The Status of Thought in Early Freud (2014)
Jasna Koteska "The Status of Thought in Early Freud", (Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications, No. 5. The Urgency of Thought I, edited by Gil Anidjar, Belgrade, 2014), 21-49.
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The text was presented at The Urgency of Thought (23-25 May 2014) Belgrade conference. You can watch the presentation on YouTube here.
The Status of
Thought in Early Freud
Jasna Koteska
I
1895:
Two
Possibilities of Thinking Thought
Contrary to popular belief,
the early Freud’s obsession was not so much concerned with emotions or with
hysteria as such, but with the unfathomable nature of thought, with the
question of how does one think. Freud was aware of the swiftness with
which thought can lead to pathologies and opted to champion the
perspective of the slowness of thought. This
late theory gave birth to the discipline known today as psychoanalysis. The
following essay argues that early Freud expressed two different perspectives on
thinking. The discussion means to examine both
perspectives, but also to vindicate the suppressed theory that anticipated the existence of
synapses and mirror neurons in order to better understand the complexity of
Freud’s insights into thinking.
In 1895, the year
psychoanalysis was born, Freud had produced two manuscripts, each dealing with
the problem of thought, Studies on
Hysteria
and Project for a Scientific Psychology.
These two manuscripts touch
on a score of questions related to thinking: Can humans think? What is the
utilitarian value of thinking? When does thinking start and stop, if ever?
What does it mean that there exists a failure in thinking? Why is there repetition in thinking? What does
the splitting of consciousness mean? How
does it affect thinking? Is nonthinking a thinking of some sort? Can one think with one’s body? Can the body be
read as a philological map of painful hieroglyphics? Can the symptom be
understood as the semantically saturated residue of thought imprinted on the
body, an imprint left on the body after the tiring process of thinking is over?
Is hysteria just an older language of thinking humanity? Is hysteria the only
valid answer to thinking? What should be the adequate speed needed for
thinking? Should one think in the shortest possible intervals
between perception and action? Should thinking
be diminished in favor of action or should it be
accelerated to the point where it actually annuls itself, or vice versa?
Should thinking be slow, or performed in such a way that the perceived moments
will not only be registered but will also be processed? How is the mind to be
slowed if one is to prevent thoughts from cracking off and tripping the subject
down? Is an overactive mind already a non-active one? How deep (in the
depthlessness of one’s being) should one delve in order to slow-think and how
to orchestrate this process? Is slow-thinking a variation of a trance? Is it
possible to synchronize the pulsations of the thinking mind so that it fuses
with the circulation of the blood? Why were transference phenomena and thought
transference, a peculiar interest of both Charcot and Babinski since 1876 at
the Salpêtrière clinic? Why were they so important to the early Freud that he
kept the term “transfer” as legacy of that tradition? Can slow-thinking reorder
the nature of thoughts and the nature of things? And finally: can
my thinking think the other’s thoughts? Freud offered two irreducibly different
answers to these questions, and, as we shall see, two completely different
concepts with regard to the nature of thought. In Studies on Hysteria he advocated for slow thinking, while in Project for a Scientific Psychology he
introduced the idea that thinking has almost no utilitarian value, so much so
that it might as well be reduced to a minimum, and whenever possible be
urgently overtaken by acting.
Perplexed
by the extravagant suggestion of two mutually conflicting concepts, and
horrified that he would be seen as someone who does not know how to think
thinking, Freud decided not to publish one of the two manuscripts. Studies on Hysteria saw the light in May
1895; Freud published it together with Josef Breuer; the book had a fairly good
reception in the Vienna medical circles, its fame only grew larger through the
years and decades that followed. It became known later as the Ur-book of
psychoanalysis. Most of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis in its core are to
be found in this pioneering book. As history showed, Freud chose wisely. The
second manuscript had a much different destiny. Freud never published it, he
considered its task impossible, even dangerous, and he left it unfinished. It
reemerged only fifty years later with the rest of his forgotten letters to
Fliess, and when in old age he was presented with it, he did his best to
destroy it; the enigmatic manuscript carried no title, the title Project for a Scientific Psychology was
later given by James Stretchy, and it was published only posthumously in 1950.
 |
| Wilhelm Fliess (right) |
Freud’s
excitement was not ungrounded. His forgotten manuscript today stands closer to the
neurosciences than any single work Freud ever wrote. In it, Freud anticipated
the existence of synapses (he called them contact barriers), which were
discovered only in 1897, two years after the text was written. He also
anticipated the existence of mirror neurons (mirror neurons are to psychology
what DNA is to biology), which were discovered only in the mid-1990s (1992 and
1996 consequently), and exactly one century after the manuscript was written.
In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida claimed that Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology should be read as a theory that memory
is the essence of the human psyche. Since Freud also advanced a radical idea
about the nature of thinking, I propose to extend Derrida’s argument to include
thought itself, as well the perception/action coupling, empathy, and
consciousness. But first, what did Freud discover about the nature of thinking
in the book he did publish, Studies on
Hysteria?
II
Studies on Hysteria: Slow Thinking
1.
Contrary to common knowledge, Studies on Hysteria, a collection of
five clinical histories, as well as theoretical papers by Breuer and Freud, is not a book about emotions, it is a book
about the nature of thought. Emmy von
N., Freud’s first clinical
case from the book, suffered from a periodical
inability to speak. When encountering a rupture in speaking, Emmy von N., would
instead produce a sound of clacking, a bird-like noise, which Freud compared to
the sound of a capercaillie.[2]
By slowly reconstructing her past,
Freud came to a conclusion that her “animal”, audial, tic-like hysteria originated when
her younger daughter was sick. Emmy von N. wanted to be as calm as
possible in order to nurture her child. But, Fanny Moser (her real name) was
also the young wife of an elderly gentleman, Heinrich Moser, whom she married
when she was twenty-three years old (he was sixty-five), so she also wanted to
have fun. What Emmy von N. encountered was the problem of two thoughts, incompatible one to another. One idea, one thought
is: “let’s be a good mother”. But, the other thought is: “but, let’s have fun.”
Both commands cannot coexist, both according to the social standards of decency
and propriety of her time, but also to the general incongruity of pleasure and
duty, two things which contradict each other completely, so she cannot decide.
If she elects one thing, she will immediately negate the other, and so she does
not choose, nor does she refuse one or the other; yet by refusing both commands
she leaves the incongruent concepts of enjoinment and duty undecided.
But, by
postponing the decision, by deciding to abstain from deciding, she somehow
announces the end of thinking: a space for a “different kind of thinking”
opens. Here an important twist occurs, and Freud saw it clearly: if Emmy von N.
cannot decide to which protocol she will subject herself to: if she deliberately
adjourns the election of one command over the other, then the decision will be
made by her own body, which now starts to “think” and “decide” instead of her. The symptom is produced as a contrivance that will
equally satisfy both factors: the power of affirmation (of her duty as a
mother, over her enjoyment as a woman), but also the power of negation of the
same pair. The resolution comes in the form of a symptom, and by developing the symptom of clacking, paradoxically, she
does find a release from the cognitive glitch. The acoustic tic frees her both from the obligation to stay calm and
nurture the child, but also prevents her from having fun, since she has a
symptom now, so she cannot truly enjoy herself anymore. In her clinical case,
Freud references Darwin’s remark that tics are a way of washing off too much
tension. Darwin’s example was that of a dog wagging its tail; Freud offers the
image of a person who is being affected by painful stimuli, but instead of
screaming, she continues to sit still, she keeps her head and mouth still, but
she starts drumming with her feet. The motor innervations help a person to get
rid of extra stimuli, and by developing an acoustic resemblance to the animal,
by falling ill, Emmy von N.
paradoxically finds a healthy way of
getting rid of extra meaning, of incompatibility of concepts.
