The Freudian Spaceship – session 3 Freud with notes

Here we continue to look at our teachers in the project, each of whom contributes to the development of a Fanonian Schizoanalysis. The notes from the session are below the video.

The Earth As A Freudian Spaceship: Session 3, 7th June 2021 – On Freud

Freud as our teacher

What can we learn from Freud?  As I mentioned in Session 2, when I talk of ‘learning from’ it’s not a simple matter of grabbing an argument from some thinker, of mining some seam of cleverness, it instead involves reflecting on how the person speaks to us, what it is that calls to us from the work.  This often involves noticing how a particular phrase, formula or model grabs our attention.

Close reading is an important skill in the practice of philosophy, slow reading and close reading involve paying attention to the way the philosopher has written, even to how they might inadvertently import unthought elements into their work.  It’s a crucial form of philosophical interpretation, but it aims at understanding the author and this aim is assumed to be neutral.  Whilst close reading is valuable and important, this ‘neutrality assumption’ is a booby trap.  It assumes that there’s some clean ‘truth’ that we can access. Moreover, it assumes that this aim of understanding the author is unproblematic, that it’s right.

Why is this a booby trap?  As we pursue the thought of a philosopher, as we try to carefully understand, it’s too easy to forget the bodies involved.  Our bodies.  It’s too easy to take on the persona of ‘the intellectual’, ‘the one who knows’ or ‘the one who pursues the truth’.  What’s forgotten are the bodies.  Why this text?  Why this author?  Why this particular thought?  The responsive bodies, the organising bodies, the ancestral bodies, these are too easily forgotten as we slip into the comfortable neutrality of ‘the intellect at work’.

Something here speaks to how we understand the process within which we are working when we try to understand something.  These processes of understanding, of learning, are caught up in the institutions within which they are carried out – the University and the School for example.  They are also caught up in the processes that prompt the desire to learn.

This “desire to learn”, what if it is a desire to quieten some trouble?  If everything is easy, everything works, nothing troubles us, then what would prompt us?  Put aside the purely functional (I need to get X qualification to get Y job) and consider instead the desire to learn as a response to the problems of living.  Something doesn’t work, doesn’t feel right, seems hidden or obscure and we want to know – or, more, we want to quieten the disquiet we feel.  Our bodies need a way of dealing with the disquiet, of settling the tension, of restoring calm.  One way is to learn, to have a moment of insight, or clarity – a moment of understanding.  This settles us for the night, tucks us in, gives us a sense of empowerment – “at least I know why it’s happening, at least I know what is happening.  Aha!  Yes, of course!  That makes perfect sense!”  We understand, and we no longer need to learn.  We have settled things.  We have quietened the chatter in our heads and simplified the tensions.

The point here is not to denigrate understanding or to deny the effectiveness of learning, rather it’s to point to an element of the process that is forgotten, which is that it’s hard to learn if it involves an increase in discomfort, if it makes us feel less secure, less certain, less sure of ourselves.  And all learning involves a degree of discomfort because it must involve a movement from ‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing’ (or perhaps, from feeling like we don’t know to feeling like we do know).  To learn is to encounter the fact that we didn’t know, and this is perhaps fine in the abstract, but it might be a little less comfortable if what we are learning about implicates our ignorance.  If we learn, for example, that a way of speaking or acting was harmful.  We see this problem playing out at the moment in the discussions around racism.  Such discussions aren’t neutral, they involve us, they implicate us, they touch us.  So we find that concepts such as ‘white fragility’ arise as ways of trying to articulate this implicated relationship the participants have in the conversation about race. 

When Fanon speaks of the ‘epidermalisation’ of a structure, he is pointing to this implication of the body, to its involvement.  The skin is a point of contact with structure or system or process.   

Just to remind ourselves, this is Fanon from the Introduction to Black Skins, White Masks –

The analysis we are undertaking is psychological. It remains, nevertheless, evident that for us the true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities.  The inferiority complex can be ascribed to a double process: First, economic.  Then, internalisation or rather epidermalisation of this inferiority.

