“It is an open secret that sexuality-once the sine qua non of psychoanalysis-is no longer foundational to psychoanalytic theory and practice.33 The three empirical pillars of contemporary psychoanalysis-infant development research, affect regulation, and attachment theory-testify to this growing neglect of sexuality. All three tend to imagine an asexual infant, and a de-libidinized attachment between caretaker and infant.34 By and large, the imperatives for bonding and affect regulation have replaced Oedipal conflicts and pre-Oedipal desires as the principal explanatory tools in psychoanalytic clinical theory..it is now more likely that sexuality will be thought of as a disguise for other, more fundamental, non-sexual dilemmas of self structure and personality.35 It is the traumatized faces of Harlow's monkeys more than the sexual fantasies of little Hans or Fritz that have come to guide contemporary practice” (161)
Why this disarticulation of sexuality from contemporary psychoanalysis?
"Without a substantial engagement with the anti-foundationalism of critical theories of sexuality, soma, and affectivity, neuropsychoanalysis will become another orthodoxy. "
Does anti-foundationalism mean finding an origin story in biology?
My interdisciplinary constitution screamed through most of this piece, which was both exciting and frustrating as a fan of Wilson's other work.
Nearly every page had at least one, usually more, comments in the margins, crying, "This is evolutionary psychology...Yes, this is literally what evolutionary psychology posits...Why aren't you citing Derrida's Sign & Play, différance? Where are the references to Deleuze, lines of flight and the plane of consistency, the body without organs? I know she knows these guys!" What about Cull's differential presence as the encounter of difference, "forcing thought through rupture, rather than communicating meanings through sameness" published two years prior? (Cull, 2009, How Do You Make Yourself a Theater Without Organs?).
Why aren't people reading outside their field? One good Buss or Kenrick/Schaller/Neuberg article could have substantiated the entire discussion of the link between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.
I also don't understand why she uses the term 'incompatibilities' when referring to neuroscience and psychoanalysis - this is a rather dualistic, dichotomous, exclusive way of thinking of these two sciences. Are they really incompatible if they are ultimately combinable in the new way she proposes? What exactly is incompatible between them? What is wrong with a core compatibility between them?
So, a question for Mike, am I reading Wilson the way I initially read Derrida? Critiquing and (dis)rearticulating others but not really saying anything new? Is that the point? Am I reacting to the exact intent of the writing, to make me mad about what I thought I already knew?! Ha.
So much of this dialogue mirrors the conceptual un-framework of A Thousand Plateaus, she is clearly in agreement with much of those concepts but I just don't understand how she is saying anything different or new:
And is evocative of Lacan (obviously):
I neglected to write about this in my Hewitson annotations, but the discussion of those LoF type moments - "small, discreet failures and compromise formations (garbled words, slip-ups, contradictory ideas, and so on) that emerge in what Laplanche calls certain 'load-bearing points'" - really grabbed me as well. I think because this is essentially what I look for in my everyday interactions with others as well as subjects of my anthropological and research interests. The Freudian slips, if you will, that allow, for a split second, a glimpse behind the facade of composure and intentionality most individuals attempt to express. These slips, garbles, lines of flight, load-bearing points, what have you, are the most interesting moments, the ones in which the unconscious slips through and reminds us that despite our attempts, meaning is not fixed, thought is not exact.
I did enjoy the bottom of 163:
Which seems to track with the Hewitson's LaPlanche-Lacan-Freud combinatorial conclusions about the distinct (un)reality of the unconscious.
Wilson's final thought was, in my opinion, actually quite delicious:
For this articulation, I can give Wilson a higher mark. This feels like a new interpretation of the plane of consistency, a different way of imagining the opposite of différance or lines of flight. But also more or less confirmation bias, no? The more we identify 'things' with 'things' we were looking for or already believe, 'things' which fit the narrative we are trying to assert, the less we actually know, discover, progress, or can say is true.
I arrived at the end of this article with a distinct feeling of "Totally, yes, this seems like a good synthesis of the three major psychoanalytic dialectics being juxtaposed." AND, I found myself thinking, BUT, would this track across other cultures, types of ability, cognitive developments, etc.?