Elisabeth
von R., another clinical case from the same book, suffered from a periodical
inability to move her legs, although without apparent physiological reason. Her
illness fired off when she fell in love with the husband of her dying sister.
She loved her sister dearly, but her sister was dying - that is one complex of
ideas. But she also fell in love with the husband of her loving sister – which
is another complex of ideas. Were she to visit her sister, she would risk
seeing her sister’s husband as well. Since thought proved incapable of solving
two conflicted ideas, it was again “overtaken” by the body, which in turn
paralyzed her leg. That way she did solve the problem: she could no longer walk
to visit her sister, but she could also no longer go for regular short walks
with her sister’s husband.
Anna
O.’s symptoms also emerged as a consequence of a particular form of
nonthinking, the impossibility of binding together the disparity of thoughts.
Anna O. wanted to stay by her dying father in order to nurture him. While
there, she overheard noises from the neighborhood; a party was taking place
nearby. If she attended the party (that’s one idea), she would be unable to
nurture her father (that’s another idea), so her arm got paralyzed. Thus, contrary to the common opinion that
hysteria is a freeing of emotions, the emptying of affects, “she is now in a crisis of tears, she shouts, soon
she will be relieved.” In a letter to Fliess, Freud suggested that hysteria is
an utterly calculated and regulated cognitive operation. If two or more
incompatible ideas cannot find resolution in thinking, thinking is “overtaken”
by the immediate organic body, thinking is “kidnapped” by the body, which then
starts to “think” on its own. The product of that thinking is inscribed into
the body. Its name: the symptom. When the medium of the body overtakes
thinking, the body is sort of transubstantiated
into a kind of a “mind”. The disparity in thoughts produces symptoms, which are
scattered, broken thoughts, thoughts that has undergone some conversion from cognitive into somatic
language, but are still products of thinking. They are residues of thinking,
they are half-thoughts, after-thoughts, and can be read and interpreted just as
thoughts can.
Through
these cases, Freud and Breuer realized that people suffer from ideas, and not
from bare emotions. Of course, people suffer from emotions as well (a person
can be sad, or happy, or surprised, or disgusted, or angry, or fearful), but
emotions alone never cause a somatic problem. Generally, Freud seemed not to make a big difference between thinking
and feeling. Although he continually wrote about the importance
of emotions, he largely ignored his own theories of emotion, focusing instead on
what is semantically hidden behind emotions. In the index to the volumes of the
Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1956-1974) in English, one finds that
there are “only five entries alluding to emotions” and even if “the index is
remiss in this regard”, Murray writes, the word emotion only appears “no fewer
than 580 times”, according to the concordance of the digitalized Freud.[3]
In all other cases, Freud talked about affections
(affects are fully indexed there), which are denominators of a more general
quality of mood (emotions are just specific components of the said affects).
After discovering that people largely suppress ideas, and rarely repress
emotions, Freud replaced the hypnosis and the Breuer’s cathartic method (both
were suitable for releasing strongly repressed emotions) for the method of free
association, which proved more adequate for strongly suppressed ideas.
2.
Studies
on Hysteria opened with Breuer’s question:
does trauma occur because life became too fast? Following the doctrine of his
day, Breuer answered affirmatively: Yes, pathologies arise because a person is
exposed to “too much stimuli”. Faced with the abnormal acceleration of life, a
person escapes into what Breuer called the splitting of consciousness (or
double consciousness). Breuer’s most famous example of the non-pathological
splitting of consciousness is an image of a person who reads a book in the most
correct grammatical order, only to realize, after finishing the reading, that
she did not understand a word of what she read. For Freud, paradoxically, this
practice is a healthy way of putting the mind on pause. People perform various
activities, but only some of them are directed towards an actual goal. Rituals,
religious and others, as well as repetitive activities: knitting, playing video
games, etc. are performed in such a way that they don’t affect thinking. There
is something utterly mindless in
repetition, and although executed within a gigantic hive of activity, these actions
are a specific types of non-activity, “passive activities", mostly
mechanical, almost deranged; they freeze the individual, reduce the possibility
for the failure of action, and minimize hesitations. Freud noted the tendency
of patients to form false connections.
The acceleration of life twists the senses; senses can still register the
events, but the mind no longer can process the information, and it escapes into
dizziness, into vertigo-like state: the
splitting of consciousness. What happens to a person who lives in a culture
where she is deprived of slowness? A person has been promised that for what she
has lost running up and down the fast streets of today, she will later be compensated
by slowly cultivating her past in the psychoanalyst’s cabinet. This established
psychoanalysis as a movement for slow
thinking, a discipline opposing the ideological commands of urgency. (Once,
I was urging my 10-years old son to do something. All of a sudden he replied
with a line from the episode of the Smurfs
series: “Don’t just do something, stand there!” the precise opposite of the
usual sentence, with which we hurry each other: “Don’t just stand there, do
something!” And is this sentence not the essence
of psychoanalysis? Yes, precisely that: pause and wait! There are situations,
when the best solution possible is to resist the temptation to engage
immediately.) Although hysteria was a century-old diagnosis, the real epidemic
of hysteria did not occur prior the second half of the 19th century and the modernization
of society. By the time Charcot was appointed as head physician at Salpêtrière in 1862, some five to eight thousand women (one
percent of the entire population of Paris) were housed there.[4] Speed splits the person in two: one of her remains
in the conditione prima and the
second is already in the conditione
seconda (Breuer’s terms from Studies
on Hysteria). But, where to locate the invisible wound, where it resides? How
to slow being in such a way that the secret will reveal itself? How to capture
and seize the traumatic encounter? Charcot did not consider himself a
theoretician of hysteria, but someone who was able to see hysteria better than others. Attacked for producing the
symptoms he claimed to discover, Charcot replied: “It would be something truly
miraculous if I could create these diseases according to my caprice and my
fantasy. But the truth is that I am there absolutely only the photographer; I
inscribe what I see”.[5]
Charcot loved the visual, he was a man of refined taste in visual arts, also a
great caricaturist. On the back of the original photographs of hysterics stored
at the Salpêtrière archives,
instructions are written in pencil as to how to photograph the hysteric women.
When Freud returned from Paris to Vienna, he decided to go in the opposite
direction. Charcot privileged a knowledge based on the gaze, Freud based his
upon hearing. And peculiarly enough, both of them privileged two different
epistemological methodologies grounded precisely on the two senses with which
they personally had some problems (Charcot in reality had one lazy eye turned
inwards and he privileged seeing; Freud often confessed that he was amusical,
he didn’t like music and could only tolerate opera, since there was still a
clear dramaturgical model in opera, but he wanted to “hear” the trauma speak).