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Two things call to me in this passage, two things speak to me, prompt me to want to learn.  The first, perhaps, is the word ‘epidermalisation’.  It crystallises something, it sits there waiting to be heard, to talk some more.  The second came later and it’s the word ‘brutal’.  “The true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities.”  A brutal truth, a brutal awareness.  Not easy, not comfortable, not an easy truth but a brutal truth.  Something here calls us to notice the bodies involved, the experiences involved, the difficulty involved.  Avoiding that awareness seems, in this context, quite understandable.  Why put yourself through such a process?  For Fanon, it seems the claim is that only the brutal can be a path to true disalienation.  It’s important, I think, not to hear this as some sort of humblebrag. It’s not because it’s somehow a higher form of awareness (look at me, how strong I am!).  Rather it’s because it’s only through the body, only in going through the body that the black man (to use Fanon’s phrase) can encounter this process of racism, “the social and economic realities”.

It’s here that Freud comes in.  Arrogantly puffing on the cigars that were to destroy him, he engages precisely in such an attempt at ‘brutal awareness’.  His breakthrough work, The Interpretation of Dreams, is a form of self-analysis.  His dreams, his desires, his self is what fascinates him, something that is made obvious in the letters he writes to Wilhelm Fliess as he writes the Interpretation.  Freud brings the body to bear on the self and in doing so produces a huge machinery of concepts, a huge cacophony of ideas that constantly seem to squirm and shift, all in the service of the attempt at brutal awareness. 

(ASIDE:  Or perhaps, in the service of an attempt to present as though engaged in an act of brutal awareness.  Such a form of presentation – ‘only I can face up to the truth of human desire and sexuality – might well produce both insights and obfuscations.  In a fascinating reading of Freud’s Interpretation called Freud’s Wishful Dream Book, Alexander Welsh carefully, and slowly, reads the Interpretation as embodying Freud’s ambition in a ‘wish to know’.  Welsh analyses and tracks the body in the text, its pleasures.  “Theory”, Welsh suggests, “sometimes takes refuge in knowingness, akin to the knowingness that is a source of so much pleasure in the dream book” (p131).  A page later Welsh remarks, after noting the sweeping nature of Freud’s claims, specifically the claim that “every dream is the fulfilment of a wish” that it is “exhilarating to make sweeping claims, and the immediate payoff may be credit for a universal theory of dreams, the discovery of a scientific law” (p132).  This notices how the ideas are not neutral, not clean, but are instead dirty thoughts, implicated in the body and its desires, pleasures and dynamics.)

Reading Freud is exasperating.  He makes things slide, squirm and shift as he brings the body to bear on consciousness.  Crucially ( a word I noticed I was using a little like a ‘tick’ in the last session when I reviewed it) – crucially, Freud multiplies the self.  No longer is there a singularity here, no longer a simple point, but now we have these multiple moments, each struggling with each other.

A quick review of some basic Freudian concepts, just a naming.  The Id, the Ego and the Superego.  Manifest and Latent content.  Repression, both primary and secondary.  Primary and Secondary process.  Cathexis, abreaction, transference, sublimation, displacement and condensation.  There’s this whole panoply of terms and concepts in Freud, one that is some widespread as to produce a whole system, a language of psychoanalysis.  One of the most interesting texts about Freud is in fact called just that, The language of psychoanalysis.  Written in the 1970s by Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis, it presents at first sight as a kind of ‘dictionary’, with entries for all the ‘basic’ concepts from Freud, each entry naming a concept and giving a little account of it.  As you begin to read you realise that there are these little asterisk marks, these little stars after some words, each star indicating another Freudian concept, another entry in the text.  It’s as though it’s a hyperlinked text and you can begin anywhere and track these threads of connection between one concept and another.  A beautiful book, one to get lost in, but one that makes it even clearer that with Freud you either buy into it, or you don’t.  There’s no royal road to Freudianism, rather there’s this curious machinery of concepts that appears to call to some, and repel others. 

I don’t buy it, not fully, not to the extent that I could live in the Freudian space, but at the same time, there’s this compelling sense of a new kind of narrative of the self, a new kind of way of encountering the human, the body, the mind.  As I said, the primary component of this new narrative is the multiplication of the self, how Freud organises the self as a complex interplay between different forces and drives, rooted in the body, expressed in consciousness.  As part of this interplay of forces, we encounter the difficulty of a neutral knowledge, but also – crucially – the engagement with an insight.

