. . . Acheronta movebo . . . . . . stirring up the underworld . . .
Sigmund Freud, 1900/192753
It is commonly thought that psychoanalysis operates in the following tripartite or triphasic manner:
Patients talk (or have difficulty talking, instead expressing themselves nonverbally) and are listened to; interpretations are generated as to what underlies the manifest meanings of their talking (the underlying meanings that are supposedly “in” the unconscious, expressed through both the content and the style of the manifest enunciations); the patients assimilate or integrate these insights (in a process often called “working-through”) and, now armed with these newly established representations of self-understanding (about the content and functioning of their psychic life), they proceed to conduct themselves with greater maturity and adaptivity.
There are a considerable number of variations in the theorization of the specifics caricatured in this sketch. For example: (1) differing opinions about the “rules”
under which the patient is expected to talk and about the processes involved in listening; (2) divergent views as to what is being interpreted (reconstructed or correspondent memories, constructions that form a coherent narrative about the past, preconscious material, “unconscious phantasies,” phenomena experienced in the here-and-now of transference and countertransference); (3) pivotal questions as to who formulates the interpretations (the psychoanalyst as an authority, the patient as a self-reflective participant, or both in some sort of interpersonal or
intersubjective dialogue that is variously negotiative or cocreated); (4) how these interpretations come to be formulated; (5) how they are to be delivered and then worked-through; as well as (6) the criteria by which their therapeutic effectiveness is to be assessed; and finally (7) debates about the way in which these interpretative contributions bring about therapeutic transformations in the patient’s functioning (which overlaps with the questions surrounding the processes or mechanisms of
“working-through”).
I am going to sidestep discussion of these seven variations in order to underscore their commonality. This involves how, in manifold ways, they all prioritize the epistemology of their therapeutic labors (in terms of the significance given to interpretations enunciated and exchanged in a relational context), they all reassert the conventional attitude of theory/practice in relation to the “beingness” of lived experience, and hence they all miss the radical significance of free-associative praxis.
On the fallacies of textual analysis
The almost bewildering variety of psychoanalytically informed and psycho-analytically oriented therapies (and the theories girding them) that today confronts the student of this discipline (or, more accurately perhaps, “these disciplines”) should not beguile us into passing over the profound significance of their shared prioritization of the acts of interpretation. As is argued here, this commonality has less to do with their indebtedness to the path-breaking itinerary undertaken by Freud, and more to do with retreat, that is often almost clandestine, away from the revolutionary implications of his discoveries—an urgent need to recenter the human condition and to establish a locus of some sort of epistemological or ontological security. In a wide variety of fashions, all these therapies hold that the transformative significance of the labors undertaken by patient and practitioner lies in the impact of interpretations, rather than in free-associative praxis per se. Thus, in all these practices, the very mode of discourse that Freud held to be the sine qua non of his discipline is seen either as entirely unnecessary to the therapeutic procedure or as a mere adjunct—a preliminary, a “data gathering” phase, a confirmatory check for veracity, and so on—to the enunciation and exchange of interpretations.
As I itemized previously, the impact of interpretive labors may be conceptualized in a wide variety of ways according to different schools or lineages of what is called psychoanalysis.54For example, following the scheme discussed in John Austin’s theory of speech acts, there are theories of therapeutic action that place more emphasis on the constative weight of interpretations and those that emphasize more the performative implications of interpretive labor as well as the relationship in which such labor occurs (especially its emotional qualities). The former theories present interpretation as a matter of equipping patients with correct (correspondent or, at least, coherent) formulations about their functioning (past and present), whereas the latter present interpretive labor as a matter of offering patients not so much understandings as the relational experience of being contained and understood, or
even as a matter of dialogically instructing patients about their social and emotional conduct (in relation to its components that are not conscious). Other opinions emphasize both constative and performative aspects, presenting the act of interpretation as a matter of providing patients with formulations that restart a biologically determined course of development. Obviously, this summary is far from exhaustive.