 |
| Josef Breuer |
Addressing
the attacks that psychoanalysis is just a form of magic, thirty-one years
later, in The Question of Lay Analysis,
Freud responded: “Quite true. It would
be magic if it worked rather quicker. An essential attribute of a magician is
speed -- one might say suddenness -- of success. But analytic treatments take
month and even years: magic that is so slow”.[6] Freud’s
response suggests that psychoanalysis is not magic precisely because it works
in the realm of slowness; slowness guarantees its scientific character. Magic
is connected to urgency. And psychoanalysis is not magic because it works
slowly. Borch-Jacobsen located psychoanalysis in the history of trance, arguing
that it is a chapter in a long cross-cultural tradition to use various
trancelike phenomena as part of their therapeutic practices.[7]
If we situate early Freud in the neurology of his time, we find that late 19th
century neurology, including Charcot’s Salpêtrière, experimented with the so-called transference phenomena, the possibility that the diseases can
be displaced and transferred to plants, animals, and inanimate objects,
even to other operators, to other people. In 1876 Charcot started studying métalloscopie and métallothérapie, two doctrines according to which if the
hysterical symptoms are repeatedly transferred from one side of
the body to the other
by the application of electricity or magnets on the skin, the symptom somehow
grows weaker and eventually disappears. The central nervous system was
envisioned “as a complex circuitry of displaceable energy”; the word Besetzung (“cathexis”) was first used by
Freud’s teacher, Theodor Meynert, to explain that a neuron has an energy which
circulates. Kravis argues that when Freud borrowed the term “transfer” he was
well aware of Charcot’s terms ‘le transfert’, or ‘la loi du transfert’ and he
consciously decided to use the term as a continuation of the same tradition of
healing.[8]
In 1890s Freud often referred to
psychoanalysis as “slow magic” or “faded magic”. If we understand magic
as an attempt to replace the order and the connectivity of things, by the order
and connectivity of our thoughts, then psychoanalysis indeed breaks the tissues
of the external social reality, and by slowly reconstruct it, it induces
more meaning.
Studies on
Hysteria
also envisioned the central nervous system as the circulation of displaceable
energy, as a “reservoir of nervous tension.” Breuer
conceptualized sensibility as a fluid, “whose total quantity is fixed and whenever
it pours into one of its channels in greater abundance becomes proportionally
less in the others.”[9]
Yet, something was still missing in order to capture the true nature of the
wound, and slowness (and resting and meditation) were not sufficient answers to
trauma. What exactly troubles the hysteric? Breuer warned that the abundance of
stimuli also creates motor pathologies. He argued that “a man who stands still
releases anxiety even more”; people cannot bear peace endlessly. The person who
does absolutely nothing is even more irritated than the one who works and
Breuer said that if a person is awake, but is not working, she is even more
restless; she is waiting to spend energy, but since the energy is not flowing
in any direction, it causes even more anxiety. The energy is not only unused,
its force is also aimless (although, technically speaking, energy is always
already aimless; energy does not have a vector). How, then, is the wound
generated? Freud offered an answer only fifteen years later, at the second
lecture delivered at the Clark University in America in 1909 where he
introduced the metaphor of shopping, saying that what causes hysteria is the ideological landscape: “(T)he
hysterical patient reminds one of a feeble woman who has gone out shopping and
is now returning home laden with a multitude of parcels and boxes. She cannot
contain the whole heap of them with her two arms and ten fingers. So first of
all one object slips from her grasp; and when she stoops to pick it up, another
one escapes her in its place, and so on.”[10]
When a hysteric falls apart, she falls apart because of the “shopping of
concepts”, of what is being offered on the ideological landscape: a hysteric
tries to follow the doctrine of her day; she tries to be a good mother (Emmy von N.), a good daughter (Anna O.), a good sister (Elisabeth von R.), a good relative (Katharina), and a good employer (Lucie R.), and at the same time, she
also tries to obey the command: let’s have fun! Once she realizes she cannot
subscribe to both prerogatives, she falls apart, and by falling ill, she
transforms an already existing perfect home into a medical room.
3.
Between
1893 and 1898 Freud offered three possible answers on how to exit the
impossible ideological landscape that troubled the hysteric. Curiously enough,
all of the solutions offered were situated precisely in the realm of the same
landscape: animals, chains and caves.
Animals.
Freud’s bestiary (1893).
When a hysteric develops nonthinking, and when she falls down into the
horizontal, she actually falls closer to the animal. Freud’s volumes are populated with animals; animals are an important
part of his theory of subjectivity. Emmy
von N. was producing bird-like sounds, Little
Hans was obsessed with horses, dogs, and wolves, and it was not until he
cut short his obsession with horses, that he was once again welcomed to rejoin
the order of humans. Freud would not permit the Wolf Man to become wolf, his wolves
needed to be turned into dogs, into his parents. Rat Man empathized with rats: when young he liked to bite people;
hysterics resemble domesticated animals and Freud was a tamer of sorts. President Schreber’ case is filled with
insects, butterflies, worms, snakes. Why so many animals, both domesticated and
wild? Falling into the horizontal,
which every mammal “knows how to read”, served not only as a liberator from the
incongruity of thought, but also as a sexual
operator. Nonthinking opens a space for jouissance
(“If I am not able to think/decide any longer, if I am unable to decode what is
expected of me, I can, just as well, join the animal world, and my deprivation
of thinking will serve my own enjoyment, just like it serves animals”).
However, the sexualization of hysteria was also the physicians’ discovery,
their most precious product. Critics warned that most of Charcot’ hysterics not
only resembled one another, they also resembled
animals: “(A)t the command of the chief of staff, they begin to act like
marionettes, or like circus horses accustomed to repeat the same evolution”.[11] What is the ontological
status of a hysteric who becomes like a hybrid beast, a composite of animal and
human; how to define her? In his obituary to Charcot from 1893,
dedicated to the only person who, in the lonely years of the 1890s, Freud
worshiped as a hero, we read that Charcot stands between two paradigms, that
of: “Cuvier… great comprehender and describer of the animal world surrounded by
a multitude of animal forms” and that of “the myth of Adam, who, when God
brought the creatures of Paradise before him to be distinguished and named, may
have experienced to the fullest degree the intellectual enjoyment which Charcot
praised so highly”.[12]
Charcot, a neuropathologist, is positioned between both paradigms, not by
chance. The implication is that between the dead, the animal, and the divine,
the living being is the one who is not complete, she crawls, crumbles, slides, creeps, drags, limps, regresses, breaks
down, falls apart just as the Salpêtrière hysterics. Twenty-seven years later,
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920), Freud gave full meaning to this concept, when referring to human
destiny, he said: “What we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping”.[13]
Chains (1896). How to orchestrate slow-thinking, how to help
a hysteric slowly stand on her feet again? The answer was offered in the
much-discussed paper The Aetiology of
Hysteria (1896) where Freud wrote: “Imagine that an explorer arrives in a
little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with
remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and
unreadable inscriptions… If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries
are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or
a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the
numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an
alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and
translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past,
to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur! (Stones
talk!).”[14]
The master of slow-thinking, the analyst, Freud tells us, should adopt the
methodology of the archeologist, and he introduced the metaphor of chains. It
can happen, Freud tells us, that a patient cannot immediately recall the
traumatic scene. How to arrive to that scene? Freud answers: She, the analyst,
should follow the chains of associations! One chain will not always elegantly
lead to another chain, trauma is not arranged like a string of pearls, chains
ramify, and are interconnected like genealogical trees, “one chain of
associations always has more than two links”, but which traumatic chain should
one follow? Do these chains have some logical ending? Yes they do, Freud
responded. In all cases, the natural ending will be the stage of childhood and
in order to reconstruct it, one has to follow a reverse chronology, that of an
archeologist, who also moves in the reverse manner. Freud’s early vision of the
psyche is that of an archeological playground; the analyst will encounter many
mysteries and ruins, but if she employs her labor with enthusiasm, one brick
will adhere to another, and after a while, the fragile territory will rise up
again to display the magnificent buildings from the past. Freud proposed that
in order to orchestrate the slow-recovery, one should treat the psyche as a
spatial category. How to visualize the space of the psyche, what does it look
like? It looks like an archaeological site, but it is deprived of the skies, nor
is there any sea or forest. Wild winds blow there, but geography actually does
not exist. Between the castle and the columns, between the palace and the
treasure-house, and in between the stones that talk, there is no actual
topography, no natural features. What exists there is an inattentive,
abstracted materiality of ghostly thoughts. These thoughts from the past are
tranquil, shallow; actually they are flat, as if put into frozen horizontal
lines. The site is made of past, sedate, horizontal, fallen thoughts. The flat
thoughts of the past can eventually grow; after all they are rooted there. One
should remember over and over again that the objects which the
analyst-archeologist discovers are not our usual firm and solid objects, they
are just ghostly residues of objects, half-objects, emptied of their true
substance; they, too, are leveled, horizontal, just as past thoughts are.