Both Wilson and Hewitson discuss the unconscious as processes and systems of processes and entanglements and engagements and of things which don't simply add on top of one another but combine and synthesize into entirely new realities/sciences/dialectics. This makes sense in the language we share, but I can't help thinking about how this would translate (or more likely not translate) into differently arranged cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and cultural systems.
For example, the idea of consciousness as topographical or economic, place-based or exchange-based, may not work in cultures which see place in an entirely different fashion, e.g. as parts of their shared biology (water as part of the same 'us' our bodies and trees and spirits occupy). Or in which the conception of 'things' is continuous, rather than discrete, such as the Pirãha tribe who treat both color and number as continuous, relational concepts which cannot be separated or disarticulated as a red scarf or three horses. Similarly, would this model work for someone who is blind and dreams without image, or someone who is deaf and dreams without sound? For infants or people with developmental differences who operate without language, with or without a sense of separateness of 'I' from 'Other', or in a culture in which meanings are rigidly fixed, where no meaning is ever fixed and in which every thing is relational already?
Fundamentally, I think I agree with the final (dis/re)articulation of the unconscious in Hewitson's five clear arguments, especially to the nature of the unconscious as a different reality, subject to its own rules and writing, but I simply don't agree with the lack of intentionality. I think both of these articles would have benefitted from the discussion of affect and sensation - of how one feels sensationally and emotively about a dream, how the dream itself felt. So many of my own dreams go the same way - mazelike buildings, trying to accomplish something but coming up against roadblocks every few steps, grand architecture to explore - but the feeling tends to tell me more about the dream than the content. Sometimes these journeys feel exploratory, evocative of awe, and sometimes they are stressful, sometimes frightening, occasionally resulting in a cold sweat, bolt out of bed awakening. This, to me, says more about the dream than whether I was navigating a literal maze, a maze of people, a confusing building, etc.
This brings me back to the question of how people of other types of cognition and culture might experience the unconconscious, and whether more could be determined from the feeling of dreams than from the interpretation of the signifier-signified process/relationship/system.
"I shall propose, first, to replace "either/or" with "both/and," that is, with a Third" (32)
"In a power-driven, myopic refusal of interdisciplinary challenge, it validates only two kinds of speech, the dualism of the biological and the psychical. It discredits, in other words, the third term, the social (and by extension the political) which nevertheless slips in on the normative or, what is in effect the same thing, the universalizing. But why shouldn't psychoanalysis answer to social theory?" (41)
"This contradiction generates a tension between two impulses: to improve women's lives and to change them altogether... This contradiction does not trouble me, for it constitutes the problem of digging up the ground beneath your feet, a problem encountered in any situation of change, whether social or psychological" (46)
I found these three ideas generative, especially in conversation with paradox as "may be how we presently understand contradiction (Benjamin, 1994, 93)": the Third, both/and, and the problem of digging up the ground beneath your feet.
These three ideas remind of Peircean semiotics, specifically Thirdness and the interpretant. Right now the affinity is faint so I need to spend more time connecting and organizing my thoughts.
Freud “specifies that the ideational representative is 'a succession of inscriptions and signs' - not signs o/a drive, but signs by means of which the drive is delegated a place in the unconscious. The energetic component of the drive and its ideational representative become 'fixed' together during the act of primal repression which constitutes the unconscious as a system distinct from consciousness, separated by a barrier of censorship.”
“we have reason to assume that there is & primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance to the conscious. With this, a fixation is established, the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it”
-this seems to signal some morality or ethical repression; or at least a time with history and past that can strengthen by way of imprinting on the unconscious
“The drive is thus bound up with representation or signification as soon as it is capable of psychical registration. Indeed this is its condition of psychical existence. The drive can be lived or experienced only in so far as it acquires a significance.”
-aligning the drive with a sense of meaning
“A stimulus from the external world impinges on nerve endings at the surface of a sense organ. To become conscious, this impulse must undergo a number of inscriptions and transformations. The unconscious resides in that gap or instant between a perception's impingement on the nervous system and its (deferred) conscious registration.”