Whatever the specifics of the conceptualization, what defines the therapeutic process in the many varieties of psychoanalytically informed and psychoanalytically oriented practice is some notion of the “unconscious” that is to be brought under the aegis of interpretation. Instead of “brought under the aegis,” one is tempted to say tamed by a relationship aimed at the interpretive labors of understanding or gaining “insight” (because, from 1920 onwards, Freud himself wrote several times about “taming the drives,” Bändigung die Triebe). It is evident that so much rides on the significance of this term, “unconscious.” In the course of the past century, this has, of course, been the catchphrase that differentiates practices that claim to have developed out of Freud’s initiatives from those psychological therapies that may involve a conversational relationship of some sort, but which hold no such allegiance. Yet even today, the term continues to be in need of critical examination, and indeed rescue from its usage by Freud’s epigones. For what is troubling—and my purpose here is to challenge such errors—is that “psychoanalysts” now routinely invoke the term in a merely descriptive sense that refers to any psychic event or mechanism that is not in the purview (or potential purview) of self-consciousness.
To be fair, as I indicated previously, Freud himself occasionally slides into this usage (that he also condemns at several points in his writings). However, the consequence of such a liberalization of terminology is that our methodical opening to the repressed dimension of psychic life—that is, the significance of free-associative praxis—is ideologically expunged.
The core commonality of all these ideas about the impact of interpretation (and of an interpretative relationship) involves assumptions about the “unconscious” as being a text, or like a text, other than that of self-consciousness. Therapy is then regarded as some sort of textual analysis by which this “other text” is brought into the domain of conscious reflection or preconscious apprehension (integrated into the functioning of the ego organization or assimilated to the self) by relational procedures of interpretation. In what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” it may well be theorized how the text of self-consciousness is designed to cover over this other text of what is descriptively “unconscious.” It may well be that every individual is composed of multiple texts and the therapeutic enterprise is to interpret and revise these texts—or narratives. However, to be satisfied with this exegetical standpoint is to remain in the realm of therapeutics and to miss the radicality of psychoanalysis.55
The widespread yet crucial mistake here is to suppose that the unconscious that Freud discovered via free-associative discourse is merely a text in some way ontologically equivalent to the text of self-conscious and preconscious psychic life, and thus one that is potentially translatable, by means of an epistemology of
Textual analysis and the dogma of interpretation 51
interpretation, into the representationality of self-consciousness. This standpoint may account for therapy but misses the radical essence of psychoanalysis (as mentioned previously, there are, of course, therapeutic aspects to every psychoanalytic treatment, but that is not the issue here and will later be further addressed).56The thesis of this chapter is precisely that the discovery generated by free-associative praxis, which is the discovery of the repressiveness of self-consciousness that operates both in the clinical setting and in everyday life, implies that the unconscious, to which Freud’s method opens us, is not some other text;
rather, this unconscious is otherwise than textuality.57 To go further with this argument, let us return to the clinical material described in the previous chapter, and discuss the dual error of confusing psychoanalysis with a form of textual analysis.
Most notably, what is involved are twin fallacies of spatialization and substantialization. As would be expected, it is evident that each segment of these associative sequences (indeed, each association) holds a quite readily specifiable logical and rhetorical relation to its predecessor. They are, after all, associative. The stream of contents in self-consciousness does not result from items being thrown randomly to the surface of psychic life (like some grotesque Vegas slot machine). There is indeed a flow to consciousness.58The relation between each element and that which precedes or succeeds it can be described in terms of condensation and displacement (as well as reversal). These operations are discussed at length in Freud’s Traumdeutung as the transformations occurring in dreamwork (although, of course, it would be a mistake not to recognize that they determine the transformations of every condition of self-consciousness). As is now well known, metaphor and metonym are the linguistic categories deployed by Lacanian theory to describe these operations (in this instance, more under the influence of Roman Jakobson than of Ferdinand de Saussure). And we should note that some commentators would add reversal, as a third operation, differentiating it from condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonym). Each association is a transformation (syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically) of that which surfaced immediately before it in what Freud called the concatenations (Verkettungen), the streaming path of thoughts (Gedankengang), or the chain of association (Assoziationskette). What is perhaps more relevant—from the standpoint of an interpretive therapeutics—is that the theme of each segment of the narration holds the same logical and rhetorical relation with the root proposition, as designated by my rudimentary textual analysis. In short, as I discussed in detail in my 1993 book, it is as if each association in the concatenation simultaneously both reveals and conceals something other than itself, which we can call its root (equivalent to the “latent dream thoughts”). What is crucial to note here is that the root (scheme, theme, motive, core conflict, or so-called “unconscious phantasy”) is fully translatable into the various manifest associations (even if under the aegis of negation or reversal).