Thoughts never choose objects there; the objects of thoughts are formless,
except when they manifest themselves on the surface of the body, on the
horizontal landscape of the fallen hysteric’s body. Since they are only parts
of the psyche, and not firm object, the analyst, the archeologist of the
psyche, is not really a “digger”, she is not a “conservator-restorer”. Psyche is
an excavation site, but the excavated parts are also those of the psyche. Since
the past thoughts are leveled, they have no form, so when they grow, they can
grow in all directions, and can acquire any form: the shapes of clouds, or of
the sky, of the ocean, or closer to the Freudian doctrine: they can become
castles, palaces and treasure-houses. The space of the psyche is ontology
turned into geography. The space is an archeological excavation site, but only
the psyche can write its own “bodily psyche” there. Geography can never truly
be erased there. The material of this space is the psyche itself, and the
buildings and the geography to be excavated, are composed of psychological
material. The figure loses the logical status of a structure or even that of a
frame, and the analyst, too, needs to transform herself into a gazing and
hearing subject, who turns her eyes and ears inwards while attempting to lead
the patient toward recognizing the lost objects of her psyche. Once the patient
recognizes the lost objects in this city of ghosts, once she recognizes the
phantom thoughts from her psyche, only then can she truly recover the lost
chains of events past, and slowly rebuild the imaginary homeland, the lost
skies, and the sea too, but most importantly for Freud, she can recover the
lost castle, the lost treasure-house.
 |
| Jean-Marten Charcot |
Up! Freud
established that in the geometrical metaphor of the psyche, the past’s formless
objects still have the potential to rise up, to undulate again. Freud
envisioned the psyche of the hysteric similarly to her fallen body. Just as the
body of hysteric falls down into horizontal, her psyche, too is a horizontal
body, populated by formless ghosts, phantoms emptied of their substance,
therefore also flat and horizontal. The analyst’s job, now, is to inflate those
subspatial horizontal forms and give them a vertical dimension, so that the
hysteric can rise up again. Freud imagined the process of slow-thinking
precisely as the reverse process of the hysteric’s falling into horizontal.
Since the hysteric fell into horizontal, the process of recovery should be a
lifting procedure, progressively standing up on her feet again. Up! Slowly
climbing the stairs from animal back to human; she will recover fully only when
she rises again.[15]
The mysterious patient “E”, who was identified through Freud’s correspondence
with Fleiss, helped Freud distill the idea that the psyche can be slowly
rebuilt, one memory block after another, until the patient stands straight,
erect, upright again!
Caves (1898). In the
iconic scene from his book Metastases of Enjoyment (1996) Slavoj Žižek tells an episode when Freud
visited the Škocjan caves of Slovenia. It was the spring of 1898, two years
after The Aetiology of Hysteria,
where Freud proposed that the analyst should go deeper, “as deep as the
infantile experiences”. But, how deep? Caves offered the answer. In 1898 in the
midst of his walk in the fascinating dark universe of the Slovenian cave, Freud
suddenly met another visitor to the caves, the Mayor of Vienna, Dr. Karl
Lueger, a right-wing populist and notorious anti-Semite. By making the wordplay
with his surname Lueger, which in German immediately associates with Lüge, a lie, Freud came to understand, in Žižek’s
interpretation, that: “(W)hat we discover in the deepest kernel of our
personality is a fundamental, constitutive, primordial lie, the proton pseudos,
the phantasmic construction by means of which we endeavor to conceal the inconsistency
of the symbolic order in which we dwell”.[16] Descending into
subterranean caves for Freud served as a metaphor for entering the netherworld
of the unconscious. The “chains of associations” he introduced in the 1890s
opened a possibility for yet another metaphor, that of caves, where in the
hidden depthlessness of being, what the person will discover is not the truth
about herself, but on the contrary, as Žižek says, she will discover a primordial lie, “the natural state of
the human animal is to live in a lie.”[17] Freud used the
metaphor of the cave in Totem and Taboo
(1913) where he connected caves with several concepts already discussed here:
thoughts, lies, and magic. Freud asserted that only one field of our
civilization has retained the idea of the omnipotence of thoughts, and that is
the field of art. He also claimed that “art did not begin as art for art’s
sake”. Art originally worked not to please, but to evoke and conjure up, which
is why the primitive artists left the paintings of animals in the darkest and
most inaccessible parts of the caves, in order to secure them. Primitive
art was created by faith in the supremacy of thoughts, Freud tells us; thoughts
were considered all-powerful, real just as events are real; primitive art was
considered as the process of “telling the truth”. Caves were seen by Freud as sites
of a supreme lesson, namely, that an “original thought” may appear, but
paradoxically that thought will always have to be one that negates the person
as a holder of truth. Commoners do not spend much of their time thinking about
eternal truths, but artists do. Primitive artists left testimonies in the
“darkest and most inaccessible parts of the caves” that what a person finds
when she faces herself is her primordial lie. Truth appears only when the
subject disappears. The completed subject is a lie. In the caves the truth is
visible and even palpable, and Werner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), tells
such a story about the Chauvet Cave discovered in southern France, which
contains the oldest human painted images yet discovered, crafted some 32,000
years ago, twice as old as the Lascaux caves. The striking part of the film is
that the painter left palm prints on the paintings, but on each of the prints
the opposable thumb is missing. The most common artist of the Paleolithic is
the one who has one or several fingers disfigured.[18]
Why? One hypothesis says that young hunters were undergoing initiations, in
which they were having some of their fingers cut off, but a second hypothesis
says that if digits are missing, it is because it is a mythogram, it is
meaningful; the artist is trying to tell us something; he wants to leave a
testimony: everybody has five fingers, but I, the artist, must tell you that no
perfect model exists; all that is perfect is a lie. The only perfect model of a
human is a human who is disfigured, wounded, who limps and breaks down. Just
like the falling down of Freud’s hysterics later.
III
Project for a Scientific Psychology: Fast Thinking
1.
Project for a Scientific Psychology, the
manuscript Freud largely overlooked and that was only published posthumously,
offered not only a gloomier vision of the human capacity to think, but
paradoxically it also offered a much broader vision of a human being than
anything Freud produced prior or after 1895. What is so disturbing about this
90-pages handwritten enigmatic manuscript or neurological document? In it, Freud
produced a complicated structure of three systems of neurons (φ, ψ and ω), two general
theorems (the principle of inertia and the principle of constancy), two
conditions of quantity (Q and Qή, standing for external and internal quantity),
two biological rules of attention and defense, the difference between
memory and perception, and finally: he tried to explain the connection between
reality and thought.
Freud
opened the text with the thesis that every life form tends to establish the
zero state as a primary state, in what he called the principle of inertia.