“the elements which stand out as the principal components of the , manifest content of the dream are far from playing the same part J in the dream-thoughts. And, as a corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts - its content has different elements as its central point”
“As thoughts, wishes, and associations are condensed into singular dream images, the dream is always capable of being situated within the subject's associative chains and memories, thus providing the possibility of interpretation”
-discusses how Freud takes a different approach---one that is more grounded on subjectivity and cryptic clues
“How the dream work utilizes the unchanging unconscious wish and the subject's recent and past experiences to form the dream's manifest appearance is the really interesting and individualizing psychological question. It displaces the intensity and meaning of the unconscious elements onto their conscious delegates, and links the manifest dream-images, through multiple connections, to a number of associated terms in the preconscious and the unconscious.”
-need to remember that the dream report, rather than the actual dream, is the focus on psychoanalysis; it’s not a narrative, which means the entire plot and story does not need to be respected or given equal importance
“Latent dream-thoughts are highly rational, intelligible, ;preconscious thoughts. These are in sharp contrast to the associative chains, which are chaotic, apparently random and linked by 'superficial' connections. Freud mentions that relations of assonance, ambiguity, contiguity, similarity, puns, and jokes are all used in recalling associative links.”
“to explain the functioning of the unconscious. If the 'unconscious is structured like a language', then it is plausible to claim that linguistics and semiotics are necessary for an understanding of the unconscious.”
-The signifer is the material component and the signified is the conceptual/meaningful component, and together, they are the bases of all languages and representational systems; can only be described as what they are not; “'A psychoanalyst should find it easy enough to grasp the fundamental distinction between signifier and signified and to begin to use the two non-overlapping networks of relations that they organize”
“A psychoanalyst is uniquely uninterested in meaning per se, but must instead address the fluid ambiguity and multiple meaning of terms, the duplicity of a language that allows itself to be used in indeterminate, open-ended contexts with several meanings at once”
“He equates metonymy with the process of displacement, that 'veering off of signification' which primary processes utilize to evade the censor. The metaphoric process, the submersion of one term underneath another, provides the general model for the unconscious symptom: the term having 'fallen below the bar', becomes repressed, and the signifier which replaces it or becomes its symptom.”
-Metaphor or condensation freezes and privileges repressed signifiers, leaving them active but confined to their own realm.
Freud posits four key characteristics of the primary processes and the unconscious system they serve:
-the unconscious admits no degrees of certainty or doubt, no forms of contradiction, no logical, grammatical, or causal relations. All that exists in the unconscious are positive contents, signifiers, cathected with more or less affect. Because they are usually visual in form, they can only be regarded as positive rather than differential terms, terms with no relations between them;
- unconscious processes are not temporally regulated - they are not arranged chronologically, and they are not subject to the normal processes of decay and fading. The unconscious is a permanent, unchanging, system whose dynamic comes from its individual contents striving for consciousness. The unconscious content has no index of age, and always functions as a current force;
- unconscious processes are regulated by the pleasure principle, not the reality principle. Unconscious ideas or signifiers have no 'indications of reality' which could guarantee a distinction between whats the product of fantasy, and what is an effect of reality; and
- the libidinal energies of the unconscious, although diminished through the processes of repression, have a relatively free mobility compared to preconscious/conscious wishes. By means of metaphor/condensation and metonymy/displacement, the libidinal cathexes of an unconscious idea can be shifted onto expedient substitutes, and through them it can gain some pleasure in compromise form through evasion of the censor.
-Lacan elaborates by discussing how the primary processes by which the unconscious acquires a delegate in conscious life are metaphor and metonymy, therefore, even if the unconscious signifiers are primarily visual, they are treated as if they were verbal à They can only be interpreted when positioned in a verbal context by means of the chains of association; psychoanalysis is indeed 'the talking cure'. Its only techniques are linguistic or literary (listening, deciphering), its object is nothing but discourse, its questions are directed to the location of enunciation - who speaks in and as the subject? And the processes of 'cure\ where this occurs, are the result of the positioning of symptoms, and indeed the subject's desire, within discourse. Psychoanalysis has no aim, object, procedures, or techniques other than those given by language
“at the very end of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that “Whether we can attribute reality to unconscious wishes I cannot say”
“a descriptive unconscious from the unconscious as he saw it – a separate system that has a distinct character and plays by different rules. For Freud, we are not talking about a non-conscious, like another version of consciousness, or even a sub-conscious at one level ‘deeper’ than conscious, but something distinct in itself, as if on a second stage or in another scene”
-have to look for the unconscious as a system that operates on the connection between the conscious and unconscious
“This ‘first text’ is just the material that unconscious processes work on. But it is the distortion itself that we are interested in, what happens between the first and second texts.”