In the last session, one of the things I was pointing to at the end was those conceptual systems, such as those of Fanon or Marx, which present us with structures that constitute oppressions – the colonised, the racialised, the proletarianised for example – which, to the extent that they explain the oppression, produce an impersonal imposition.  At the same time, and this is far clearer in many ways in Fanon, the affirmation of life in the face of such impersonal systems is just as much as part of the conceptual system.  My interest, in this situation, was in how we might think of these moments of the affirmation of life and how we might nurture, cultivate, sustain such moments.  The question becomes less one of understanding and moves to the question of survival – how can we survive?  How can we sustain the moments of breakthrough that we encounter in the affirmation of life to produce a breakdown in the systems that alienate?  The lessons of psychoanalysis are perhaps to be found less in the squirming systems, from Freud to Klein or Lacan, than in these engaged attempts to form breakthroughs, to sustain breakthroughs.  Put bluntly, what makes psychoanalysis interesting is its purpose, which is not one of knowing, but one of changing a constituted reality. 

Psychoanalysis would be worthless as a theory without psychoanalysis as a practice. (And this will apply to both the revolutionary and the sorcerer as well, which is one of the reasons these three conceptual persona form part of the way we have been responding to the world).   What’s curious is that the practice would equally be worthless without the theory.  And yet there is no causal relation here, there’s not a mechanical movement from the theory to action.  It’s not like learning an engineering problem, where we – crudely speaking – might say something like the following – have a goal, conceive a solution, work out the strengths and weaknesses of a material with which you can build the solution and then test.  The more accurate my theory of, say, the properties of physical material and forces, the more accurate my initial building of a solution.  There is a test and refine loop, such that the practice can inform the theory, but fundamentally the theory is the ground of the practice.  In psychoanalysis, the relation is more like a marriage, a co-dependency, a co-constitution.  The theory might be complete bullshit in reality, but like a good story, does it engage the audience, does it enable the imagination to move, does it produce shifts in the bodies engaged.  Engineering or physics might require accuracy of the representation of the world, whereas psychoanalysis requires a workable relation – and in terms of our response to the world, the workable relation is more urgent than ever.

A closer look at Freud (just a start)

At this point, let’s look a little more closely at some of what Freud says.  I’m looking at the text, An outline of psychoanalysis.  This is something Freud writes in 1938, something he leaves unfinished and which is published in 1940, just after his death.  It’s not quite his last text but it’s close to it.  It presents as a codification of psychoanalysis.  It’s not a case history, nor is it one of the more fluid, slippery texts that Freud produces throughout his life, where there is a to and fro, a discussion of his ideas in which counter-arguments and difficulties are staged.  Rather this is a plain text, direct, straightforward, with the tone of the scientific biology from which Freud’s work arose and to which he always appeared to aspire.  It’s as though we are reading a textbook, a teaching aid or a creed.  Maybe, given the moment it’s produced, just as he’s dying from a horrendous cancer of the mouth brought on by the continual sucking on the cigars, he feels a need to stamp his mark, his standard, on the growing field of psychoanalysis.  The last word on the matter. 

Here is the opening of Chapter 2:

The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life.  This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs.  No such purpose as that of keeping itself alive or of protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id.  That is the business of the ego, which is also concerned with discovering the most favourable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account.  The super-ego may bring fresh needs to the fore, but its chief function remains the limitation of satisfactions.

The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts.  They represent the somatic demands upon mental life.  Though they are the ultimate cause of all activity, they are by nature conservative; the state, whatever it may be, which a living thing has reached, gives rise to a tendency to re-establish that state so soon as it has been abandoned. … (p5, OP, London 1949)

Even in this short description of the psychic apparatus, we can see these multiple forces, this multiplied self.  The four factors at play – Id, Ego, Super-Ego, External World; the so-called ‘principle of constancy’ that produces this ‘natural conservatism’ of the id; the relationship of control or struggle for dominance between the various elements of the psyche that ensues.  At the heart of it these ‘instincts’ (ASIDE: Trieb, drive, instincts – cf. Laplanche and Pontalis, Instinct (or Drive), p214).