Freud wrote: “The original trend of the nervous system [is] to keep Q (external
quantity) at [the level of] zero.”[19]
Although the organism tries to withdraw from the external stimuli as much as it
can, it cannot stay in inertia all the time and is obliged to abandon it,
because of the second principle, the principle of constancy, according to which
the organism requires a minimum of quantity to keep the fulfillment of basic
needs (such as hunger, respiration, sexuality) at sufficient levels, therefore
the principle of constancy can be equated with that of homoeostasis. However,
the trend toward inertia persists. The nervous system is an inheritor of the
general irritability of protoplasm; the organism prefers those paths of
discharge which involve a cessation of the stimulus, in what Freud called “flight
from stimulus”. Both principles will be later transformed into his complex
notions of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, which are
foreshadowed here in the Project. Freud’s obsession with the principle of inertia continued through the
years, and he reintroduced it again in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(there he called it the Nirvana
principle), both terms representing a clear anticipation of the death
drive. As early as 1895 Freud said that the principle of inertia serves as a
common movement toward a zero state, towards death. Life is just an extension of death, life is just a “very
rare species of death", as Nietzsche called it. It is a version of the
eternal return to the deathly state
of inactivity, an insurance that the organism eventually dies; it should die by
its own death, and not by something harmful from the external reality. The
drive is destined to ensure that
life returns to the inorganic, and that the return to death must already occur
within life, and from life.
Seeing
life as a rare extension of death had serious implication on thinking. In the Project Freud said that he doesn’t have
a high opinion of the human capacity for thinking. the human being is generally
a nonthinking being. Hysteria is only one proof that a human being is a
nonthinking being. Accordingly, hysteria can be treated as an older language of
humanity. Humans are prone to develop a kind of nonthinking; it is deeply
rooted in the primordial lie (the proton pseudos) that resides in the depthless
being. Nothing in human is evolutionarily directed towards thinking, says
Freud. Moreover humans tend to distort the results of perception and to modify
the image of reality in favor of the principle of inertia. The network of
charged neurons never inform objectively about physical reality, they tend to
fabricate reality, and this process of false perceptions Freud called false knowledge. He writes: “It is very
difficult for the ego to put itself into the situation of mere ‘investigation’.
The ego almost always has purposive or wishful cathexis, whose
presence during investigation, as we shall see influences the passage
of association and so produces a false knowledge of
perceptions.”[20]
Freud introduced the term Proton Pseudos
(borrowed from Aristotle’s Organon).
Its original meaning “the first lie”, served
Freud as an explanation that a person always forms false premises and
false conclusions, as a result of “preceding falsity”. The neurons tend to
bring us a lighter version of reality, and although the ego “wants to know”
what is happening in reality, it only wants to
know as far as it keeps the cathexis (the concentration of mental energy) on
lower levels. Ego is curious about learning, at the same time it is not interested
about learning, it ignores reality. Ego
will keep track of reality only as long as it is not dissatisfied with the
results it receives. The minute it gets worrying information, it is prone to
falsify reality. Freud says: “The unpleasure through neglecting cognition is
not so glaring as that from ignoring the external world, though at bottom
they are one and the same. Thus there is in fact also an observing
process of thought in which indications of quality are either not, or
only sporadically, aroused, and which is made possible by the fact that the ego
follows the passage [of association] automatically with its cathexis. This
process of thought is in fact far the more frequent, without
being abnormal; it is our ordinary thought, unconscious, with
occasional intrusions into consciousness.”[21]
What we usually call thinking is merely an attempt to keep up with a measure of
reality. Although the ego wants to keep up with reality, it loves to store it
into the unconscious. When a subject thinks, it is only an intrusion as
thinking. The conscious attempt to think is just an exclusion to the cognitive processes, which would take
place even without our conscious presence. Thinking is a dream-like,
unconscious process in which our consciousness is but an intruder. In this
vision, thinking acquires the quality of an almost instinctual process. The ego
is irresponsible and lazy, it resists the information from the outside world,
it also falsifies it, and the principle of inertia guarantees that ego will
soon be saved from thinking. What complicates the desire of the ego to forever
stabilize in accordance with the principle of inertia is not just the principle
of constancy (homoeostasis), but also information coming from the outside
world. Although the ego tries to ignore reality, the information is still
powerful enough to force the ego to leave the inertia principle. Still, once
the ego recognizes the reality signs, once it is forced to concentrate and to
observe, the ego will immediately re-gain its status quo by faking reality,
pretending it is observing it, while it is merely making false perception, thus
faking thinking, in what Freud called false
knowledge.
In
contrast to the whole western tradition of philosophy that defines the human as
a thinking being, Freud determines it is a nonthinking being. Then, why do we
think at all? What is the purpose of thinking? In chapter 18 of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, entitled Thought and Reality, Freud writes: “The aim and end of all
thought-processes is thus to bring about a state of identity, the
conveying of a cathexis Qή [sic], emanating from outside, into a
neurone cathected from the ego.”[22]
Freud essentially says: the practical meaning of thinking is to establish a
process of identification, to be able to say: “This bird is a bird”. The minute
identification is established, the need for thinking stops. Ultimately,
thinking will stop even if no action follows thinking. Freud believed that thinking is just a release of tension which comes
in the form of identifying the information that come from the outside world,
and what remains in the outside world are just the residues of thoughts
(“Uh-huh, what I see is a fish”. The moment identification is established, and
the object is recognized, it closes thinking). Freud made a distinction
among several types of thinking: practical, reproductive and cognitive.
Practical and reproductive types are similar: they don’t have any goals. Their
structure, however, is different: practical thinking starts from perception and
comes to a certain critical idea. Reproductive thinking, on the contrary,
starts with the need to review some critical idea and arrives to perception. Cognitive
thinking (Freud also called it critical and research thinking) is always
associated with discontent, and unpleasure is the most inherent value of
critical thinking. According to Freud, it is so, because there is a “logical
error” in thinking. The error consists of the fact that thinking is unable to
stop itself! Thinking cannot stop from constantly reviewing a given situation.
Freud considered that the most important aspect of thinking is the ability to stop, to pause, in order to protect
precisely the biological prerequisites for thinking. But even cognitive
thinking is not thinking, Freud tells us: it consists of giving opinions,
validations, and judgments. If my desire overlaps with my reality, my universe
does not need any thinking. If parts of my desire are overlapping with my
reality the space for some kind of thinking opens, but it is always something
from the realm of remembrance. In other words Freud did not consider every, or
even any, thought to be a manifestation of thinking.
 |
| Sigmund Freud |
If
we summarize Freud’s findings related to thought from the Project for a Scientific
Psychology, we can offer the following points: 1) The most common version
of a thought is a judgment, validation, or opinion, and as such, they don’t
really qualify as thinking; 2) A thought which manifests itself as reproductive
thinking is almost always comparable with recognition, which is a lower version
of thinking; 3) Thinking rarely comes in the form of the so-called “pure act of thought”,[23]
but even when it comes as a “pure act of thought” it has little evolutionary
value except for the fuzzy idea that it will be useful in some potential
future. 4) There is no instant gratification from thinking, therefore pure
thinking is also a source of discontent (Freud: “It is quite generally the case
that we avoid thinking of what arouses only unpleasure, and we do
this by directing our thoughts to something else.”[24]
5) Thinking is hard. There are so many things that distract thinking in other
directions, but for Freud paradoxically that is a healthy way to stop wasting
time and to preserve energy for practical deeds. 6) Thinking often raises itself
above the ego, and the ego then starts to be dependent on thinking, for
thinking pumps the ego up, instead of the ego just using thinking for its survival
purpose. 7) The thought paradox is that although practical thinking develops
prior to cognitive thinking, cognitive thinking is still just an introduction
to practical thinking: the subject needs to think in order to situate herself
better into her surroundings, yet she needs to situate herself better in order
to think. 8) Cognitive thinking is a luxury that also drags all sorts of vices
(subjectivity, incompleteness, uselessness). One should think practically, and
that narrows down thinking to some kind of practical action. 9) The thinking
human is already someone who expels herself from the “normal” psychological
processes, because thinking is a fertile ground for all kinds of perversions,
contradictory impulses and desires. Thinking attracts pathologies. All of these
conclusions do not imply that Freud in the Project
advocated for a sentimental Rousseauism or that he glorified the
illiterate man as good historical “material” of the
Darwinian evolution. Freud did not imply that the preferred subject is the one
who talks from his experience and who doesn’t offer any
interpretations of what he has been through. On the contrary, Freud considered
thinking to be almost an impossible operation, so complicated that is not
easily reachable for humans.
