thing you would want to say in this situation, to these people. And you can see from their immediate reactions that this is exactly the meaning they have taken from it. There is no covering it over, no pretending it didn’t happen. You go bright red, and want to sink into the floor.

There are several different stages or layers to your mortification. First of all, you are mortified because you had no deliberate intention of saying it. Perhaps the meaning itself had not even crossed your mind before you said it. But you said it, there’s no denying it: with that curious detachment of a dream, you heard your own voice saying it, felt those words forming just too late to stop them slipping out. You have witnesses too: the looks on the faces of the people you are talking with tell you that. They are going to want some explanation. This thing you least wanted to say forced its way into your mouth. It is as if something that wasn’t you has just used your voice to say something you would never have permitted. This first stage of your distress is that you feel divided against yourself. You cannot trust yourself. What had only a couple of seconds ago appeared to be an easy and unproblematic clarity of intention has revealed a deep fissure – in you, in your very sense of self. Something in you is not answerable to you.

Then comes the twist. Could it be that in some sense you did desire it after all? What you’d have least wanted to say is not at all the same thing as what you’d never have thought. In fact, it’s all too close to what you might actually think. Now that you’ve said it you do in fact recognise yourself in it, much as you’d like not to. Perhaps that divided intention has really only been working behind your back to say what you’ve actually thought all along, but were never willingly going to say. That is, are the two warring parts of you actually in agreement that this is indeed what you feel about whatever it was? Is the only disagreement between them a matter of whether it should have been said, here and now – and with one of them now forcing the hand of the other? Everybody has heard of Freudian slips; everyone knows that they tend to show up what’s on the slipper’s mind anyway. This, of course, includes the friends who have just heard you make the slip, and who know you well too. All of this reasoning is just as transparent to them as it is to you. How can your very blush not be taken as confirmation, an admission that you’ve read the slip in exactly the way they have? If what you’ve just said didn’t carry the meaning everyone has now given it, why would you be so embarrassed about it? Even to talk about it and try to offer some sort of explanation that it wasn’t what you really meant at all, would be to acknowledge that yes, the words you’ve said do in fact mean exactly what’s now crossed everyone’s mind, that you know what they mean and that everyone else does, that the fact of having said them makes you uneasy and you’d love to explain them away, but that every word you say from now on is going to do nothing but dig you in deeper ...

In the midst of which, another twist to the knife. You become aware of an even more ghastly possibility. It is not enough for you to admit painfully to yourself that perhaps you did, in some sense, think that after all, and that the slip has just been a matter of blurting out what you didn’t ever really want to say. What if you really did want to say it? After all, the whole thing has been done with devastating timing: it couldn’t be worse if it had been calculated. The horrible possibility dawns, that you – for what else could it be that spoke in your voice anyway? – might in a sense have wanted to say the unsayable, with all of the consequences of that saying, whose discomforts you have the awful feeling you are just beginning to explore, and that in some sense you might actually have wanted and even called up this mortification. Everything happens as if this fierce humiliation you are feeling carries with it a somewhat perverse enjoyment. Which is doubly mortifying. And thus – by this deeply perverse logic from which there no longer seems to be any secure exit, and in a way which is utterly inseparable from this escalating mortification – somewhere, somehow, and to this someone you dare not quite think of as yourself, even more enjoyable …

By this stage, of course, it is no longer possible to convince those who heard you of your innocence, for all of this is quite transparent to them too. It is no longer even possible to know how far round these spirals they are willing to go, and how culpable they hold you. You are caught in a double bind: if you try to explain, you only make yourself look more guilt-driven, and if you refuse to explain, you leave your friends to think the worst. You have no tenable position, nowhere you can feel at all comfortable. It is not even that the only places left for you to occupy are those you feel are quite profoundly not you – false places, places that give a false idea to others of what you really are. That would be some sort of comfort in itself. Neither is it even any longer a question of having to admit to yourself that, yes, you really were thinking that all along, yes, you really did want it to be expressed, with all of its consequences, and that in some way you were after that mortification all along. Things have got beyond that stage. The problem here is, now that you no longer know what you wished; what your motivations might have been. Nothing will confirm them one way or another. All you are left with is that acute sense of having nowhere at all to go. Oddly enough, it is precisely at moments like this that you are most aware of your own selfhood, as a series of empty positions, none of which fit.

We can plot it out:

1. You didn’t want to say it.
2. You did want to say it.
3. There’s a perverse enjoyment in being skewered on the double bind of 1 and 2.

We make slips of the tongue. We dream, and wake amazed by the strangeness of what has been passing through our minds. Ideas just come into our heads, unbidden: we can beat our heads against a problem all evening without results and then wake up in the morning knowing the answer in all its details. We perform elaborate and highly directed series of actions automatically, even when they require a good deal of alertness, such as driving a car. Our everyday experience suggests that not all thought processes are actually accessible to our consciousness, and that even those which are, are not conscious all the time. What’s more, once those unconsciously-performed acts are examined, it’s often easy to see in them all the detail, complexity and even lucidity we might usually associate with conscious thought. All of which suggests that we should not equate mental processes and consciousness. There would seem to be mental processes of which we are not conscious, but which nevertheless have all the complexity of those of which we are aware.