This character of simultaneously revealing and concealing something other, as if both pointing toward and pointing away from a meaning that I have defined as the root proposition, is important to understand because it intimates a type of opening; yet is not, in and of itself, the discovery of the repressed unconscious. It
is achieved in the transformation from one association to the next as if by
“maneuvering” (by which I do not mean anything like a consciously intended manipulation) the positions of the actor, the recipient, the action or affect, and the timeframe to which the “scene” (to use what is surely one of Freud’s favorite terms) refers. The audience for this process of revealing–concealing is both the patient and the psychoanalyst, as they share the task of listening to the free-associative chain.
By this, I mean that we must firmly dispel any notion that the patient is self-consciously intending to direct some sort of striptease, as a dance of showing-and-hiding that intends to engage the psychoanalyst.59
This transformative maneuvering is well illustrated in both clinical vignettes.
For example, when my male patient shifts from the story about his son to the story about his Rabbi, it is as if the shift both points a little more toward the root proposition and, at the same time, points a little more away from it. That is, the former narrative positions the son as he who is angry and the patient as he who quits the relationship, within the timeframe of the recent past; whereas the latter positions the patient as he who is angry and the Rabbi as he who quits the relationship, but now the timeframe is the distant past. In relation to the root proposition (“If I become angry with the other, my psychoanalyst, he will abandon or reject me”), the transformations from the one story to the next takes the patient closer (the son story reverses the positions of actor/recipient, whereas the Rabbi story does not), but simultaneously takes the patient further away (the son story is fresh from the weekend before a Monday session, whereas the Rabbi story refers to a time long ago and events barely remembered). Finally, we note that the suddenly recollected dream fragment abolishes entirely the contingency of action and affect, but is a scene that casts the dramatis personae in the presentness of the session, patient and psychoanalyst. It also introduces the idiom of enjoyment, rather than anger and rejection. Although the enjoyment only arrives in the manifest content of an oneiric construction—a dream—it presents the duo sharing harmoniously, and possibly homoerotically, the pleasures of a “third,” the feminine aesthetics of beautiful countryside.
A textual analysis of this sort of maneuvering—the simultaneity of revealing and concealing in the passage of conscious thinking and speaking—is of such interest that it readily misleads us into believing that what I am calling the root proposition is an “other text” already formulated some place “in the patient’s mind.” I believe we must challenge this tempting conclusion and that we must do so despite the fact that Freud succumbed to it in both a minor and a major way. The minor way is exemplified by his suggestion in 1900 that a dream’s “latent contents” (the thoughts that eventually emerge as one associates to each of a dream’s manifest elements) are equivalent to, or at least indicate what were, the “latent dream thoughts” operative as a substratum in the formation of the manifest dream at the time of its construction (this has sometimes, rather misleadingly, been called Freud’s “tally argument”). The major way is, of course, exemplified by the entire enterprise of speculative theorizing called the “first topography,” which attributes regions to the psyche (conscious, preconscious, and unconscious). This is the model
Textual analysis and the dogma of interpretation 53
of the “mental apparatus” that offers us a spatial depiction of psychic events in terms of representations that occupy different areas of the psyche and that might move, or be moved, from one to another—for instance from the preconscious into self-consciousness. The trope of spatiality (if it is a trope, since indeed many practitioners seem to hold the model as if it might be literal) also misleads us into treating representations (thoughts, feelings, actions) as if they are substantial or material entities (since typically it is only physical things that migrate from one location to the next).