2.
Further
on, things get more complicated. Building on the premises that thinking is
almost an impossible operation, Freud came to a conclusion that “the state of
waiting” established between perception and action (and that is - thinking
itself) is actually useless! In the closing chapter of his Project for a Scientific Psychology, one encounters the following,
enigmatic recommendation about the nature of thinking: “The process of thought
must now be considered still more closely. Practical thought, the origin of all
thought-processes, remains, too, their final aim. All other kinds
branched off from it. It is an obvious advantage if the arranging of
thought, which takes place in practical thought, need not wait to occur
till the state of expectation but can have occurred already: because (1) this
will save time for the specific action to take shape, (2) the state of
expectation is far from being particularly favourable for the passage
of thought. The value of promptitude in the short interval
between perception and action is shown when we consider
that perceptions change rapidly. If the thought-process lasts too long, its
product will have become useless in the meantime. For that reason we ‘think
ahead’.”[25]
Freud
concluded the manuscript with an unexpected enigmatic conclusion: Think fast!
Think quickly! Think in “the short interval” between perception and action, so
that the perception should already be an action. He explained that “the
perceptions change rapidly”, so rapidly, that the product of our thinking
“becomes useless in the meantime”. This recommendation clearly transforms
thinking into an excess, a surplus which
has little utilitarian value, therefore we need to “think ahead”; we “need not [to]
wait”! We should “arrange thoughts” in such a manner that the “state of
expectation” needed for thinking is downsized to zero! There is an obvious
profit from such an operation, says Freud, because when we spare ourselves from
thinking, an “obvious advantage” occurs, namely we “save time for the specific
action to take shape”! Instead of thinking, “save time” for acting! Thinking
should have ended even before it truly began. The only useful thinking is the
one that directly leads to action. Thinking should happen before starting. But
how to think in such a fashion that thinking annuls itself? How to think in
such a way that you erase precisely the protraction that the thinking requires?
The
radical command (“act, don’t think”) diverges from everything Freud publicly
advocated in 1895. It is in direct
contradiction with Studies on Hysteria,
but also with his considerations throughout his career (for example, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930,
is based on the premise that the capacity of humans to postpone action in favor
of thinking is the most important feature of civilization). Why was Project for a Scientific Psychology different?
Why after a complicated neurological investigation into the human organisms,
and in a text that Freud considered to be his magna opus, why did Freud all of a sudden proclaimed that thinking
is an error? Furthermore, not only is this contradiction embedded in early
Freudian theory on thought, it is also that Freud’s theory on thought from the Project was largely overlooked by the psychoanalytical tradition. Freud
talks about the speed needed in
thinking (even thinking downsized to zero in favor of action) in the Project, yet he insisted that one should
think slowly in Studies on Hysteria.
Should Project for a Scientific Psychology be read as a recommendation for
the urgency of thought? Freud was a
thinker of paradoxes, his whole life was devoted to discovering the paradoxes
of the human psyche, and in 1895 he too became a victim of such a paradox. But
was it really a misfortunate overlooking that he produced two divergent theses,
or was it that Freud actually wanted to produce an antithetical body of
knowledge? The two manuscripts from 1895 contradict or even negate one another,
and often within the same books. But what connects both theories of thinking is
that both of them offered a reading of two qualities of thinking, of two types
of thought: thinking close to nonthinking, and thinking as acting. Thus, we are suggesting that they be thought
of in terms of a principle of complementarily, similar to the theories of light
in physics: wave and corpuscular theories.
The
same contradiction is to be found fifty years earlier, in Kierkegaard’s book Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846).
Kierkegaard spoke of two eras: The Age of Revolution and The Present Age.
Revolutionary age is an age of action, a passionate age. There, thinking is
reduced to a minimum, one just makes a decision (Kierkegaard did not talk about
action, but about decision), everything is done without much thinking, even-
and this is important- if it is a wrong decision! The present age, on the other
hand, is a period devoid of passion, reflective, marked by contemplating;
nothing really happens there, a person is all the time in a “seductive
uncertainty of reflection”,[26]
and life is decaying because it is becoming endlessly embedded in one’s inner
thoughts (a theme perfectly illustrated by Lars von Trier’s film Dogville, 2003, which tells a story of a
woman arriving in the small town of Dogville; she tries to win acceptance of
the inhabitants, but she ends up being raped, molested, and subjected to all
kinds of sadism and torture. Yet she keeps “offering her own death to others as
the ultimate act of friendship”, as Derrida would say about friendship. In
Kierkegaardian terms, both sides, the villagers and the female character, are
“acting”, even when they are making the ultimate wrong decisions; the most
disgusting character in the movie, however, is the writer and philosopher, who
constantly contemplates the moral issues, and runs from one group to another,
and offers “consolations”: “Okay, they raped you, but still they are good
people”, or: “Okay, she is disturbing your social order, but she means no
harm”, as the ultimate example of the Kierkegaardian man from the present age,
holder of the true decay of life that takes place when one constantly reflects
and contemplates). In the Project,
Freud questioned precisely this: is it possible for humans to perform the
urgency of thought, to act immediately? And he opted for the age of revolution
(in Kierkegaardian terms) an age without thought.
3.
Freud
was aware that the suspension of thought brings about urgency. Is this not the
case when the urgency of thought equals Revolution?
And what does it mean? To answer this question we must depart from Freud’s
theory and take a look at some of the historical events related to thinking and
revolution closest to Freud’s time. The first example of a revolution one encounters is the October
revolution. What did this revolution mean for the nature of thought? We find
the answer thirteen years after Project
for a Scientific Psychology was written, and around the time when Freud was
about to publish his study on Little Hans
(1909). In 1908 Maxim
Gorky was on Capri, together with a group of Bolshevik emigrants. He wanted to
organize a philosophical debate and he invited Lenin to be his guest.
Although Lenin considered Gorky a bourgeois, he appreciated his talent and
respected him as one of the rare Russian writers who could help the Revolution.
Lenin immediately replied to Gorky, but clearly set the conditions of his
visit: “Dear Alexei Maximovich, I should very much like to see you, but I
refuse to engage in any philosophical discussion.”[27]
Lenin wasn’t a naïve political strategist, he knew he would need support from
all the emigrants. His excuse did not mean that he was afraid of the connection
between philosophy and politics, thinking that it would be devastating to the
politics. Nor did he excuse himself because he considered theory unimportant;
on the contrary, Lenin is the creator of the doctrine of anti-spontaneism,
meaning that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary
movement. Yet the philosophy he wanted was philosophical innocence, he wanted thinking to be only a remnant of politics. The episode is analysed by Althusser in his
essay Lenin and Philosophy, where he
called it an act of “Lenin’s laughter”.[28]
Lenin is asking Gorky the most complex question about the nature of thought:
But, tell me, what will that thinking be like, after we have come to the
threshold of the thinkable? Think that! Until then, I will laugh at your
philosophical debates.
When one becomes
revolutionary, when one decided (in
Kierkegaard’s terminology) or already acted
(in Freud’s terms) or, when thought has reached the threshold of the
thinkable, what will thought be like?