One of the lines that speaks in this passage is this, speaking of the instincts – “they represent the somatic demands upon mental life”.  This, coming after those opening lines, that opening move in which the “true purpose” of the individual organism’s life is identified with the instincts of the id, and the ego is relegated to a kind of ‘negotatior’ with the external world, is a remarkable embodying of the kind of being that we are.  Think of this for a moment.  The ego, that thing we might say ‘is me’, where I say I and where I am conscious of myself, is nothing more than a mediator between my ‘true purpose’ and the world.  Immediately we let slip something like a paternal or parental function.  The ego is there to prevent my id from crashing and burning.  It’s not there to know, or to illuminate, but to protect.  The “ultimate cause of all activity”, the id, is like an idiot, in need of the protection of the conscious ego that can negotiate with the external world, protect me from myself.

This ‘self-protection’ dynamic is central to Freudianism and one of the things that’s at the root both of the interesting narratives of behaviours that it produces as well as its inherent conservatism and expulsion of joy.  You can almost see the whole relationship of a sensible adult protecting the wild child, crushing the child within under the boots of mediocre normality, urging conformity.  Stability. Caution. Conformity. Compliance.  Protection. These are the watchwords of the Freudian machinery, the watchwords of the Viennesse bourgeois.  This is the very model of domestication.

It becomes even clearer in a sense, this model of domestication, if we look a couple of pages earlier.  At the end of the first chapter we find the distinction between the ego and the super-ego.  The ego deals with the external world via the development of experience (memory), “avoiding excessive stimuli (through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and, finally, by learning to bring about appropriate modifications in the external world to its own advantage (through activity).  As regards internal events, in relation to the id, it performs that task by gaining control over the demands of the instincts…”.  This basic relationship of domestication is then complicated, according to Freud, because of the long childhood of the human, which leaves a kind of imprint or trace of the parents’ own mode of domesticating their child.  The ego is then in a constant struggle to domesticate the id in a way that is compatible with its own domestication by its parents.  This curious domestic drama, translated into a theoretical model of the psyche, seems almost transparently to reproduce the self-image of comfortable bourgeois family life.  However, after this little soap opera is played out there are two interesting moments.  The first suddenly displaces the family and places us back in the social, somewhere near to where Fanon would develop his concept of sociogenesis.  This is Freud:

The parents influence naturally includes not merely the personalities of the parents themselves but also the racial, national and family traditions handed on through them as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu which they represent.  (emphasis added, Freud, ibid, p4).

He goes on to note that, like the id, the super-ego must “represent the influence of the past”, whereas the ego is “principally determined by the individual’s own experience, that is to say by accidental and current events”.  The id and the super-ego stand, therefore, as the somatic and the social.  The ego lives at the border of these two constitutive moments, domesticating the animal into the social.  Interestingly the last move of this first chapter reinforces this curious sense of the real tension being between somatic and social factors.  Again, here is Freud:

This general pattern of a psychical apparatus may be supposed to apply equally to the higher animals which resemble man mentally.  A super-ego must be presumed present wherever, as in the case of man, there is a long period of dependence in childhood.  The assumption of a distinction between ego and id cannot be avoided.

Animal psychology has not yet taken in hand the interesting problem which is here presented. (ibid)

This last move is one of those things that once again speak.  The human-animal distinction, which would seem so central to psychoanalysis in many ways – the more so the more we emphasise language, as with Lacan perhaps – appears here to dissolve.  The psychic apparatus of id, ego and even super-ego are not human, but are here presented as parts of any ‘higher animal’.  Dolphins, whales, maybe the big cats, chimps and apes and even dogs maybe – minds proliferate well beyond the human. 

Putting this interesting moment aside for now, the other thing to note is this relationship of the id and the super-ego to ‘the past’.  It might seem obvious what is meant here, biological heredity and social tradition for example.  Yet what slips by too quickly is the fixed nature of this past.  It’s happened, it’s there, it’s not changeable – it’s a kind of necessity.  Note how the ego is the current lived experience, determined by “accidental and current events”.  In the last session I spoke about the tension between socialising nature and naturalising society and how, along this tension, we can find the problem of what, in the first session, I named as ‘the personification of process’.  Freud, in this moment, appears to be naturalising society.  He appears to be taking it as causal, but fixed, a ‘natural fact’.  This is in many ways the archetypal structure of the social, including of capitalism – the transformation of a contingency based on human choices and decisions into a natural fact immune to agency.  We can thus see here the importance of the specific way in which Fanon poses sociogeny when he places it into a causal relation and at the same time posits it as contingent and subject to change.