Despite promulgating this topographic model, Freud was relatively consistent in distinguishing between psychic and material reality.60 In this respect, he acknowledges that a psychic event is not equivalent to a material thing (however, it may be noted that, as I shall argue, his theorizing of the bodymind’s libidinality implies a radical departure from any sort of Cartesian dualism). In the next chapter, the problems engendered by a spatialization of the psyche and by the substantialization of representations will be further discussed. Here it merely needs to be emphasized how these spatial–substantial tropes reinforce the mistake of apprehending the repressed unconscious as if it were a text other than that of self-consciousness. That is, a text that must be understood in epistemological and ontological terms familiar to self-consciousness (the colonialist ambition is evident here, acting as if the geography of Mozambique can only be grasped via coordinates developed in Portugal).
The errors of spatialization and substantialization compound the dual fallacy of belief in root propositions as indicative of representations (schemes, themes, motives, and so forth) that are “in” the unconscious. Even if one accepts the topographic teachings as a useful heuristic (making allowances for their potentially misleading implications), one must still not mistake the root propositions that are constructed or reconstructed by textual analysis (or brought to the surface by some other means) for Freud’s discovery of the repressed unconscious. As I have already indicated, this error seems widespread. All too many commentators assume that representations such as those which I am calling root propositions are the unconscious as discovered by Freud, or exist “in” this unconscious. Such assumptions are seriously wrong (and have done much damage to the appreciation of psychoanalysis).61
Representations such as the root propositions, if I become angry with the other, my psychoanalyst, he will abandon or reject me or I fear that I wish to damage the other’s, my psychoanalyst’s, penis, are not “in” the unconscious (indeed, at this juncture, it is not even wholly clear in what sense we might claim that the aggressive wishes intimated by these propositions are dimensions of the repressed unconscious, which is a matter to which we will return shortly). Such propositions may be, as Freud occasionally stated it, descriptively unconscious (or noncon-scious)—they might be, so to speak, deeply preconscious—but their specification misses entirely the genuine significance of Freud’s free-associative discovery of the way in which human self-consciousness represses something of itself from itself. By which I mean, the way in which self-consciousness represses from its domain of
representationality—renders otherwise than that which can be represented—
dimensions of its own being-in-the-world that nonetheless animate it. As shorthand for what must be further argued in this chapter, it might be said that, if it is, or can be, represented, it is not repressed. To express this differently: That which is repressed is otherwise than representationality (recall here the notion of enigmatic messages, “thing-presentations” or “unfathomable navels” presented as the traces of erotically embodied impulses). Again, the repressed unconscious is not a text other than that which is available, or which could be made available, repre senta -tionally, to self-consciousness.62This issue is crucial of our understanding of the revolutionary significance of psychoanalytic praxis.
The commonplace but serious error of mistaking root propositions or core conflicts as they are sometimes called (again, schemes, themes, motives) for the repressed unconscious itself has generated much of the way in which psychoanalysis is confused with the procedures of psychoanalytically informed and psycho-analytically oriented therapy or, for that matter, other therapies that might privilege interpretation with the goal of accumulating “insight.” the term “unconscious phantasy”—which has been, since Susan Isaacs’s 1948 paper, such a powerful notion in some clinical lineages—has more recently contributed to the extent of this confusion, when its usage is accompanied by a certain disregard for the distinction between the preconscious, or what I am suggesting might be the deep preconscious and that which is repressed.63 The vicissitudes of “psychoanalytic” theorizing since Freud—such that the term “unconscious” can refer to anything that is not conscious, including not only preconscious and deeply preconscious representa-tions, but also nonconscious cognitive mechanisms such as the deep structures of language—must be confronted. It must be confronted if for no other reason than that, in this maelstrom of conceptualizations, the radicality of free-associative praxis is eclipsed or lost.