The drama of the previously said, places thought in the era of the unthinkable,
in the sense in which Sartre declares Engels and Lenin “unthinkable”. One of
the most important sources for the theory of socialism was the monk Deschamps
(considered Hegel’s predecessor) from the 18th Century. In the book The Real System or the Word of the Metaphysical
and Moral Conundrum (1769) he says that a condition for higher changes in
the consciousness is to burn all books. Deschamps was not selfish, he thought
that the last book to be burned would certainly have to be his. (In Emmerich’s
film The Day After Tomorrow, 2004,
such an extreme situation is described, the ultimate conditions under which
such magnitude of the decay of
thought is possible. A small group of people hides from the Ice Age that
threatens to destroy the northern hemisphere, and one scene takes place at the
City Library on 42nd Street in New York, where the survivors have to warm
themselves with what they can find – the books. When a girl picks up a book by Nietzsche to throw into
the fire, an elderly man tells her that one of the greatest philosophers in the
world must not be burnt. She replies “Nietzsche was in love with his sister”.) If a
critical mass of people is missing, if morality is tightened, the question is:
what happens to thought? Is it that the first thing that will
disappear is thought itself? In the documentary Welcome to North Korea (2001), there is one grotesque scene that
takes place in the only library, the “People’s
House of Education” in Pyongyang.
In the scene, the authors of the
documentary enter the room where the volumes of Kim Il Sung’s personal teachings are kept and his
teachings are collected in 3,078 volumes! With this number Kim Il Sung becomes
the most prolific writer in the history of civilization. But, more importantly,
Lenin’s question to Gorky’s circle (“What will we think when thought reaches
its end?”) gets its concrete historical answer here. Kim Il Sung’s volumes are
the most correct answer to Lenin’s laughter. It is possible that thought will
continue once it has reached the threshold of the thinkable, but that thought
will have the form of Juche-teaching. When we have reached the end of thought,
thought can then produce an infinite number of volumes. A massive amount of
destruction of thought, Freud warns us, can happen precisely by way of
uninterrupted thinking. Freud also said that the most important aspect of thinking
is the ability to stop, to pause, in
order to protect precisely the biological prerequisites for thinking.
However,
Freud never proclaimed the urgency of
thinking to be an act of revolution. Instead, Project for a Scientific Psychology had one clear concern: how to
think thinking from an evolutionary perspective. For Freud most of what is out
there are only some practical decisions about what kind of life one wants to
commit oneself to; the only modus through which thinking manifests itself, for
Freud, is a living without much cognitive thinking, only with some version of
pragmatic thinking. Freud considered that it is impossible to arrive at what he called “total thinking”, its
total facilitation (Bahnung), because it would produce a collapse of the
ability to differentiate between the perception of reality and reality. That is
why total, completely satisfying thinking can never occur, thinking can never
be pleasurable thinking. If it is pleasurable thinking, it will dismiss
reality. The nature of thinking is always thinking as half-thinking, thinking
in discontent; humans are not capable of genuine, brilliant thinking, because
that thinking would refute reality, which in turn would refute the very
possibility of thinking. At the moment thinking completely satisfies the body, at
that very moment the border between reality and fiction will cease to exist.
4.
Yet,
there is something even more disturbing in the Project for a Scientific Psychology. Freud suggested that actions
are never really products of thinking; actions have always already happened;
actions occur prior to thinking; they exist before thinking even happens. What
does this mean? How is it possible that action happens prior to thinking? The
answer is connected to another concept important to Freud: the problem of identification. When I want what other
wants, I am actively in a place where “I want to overtake the place of the
other”, as Freud writes in relation to Lucy R. in Studies on Hysteria. When I mimic something, it is not a conscious
attempt to imitate the other, it is not a conscious choice, and I am not
acting. The neurotic is never a liar, Freud says. We simply do not exist
without existing in the field of the Other, essentially the same thing Lacan
repeated in his seminar on the Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: “I can do no more than suggest the
extraordinary consequences that have stemmed from this handing back of truth
into the hands of the Other, in this instance the perfect God, whose truth is
the nub of the matter, since, whatever he might have meant, would always be the truth-even if he had said that two
and two make five, it would have been true”.[29]
(A colleague of mine from the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje, upon hearing
this quote, replied to me: “It might very well be the truth, but only under
condition that what follows it that two and three will have to make six”).
The
neurotic is never a liar. What a human is, is always what exists in the field of
the Other, and is actively connected to the concept of identification. What
does this mean? In Studies on Hysteria
Freud implied that “bodily thinking” arrives only after thinking failed. In Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud changed his mind, and said that
cognitive and judgmental thinking are connected to bodily cathexis, while
reproductive thinking is connected to psychical cathexis. If “the aim and the
end of all thought-processes” is to establish a state of identity, Freud said, then establishing the state of identity first occurs
at the level of the body, and only later does it appear as reproductive
thinking, which takes place at the level of the psyche. It takes time to filter
the information coming from outside; the body is faster, it receives the
information faster. The body “thinks” first, through its “kinetic thinking”,
through bodily sensations, and in the Project
Freud introduced the idea that thinking always comes with some “bodily
resonance”; while I am thinking, I am also thinking with my body. Thought always comes with some
“motor activity”. Freud writes: “The idea and the movement only differ
quantitatively, as we have learnt from experiments on thought-reading. If
thought is intense, no doubt people even speak out loud.”[30]
Freud warned that there are many situations when it is hard to make a
difference between physical reality and psychological reality, that which is in me and that which is outside of me. When I remember some
movement, my body often repeats the movement. The neurotic often cannot distinguish between her thoughts and the real
events. She can be haunted by her guilty consciousness, and although she knows
her thoughts are not the same as the external reality, her thoughts are still
taken as seriously as if they were real events. To explain this phenomena Freud
developed three different types of reality: thought reality, external reality
and psychological reality and he gave justification for the confusion of those
three, by explaining that neurologically speaking, the idea of movement and the movement are not qualitatively different,
but only quantitatively so. It means that both are made of the same materials,
the only difference lies in their intensity. Freud introduced the notion of motility and said that for the neurons
it makes no difference if the motor activity is performed or not. This led to
the discovery of something more extreme than Freud ever imagined possible-the
anticipation of mirror neurons. In the chapter Though and Reality Freud writes: “While one is perceiving
the perception, one copies the movement oneself -- that is, one innervates
so strongly the motor image of one's own which is aroused towards
coinciding [with the perception], that the movement is carried out. Hence
one can speak of a perception having an imitation-value. Or
the perception may arouse the mnemic image of a sensation
of pain of one's own, so that one feels the corresponding unpleasure and
repeats the appropriate defensive movement. Here we have the sympathy-value of
a perception.”[31]
The importance of these lines is everlasting. This
was the earliest neurological anticipation of the existence of mirror neurons.
This concept later paved the path for Lacan’s most famous principle that
“Desire is the Desire of the Other.” It was not Lacan’s but Freud’s initial
idea, and for the first time it was stated precisely in the Project for a
Scientific Psychology. Freud noticed the strange phenomena that movement is
not only a movement of oneself, but an imitation; it is the innervations of the
motor image I copy. It meant nothing in scientific terms until the
middle of the 1990s when a strange class of neurons were discovered, and were
given the name, mirror neurons. This new class of neurons was explained
by the strange interconnectivity between self and other. Here is one popular
description of how mirror
neurons work (from Wired magazine):
the child looks at her mother as she picks up the keys. The child thinks “mommy
wants to play”. The husband watches his wife as she picks up the keys. He
trembles “this time she is really leaving me”. How do these people know what
the other is thinking? How do they judge their intentions? The child can also
come to a conclusion that mommy wants to leave, or the husband can also think
that his wife wants to play. But they are not mistaken. They know! They know
precisely because of the existence of the mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are
active when the subject is in the process of performing a certain task: for
example, raising her own hand, and in that sense they are insignificant. But
the same neurons fire off when their owner sees someone else performs the same
task, when the other raises her hand, too. They are activated by a kind of
empathy, a simulation of the activity of the other. It means that the
conduct of the other is produced but at the same moment it is also reproduced in me! So each conduct comes
not as one and individualistic, but always, at least, as double, i.e. doubled
activity. That is then a case when between me and the other there is a relation
that is not mediated in a physical sense, but in the sense of a simulation,
what Freud in the Project called
“copying the movements”, “a perception having
an imitation-value”, and “sympathy-value of a perception”.