Some of these may of course be easily brought up into consciousness. Though the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ isn’t always in my conscious attention, I can bring it to mind without effort when the situation calls for it. Much of our day-to-day driving of a car is semi-automatic, but this state is one of smoothly implemented skill rather than unawareness. The phrase for it is exact: you really know what you’re doing only when your actual doing of it no longer fills the centre stage of your consciousness. You start becoming a competent driver once the complex co-ordination of different tasks for all four limbs becomes automatic. A vast amount of our consciousness, our learning, our memory, is like this: not occupying the forefront of attention, but neatly packed somewhere off to one side, waiting for the moment when it’s needed, when it springs out almost without bidding. Freud uses the term preconscious for this off-stage consciousness. Preconscious mental processes seem to exist seamlessly with conscious processes, sliding effortlessly from one to the other as required.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Sometimes that unpacking of the preconscious doesn’t take place as smoothly as we believe it should, and this failure can be persistent, and even oddly consistent. We may forget the name of an acquaintance or get it wrong, even when it’s someone we know perfectly well and have regular dealings with. We may find ourselves doing this repeatedly, even after being embarrassed by the lapse and making a deliberate effort to remember the name the next time. We may even feel that the very repetition we make to fix it in our mind may serve to increase our confusion about which is the right version. In cases like this, there is not only the feeling that what should be a clear passage between conscious and preconscious is blocked, but that there even appears to be some sort of opposing force reinforcing the blockage. It can work the other way around too for example, if ‘Happy Birthday to You’ refuses to be sent back into the preconscious lumber room after the candles have been blown out, and stays around as an annoying jingle for a good part of the day. (Why is it that as often as not, the song which sticks in your mind is one you don’t like – and one you certainly don’t want people to hear you singing inadvertently?)

Not everything that is unconscious has the same easy relationship to consciousness that the preconscious has. There are blockages: some things do not slip easily from a preconscious to a conscious state, and even actively resist consciousness. Or rather, since we obviously cannot be directly aware of something that resists our awareness, it is better to say that our everyday experience of consciousness is full of gaps. From these gaps, we can hypothesise mental events that are not conscious.

I go to bed worrying over a problem, and I wake up to find that somehow the problem has been solved while I slept. But the fact that it has been solved, there in my own head, doesn’t necessarily mean I have the slightest knowledge or memory of the processes my head used to solve it in my absence. I have been landed with the solution, perhaps even an ingenious and elegant one, but I have no idea of how it came about. Beyond doubt, some mental processes must have taken place, but just what they might have been remains hypothetical for the simple reason that I was not there to see them. Even to reconstruct those processes with a high degree of probability and conviction may not in itself be enough to bring them back to memory. But what a careful reconstruction can do is provide a smooth, credible and comprehensible chain of reasoning which links the problem to its solution. Without this, we are left with a solution that appears from nowhere, without explanation.

Early writings:

The Freud–Fliess correspondence (1887–1904) ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1887–1902) Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–95)

In 1881, the 25-year-old Freud graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Vienna; the next year, he began work at Vienna General Hospital, while continuing his researches in biology, physiology and neuroanatomy. Late that year, Josef Breuer, an older friend and colleague told him of a successful treatment in which an hysteric patient under hypnosis seems to have remembered a long-buried trauma, with a cathartic and curative effect. In 1885–86, after Freud had been appointed to a university lectureship in neuropathology, a travelling bursary allowed him to spend several months in Paris, studying under the great neurologist Charcot – at the Salpêtrière hospital for nervous diseases – who, at this late stage of his career, had also become interested in hysteria and the possibility of treating it with hypnosis. On his return to Vienna, Freud’s work began to focus increasingly on the neuroses and their treatment, including electrotherapy and hypnosis.

In 1887, Breuer introduced Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, two years younger than Freud but already a successful Berlin ear, nose and throat specialist, whom Breuer had recommended attend Freud’s lectures while carrying out further studies in Vienna. The two became close friends, and carried out a regular and voluminous correspondence over the next 14 years. In Freud’s letters, one can see in gestation many of the characteristic terms, concerns and frameworks of what would become psychoanalysis, caught in the process of separating themselves from their original neuroanatomical framework. He sent Fliess a number of drafts of work in progress, including the substantial but never completed ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ in 1895.

The ‘Project’ draws on the recent discovery of the neuron (in 1889 by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who would receive the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1906), but it makes use of it in a speculative rather than strictly neuro-physiological sense. Freud postulates a quantity, Q, which he does not define, but which works like a fluid or an electrical charge. This Q is cathected – made to flow from one point to another, to accumulate in some places and abandon others – by the neurones, which are arranged in two systems. The first system, Φ, is easily permeated by this flow of Q and retains none of it; this is the system of perception. By contrast, the second system, φ, is impermeable, and in holding back Q allows for the possibility of memory. From this, Freud builds up a conceptual system that is much closer to the outlines of the imaginary neuroanatomy, which underpin it, than any of his later and more strictly psychoanalytic work will be. Nevertheless, we can already see in it many of the concerns of that later work: cathexis and a dynamic and economic model of fluids; the subjection of these flows to a principle of constancy, which tends to keep the total quantity of excitation in a system as low as possible; the essentially biological modelling of an organism attempting to protect itself from the stimuli of a chaotic external world; structures of repression and inhibition; the aetiology of hysteria; the formation, intelligibility and functioning of dreams, and their similarity to hysteria; and the division of the psyche into primary and secondary processes according to whether psychic energies are bound or controlled.

But aside from the content, there is another dynamic at work in these letters and drafts, which makes this relationship such a crucial one for psychoanalysis. Freud and Fliess doubtless had certain commonalities, if only broad ones. Both were Jews, in a profession where, and a time when, anti-Semitism was still a major obstacle in a career path. Both were engaged in fields of research that put them somewhat at odds with the medical orthodoxy of the day. But Fliess was not an obvious ally for Freud, and oddly, this ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Borders
• 1 Unconscious
• 2 Sexuality
• 3 Social
• References
• Index