On the murmuring of what is otherwise than textuality
It is an acutely paradoxical commentary on the history of psychoanalysis that the notion of the repressed unconscious as being a text that is other than, yet hidden by, that of consciousness and the preconscious has held such sway over theoriz-ing after Freud. Yet it is actually quite unsustainable. For example, it fails to explain why such a discovery should have required free-associative method, although indeed it explains why so many of those who claim to be Freud’s successors have demoted or abandoned this method. If the individual is indeed composed of multiple texts, then it would seem that the relation between them is conceived as one of translatability, and the subject’s relation to them could almost entirely be conceptualized in terms of attentionality (that of attending to one and not the other at various points in time and for various internally motivated or circum-stantial reasons), as well as the conscious willingness to listen to and acknowledge oneself translatively. This is how Sartre read Freud’s discovery, leading him—
understandably—to condemn the Freudian unconscious as a matter of “bad faith”
Textual analysis and the dogma of interpretation 55
(mauvaise foi). By this, Sartre meant that all Freud had discovered was the individual’s failure to “own up to” narratives that are being disowned by self-consciousness.
In this Sartre merely assumed and reasserted prerogatives of an agency that Freud had already shown to be inherently and ineliminably duplicitous or contradictorious.
Those sorts of existential arguments rest on a failure to appreciate the radicality of the free-associative method and the way in which it opens us to an unconscious profoundly different from that envisaged by pre-Freudian philosophy (the unconscious exemplified by writers such as Schopenhauer). Free-associative praxis opens us to an unconscious of energy rather than textuality, and, more disturbingly, to an unconscious that, unlike that of Romantic philosophy (identified with thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), is far from the harmonious substrate of representational consciousness. Rather, the repressed unconscious is in a contradictorious relation with the self-consciousness it produces.
In the vignettes introduced in the previous chapter, there are perhaps three intimations of, so to speak, an anti-textual unconscious. That is, an energy that disrupts the law and order of what I have elsewhere called the narratological imperative.64Again, it is to be emphasized that these are intimative, rather than evidentiary. The caution about the limitations and distortions of this sort of depiction of free-associative discourse must again be emphasized. These three intimations can be mentioned now in the context of the first vignette, and their significance developed in the chapters that follow.
The vignettes aid us in raising a question: what impels the shift from one association to the next? Each vignette simultaneously reveals and conceals a meaning other than itself. That these shifts can be logically and rhetorically specified in relation to a narrative that I have called the root proposition does not address the impetus for such shifting. In these transitions, which disrupt the law and order of ordinary “making sense,” something is intimated that seems extra -ordinarily and enigmatically otherwise than the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules and regulations of the narratological imperative. This is not merely a matter of wish-fulfillment in a sense that might accommodate Brentano’s notion of intentionality (which echoes through post-Husserlian phenomenology). Rather, it seems to be the obstreperous momentum of desire that shakes up, yet cannot be captured by, representationality.65
The vignette provides us with a second hint of a current deeper and different from the text of the root proposition, and from the mere transformation of representational forms from one to the next in the free-associative sequence. Here we might consider the thread of the Bs—the bar to which my patient fled from the anger of this son, the Bar Mitzvah for which the Rabbi tutored him, and the Bosum Buddies walking in luscious countryside, one of whom appears to be Barnaby B Barratt. This is surely an example of, so to speak, an extraordinary and enigmatic energy that attaches itself to a signifier, the meaningfulness of which is entirely extraneous to the manifest text, and indeed to that other text that I have called
the root proposition. Yet this very process hints at a momentum of energy that eludes textual analysis—an erotic bodilyness that pervades both the course of associative thinking–speaking and what has been called the “psychoanalytic field,”
the connectedness of patient and psychoanalyst.66
To take this further and offer a third suggestion as to what is intimated in the flow of associative discourse, let us note how the vignettes point to something extraordinary and enigmatic about what is routinely called transference. It is surely facile to specify my male patient’s transference as simply as can be discussed in formulations such as “If I become angry with the other, my psychoanalyst, he will abandon or reject me,” or for my female patient, “(I fear that) I wish to damage the other’s (my psychoanalyst’s) penis.” To be sure such dimensions of the interpersonal relationship and the undertow they have for the patient are important, and their explication may be therapeutic. Yet our understanding of transference has to go deeper than that, and to be considered in a different register—namely, that of an intricately, intensely, and deeply shared flow of erotic sensibility.