Even more briefly on Daniel Stern (and Marx)

Marx still lingers in the background here.  As I mentioned in the last session, his analysis of the social relations of labour, of how we work, is such that capitalism is described in terms of a machinery of forces, much in the same way that Freud describes a machinery of forces to explain the psyche.  In Marx’s case, however, the machine itself is central to the machinery of forces.  The three factors of the labour process – the work itself, the subject of work and the instruments of labour – are organised in a specific way within capitalism, understood a society of commodity production. 

Commodities are specific things, not just stuff made by people.  It names the type of objects produced, claims that the social relations these objects embody are different under capitalism than in other social structures.  Briefly, the commodity is thing that’s produced by work, but the work is not directed simply at producing something useful, or that someone needs.  It continues to have this element in it, what is called use-value, but it also has this other, stranger element, exchange-value.  Things are made to be sold. 

This rather simplified way of putting things marks a crucial shift in the dynamics of the machinery of the labour process.  It re-organises social relations.  In doing so it re-organises the human who does the work, transforming work from a practice grounded in satisfying needs and desires, to work structured and disciplined according to the logic of exchange value.  The ‘id’ of capitalism, the ‘driving force’, the “ultimate cause of all activity” to use Freud’s phrase, is the fact that this new arrangement found in the commodity enables the production of value, as if by magic.  This new value produced, ‘profit’, arises from the transformation of work into a commodity itself.  As Marx says,

“the specific use value which this commodity possesses [of being] a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.  This is the special service that the capitalist extracts from labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the ‘eternal laws’ of the exchange of commodities” (Capital, Vol 1, Ch.7, Section 2; p188 Lawrence and Wishart, 1977)

The capitalist doesn’t “pay the worker for their work” but instead purchases labour-power.  Capital captures the power of work and in doing so transforms it from being productive of life, to being productive of value, a value that is controlled by the capitalist.  Capitalism thus marks a radical shift in the control of the power of human work, human activity.  It is this capturing of control that we encounter as the alienation of labour. 

I bring forward this brief excursion back into Marx in order to notice two things.  First, that at the heart of Marx is an account of the radical transformation of social relations.  Capitalism is a specific social relation and is no more a natural fact.  He goes on to try and establish a theory of history, a general account of how social relations change over time, called historical materialism.  This is embodied in the phrase from the Communist Manifesto,  “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”  Maybe, maybe not.  The point is here not to buy into historical materialism, only to not the contingency of the social, that it’s not a natural fact, that it changes, quite radically.  Second, this emphasis on social relations and the different forms they can take also plays out in dealing with the psyche.  I just want to indicate one other model of the machinery of the mind, the way in which the psyche is formed in relation with the world, and that is the model of Daniel Stern.  I want to mention Sterns model because it is used by Felix Guattari, who I will be looking at in the next session.

Stern proposes four different forms of the self, each of which ‘layers’ upon the other.  Instead of a single narrative development, as in Freud, governed by a dynamic of domestication, Stern suggests a gradual complication of what it means to ‘have a self’.  These four layers are as follows:

• The sense of an emergent self, which forms from birth to age two months (continuity)
• The sense of a core self, which forms between the ages of two and six months (subjective perspective)
• The sense of a subjective self, which forms between seven and fifteen months (intersubjective)
• The sense of a verbal self, developing from 2 years onwards (language acquisition, abstraction and narration)

What’s interesting about Sterns model is that it gives a different way of thinking about the machinery of the mind.  In each new layer, more complex relations with the social world are available, yet each ‘layer’ remains and continues.

Stern develops this model in his book The interpersonal world of the infant and develops it further from this initial model in a revision where he adds two more layers.  At the moment what’s important is not the details of Sterns’ theories, which we can look at in more detail if we want to later.  What’s important is the way in which this model still places centrally the relation to the social but displaces the curious domestic drama of the taming of the id. What also matters, returning to the remarks at the beginning of todays session, is the way in which this model ‘speaks to us’.  

The complexification and multi-layered set of dynamics that Stern suggests are things that speak to us, more than much of the domestic dram of Freud.  It’s models like these that we pick up and run with when we begin to think in terms of one-to-one, group and community relations as ‘modes’ in which we encounter and respond to the world, something I mentioned in the first session and which is part of the second and third sections of the book.