Although the activity of the brain is identical in both subjects, the one
watching won’t raise her hand in reality, as the one that is being watched.
That is because most of the time, a strong brain inhibition will stop the one
watching from activating her motorics. But, the uneasy feeling we have when
someone is having an injection, for example, is a proof that these inhibitors
don’t always block my reactions. In short, mirror neurons for the first time
gave rise to the idea that there is a primitive, unmediated dialogue between
the subject and the other, and that is something of great importance for the
constitution of subjectivity. There is an actual concurrency between me and the
other, and it is not just an empty abstraction, or a poetic metaphor, but an
essential psychological synchrony, i.e. relatedness. The timelines of the
subject facing the other are identical, and between them there is always one
that is repeated, i.e. a duplicated timeline, but only one of the two is interrupted. This
was a new idea, and much radical one from everything Freud produced in 1895. He
did not proceed with publishing it, but its existence should be noted as
extremely important for our understanding of humans.
IV
Conclusion
Freud’s
position on the relation of thought to action is a composite of two
perspectives. One of them became psychoanalytical doctrine; the other
perspective got suppressed in psychoanalytical studies, but is making its
presence known, and therefore has to be taken into consideration in any full
accounting of early Freud’s position on thinking. The suggestion is that
perhaps they be considered in a complementarily way, a known scientific
principle in explaining the nature of light in physics.
In
Studies on Hysteria (1895) Freud argued that the symptom is a particular
form of thinking, a kind of nonthinking, and a product of incongruent ideas; he
suggested that the cure should come by adopting slow-thinking which will uplift
the fallen hysteric. This paper tried to read Freud’s manuscript together with
two texts that gravitate around it, Freud’s obituary Charcot (1893) as well as his controversial The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896). In all three texts, Freud offered
several methodologies on how to slow-think. Freud asserted that: 1) the analyst
should treat the body as the thinking body, and symptoms as the hieroglyphs of
nonthinking, 2) the analyst should perform the investigation of the chains of
associations; 3) the analyst should perform the task of archeological
reconstruction of the netherworld of the psyche, and finally 4) the analyst
should dive into the kernel of one’s being, as in a cave, where the proton pseudos resides. Although Freud
was already shaping his concept of the unconscious, his early work remains
closely connected to the Cartesian universe, and his subject consisted mainly in
a thinking subject. Thinking and being are the same for early Freud; everything
psychological possesses a notion, which renders it thinkable in its essence, in
what it is, and even when it is not thinkable, it is still in the realm of
thinking.
Project for a
Scientific Psychology offers a completely different concept. The
manuscript was mainly overlooked by
the psychoanalytical tradition, for in it, Freud proposed a radically
different theory of thought. Here, the human being is no longer a thinking
being; humans don’t have a capacity for thinking, therefore wherever possible
thinking should be immediately replaced by acting; one should think fast, and
in the shortest possible intervals between perception and action, so that
thinking annuls itself even before it starts. Freud considered “total thinking”
impossible, for it would produce a
collapse in the difference between the perceptions of reality and reality. But,
in this enigmatic manuscript Freud also suggested that action,
paradoxically, always already happens prior to thinking. This opened the
possibility that action initially is not even happening in the field of the
subject, but is always already happening in the field of the other. This, in
turn, made the radical expansion
of the Freudian subject feasible,
but it also lead to the earliest anticipation of the mirror neurons
known in psychoanalytical literature. The overlooked manuscript of Freud today
stands closer to the contemporary investigations into how human mind thinks,
than anything Freud wrote prior or
after 1895.
[1] Freud, Sigmund, SE Pre-Psycho-Analytical Publications and
Unpublished Drafts, Volume I (1886-1899), ed. James Strachey, (London:
Vintage, 2001), 283.
[2] Freud,
Sigmund and Breuer Joseph, Studies on
Hysteria, ed. James Strachey,
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), 49.
[3] Murray, Sherman,
“Emotional
Communication in Modern Psychoanalysis: Some Freudian Origins and Comparisons,” Modern
Psychoanalysis, vol. 8 (1983), 176.
[5] Roth S., Michael. Memory, Trauma, and History. Essays on
Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 63.
[7] Borch-Jacobsen,
M, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis,
Mimesis, and Affect (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 114.
[8] Kravis, Nathan, M,
“The ‘Prehistory’ of the Idea of Transference”, (The International Review of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 19, 1992), 13.
[11] Adler, Amy.
“Symptomatic Cases: Hysteria in the Supreme Court’s Nude Dancing Decisions” (American Imago, No. 64, 2007), 306.
[12] Freud, Sigmund, Charcot
(1893), in The Freud Reader, edited
by Peter Gay, (London: Vintage Books, 1995), 50.
[13] Freud,
Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
edited by James Strachey, (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1962), 58.
[15] Freud was aware
that not everything from this archeological playfield would be uplifted, some
ghosts of the psyche remain fragmented, and titles of his clinical cases
indicate this awareness: Dora was
published with the addition “Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, Rat Man with ”Notes Upon A Case of
Obsessional Neurosis”, Wolf Man with
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”.
[27] Althusser,
Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 11-13.
[29] Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Principles of
Psychoanalysis, (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1998), 36.
The Status of Thought in Early
Freud
Jasna Koteska
Resume
The article argues that early
Freud produced two antithetical theses about the nature of thought. Koteska proposes
that in Studies on Hysteria (1895) Freud
read hysteria as a consequence of incongruent thoughts and therefore, to tackle
it, he introduced the perspective of slowness of thought, which gave birth to
psychoanalysis. The other thesis Freud proposed almost in parallel in his largely
overlooked manuscript Project for
Scientific Psychology (1895). Herewith, in a contrast statement, Freud suggested
that thinking has almost no utilitarian value and therefore thinking should be
urgently replaced by action. However, Koteska’s article proposes that the two contrasted
Freudian theories of thinking should be thought of in terms of a principle of
complementarity. Namely, they should be viewed through the concept of transfer,
known in the mid-19 century French neurology as the transference phenomena and
used by Freud to work with hysteria. Koteska also suggests that Freud was the
first to extend the concept of transfer to both thoughts and actions in his Project for Scientific Psychology, which
is the earliest psychoanalytical anticipation of mirror neurons, discovered in
the late 20th century neuroscience.
Keywords
Sigmund Freud, thought, Studies on Hysteria, Project for a Scientific Psychology.
Biography
Jasna Koteska is a Macedonian
writer and theoretical psychoanalyst. She is a full time professor of
literature, theoretical psychoanalysis and gender studies at the University Ss.
Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. She published over 200
articles on the variety of topics including intimacy, sanitation, trauma,
abject, ressentiment, repetition, miniaturization, and gestures, which were translated
in twelve languages. She is also author of six books, including The Freud Reader. Early Psychoanalysis
(2013), Communist Intimacy (2008) and
Sanitary Enigma (2006).
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