With the male patient, for example, we have intimations of an otherwise current that wells up in the unseemly momentum from the Titanic to the Bosum Buddies, via the story of the son (and we need to remember how anticipation of a father’s death is heralded by the vitality of a son) and the allusion to the actual death-of-the-father.67Here we must refrain from the temptations of textual analysis, in order to appreciate the currents of energy that are intimated. Despite being framed as a hostile jibe at his psychoanalyst (“you’re always harping on about our relationship, as if it has to do with absolutely everything, including the sinking of the Titanic”), the watery deep calls upon the sensuality of union in the limitlessness of death.68
“Bosum Buddies,” with all its homoerotic resonance, casts the couple into a union that is slightly differently nuanced, with “luscious countryside” evocative of a certain sort of femininity and the maternal body (as a “third term”). The image also holds death perhaps in abeyance by the form of dreamwork which manifests an endless presentness (into which extraordinary and enigmatic messages have intruded).
One way to consider these murmurings of a meaningfulness that is otherwise than textuality is not only to consider the significance of “thing-presentations” that cannot be translated into the representationality of self-consciousness, but also to understand such murmurings as the “unfathomable navel” that animates the lived experience of the subject’s discourse. As is well known, Freud said about dreams that each one has “at least one locus at which it is unfathomable, like a navel, a passage through which its meaningfulness is connected to the unknown” (and unknowable . . . mindestens eine Stelle, an welcher er unergründlich ist, gleichsam einen Nabel, durch den er mit dem Unerkannten zusammenhängt). The imagery of a navel also suggests quite graphically how this passage might point back, through the traces of erotic embodied experience, to an unknown and unknowable originary, an arche from which life began (requiring an anarchic method to appreciate). Such an insight cannot pertain exclusively to the textuality of dreams; it must surely be relevant to the entire discourse of self-consciousness. Moreover, Freud’s analogy to the navel
Textual analysis and the dogma of interpretation 57
is profoundly illuminating, indeed brilliant. This umbilical scar intimates a con -nection of which we cannot speak—an erotically embodied, life-giving con-nection that antedates the formation of our subjectivity.69
Preliminary conclusion
Free-associative discourse is, of course, compliant with the rules and regulations of representationality. The passage from one association to the next “makes sense”—or, more precisely, can “be made sense of ” retrodictively. But to rest with this reassurance is to miss the radicality of psychoanalysis. It is to miss the healing involved precisely in the “disassociative” dimension of free-association, wherein lies its derepressive impact (I will later return to this point). In short, to cling to the comforting supposition—that everything in psychic life can sooner or later be represented and thus understood—which is the fundamental dogma of interpretation, is to fail to appreciate the profound significance of free-associative discourse. Such dogma leads to a “model of the mind” that establishes the unconscious as if it were a place (and as if thoughts, feelings, and images were substantive entities that might populate it, or that might return to the domain of consciousness and the preconscious). Such models depict the unconscious as if it were a text hidden by, yet partially detectable or discernible through, the domain of representationality, and thus potentially translatable into conscious representation.
Admittedly, Freud used such spatial and substantial allegories (from the elaboration of the topography to his 1925 discussion of the “mystic writing-pad”), but such heuristic usages in the promulgation of metapsychology have distracted us from the radicality of his own discoveries.
Yes! The passage of free-associative discourse is compliant with the law and order of representationality, but it also perpetually bears the mark—the wounding, if you will—of something otherwise than representation. The method opens us to the intimations of a seemingly chaotic or desirous energy that prohibits the fulmination or totalization of any and every effort to “make sense.” Freud’s revolution is thus to demonstrate, by this method, that we cannot “bend the heavens to our will”—Flectere si nequeo superos, as the first phrase in Freud’s epigraph to his Traumdeutung tells us. For this is an energy that intervenes upon the transitions between representations, scarring their formation with its disruptive insistence and ineluctable persistence, and hinting perpetually at its erotic status as the brio of life itself. Thus, the experience of free-associative praxis opens us to the necessity of stirring up the underworld.