-focus on the interaction between the two
Freud hypothesised a psychical dynamism involving censorship, repression, and compromise formation that takes place between a wish on one hand, and a defence against the wish on the other.
“There is a single inscription of the thought – it exists in either the conscious or the unconscious, and whether it is one or the other depends on the level of (libidinal) investment (what Strachey translates as ‘cathexis’) it receives, as if a different light were being shone on the same thing. This he calls the functional hypothesis”
-advantage in that it explains how something becomes in the first place; however, does not explain how the unconscious idea stays in place; because wouldn’t repressed unconscious thoughts constantly be pushed into the consciousness?
“double inscription of the thought – the same thought exists in both the conscious and the unconscious systems at the same time, so there is a qualitative difference between the two systems. The ‘two texts’ in question therefore are not just the manifest content of the dream and the latent thoughts, but a double inscription of the same thought. This he calls the topographical hypothesis.”
-advantage in that it may explain how we can still accept an idea consciously and also recognize its unconscious status, however, it doesn’t account for why one cannot shift an unconscious complex just by pointing it out and drawing attention to it.
“Politzer wanted to emphasise the individual, personal, and subjective status of the unconscious. In this sense his was a fundamentally phenomenological position. The unconscious, for him, expresses a first-person drama via a “personal dialectic…Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud’s impersonal characterisation of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology, and he thought Freud’s metapsychology had created just that.”
“For the rest of his career, as Politzer saw it, Freud pursued this path: the psyche was the battleground of warring forces or agencies like the ego and the id; the censorship operated like a nightwatchman or a border guard between the unconscious and consciousness; life and death drives vied over civilisation itself just as they did within the individual, and so forth.”
-believed there was no disguise, just people expressing the same thing in different ways: instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn’t derivative of anything – like an interplay of psychical forces in conflict, as Freud thought. It is simply the same idea expressed differently.
We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them
-still emphasizes the intentionality of the unconscious as a driving force;
Instead of looking for alternative modes of ‘expression’ of a fully conscious idea, the notion of a ‘dynamic’ unconscious means that the output of the unconscious will bear the mark of its processes. Interpretation therefore involves interpolating the manifest text as if the unconscious were a kind of lost discourse
“… The unconscious would not be a ‘content’, but a ‘force, and the dream would be nothing but the treatment of preconscious thoughts in the mode of unconscious functioning”
-Instead of an unconscious that articulates a wish in the first person, Lacon sees the unconscious as a series of processes that operate independently of the subject; things change depending on the context its placed in
“There may be a totally different inscription of the same signifier in consciousness and in the unconscious. These inscriptions are the same on the plane of the signifier, but they are, on the other hand, different in that they turn their battery to occupy topographically different places. That a certain signifying formation can be at one level or another is precisely what will ensure it a different import in the chain as a whole”
"an opposing conceptual framework: psychology versus culture, private versus public, self versus society, individual versus collective, mind versus context, and so forth" (374)
"Because the viewpoint I am describing rejects persisting Cartesian dichotomies between inner and outer, mind and context, it is sometimes referred to as "post-Cartesian" or "contextual," and is indebted to the hermeneutic philosophical tradition (cf. Cushman, 1995; Frie, in press)" (390)
Something that struck me from this reading was the opposition of "mind v. context." As Frie writes: "The notion of the individual mind, free from its sociocultural or historical contexts, is a creation of modern individualism (Frie, 2011a)" (390). Frankly, I never considered this opposition before, but thanks to Frie's text, it now appears obvious how and when (some) psychoanalysts and anthropologists have operationalized and mobilized around "mind v. context." Within the "opposing conceptual framework" as described by Frie, mind becomes interlocked with "psychology," "private," "self," and "individual" whereas "context becomes interlocked with "culture," "public," "society," and "collective" (and "so forth"). I would like to examine this binary more closely, paying attention to how/when/where it emerged and became naturalized as an opposition. Frie frames this as "Cartesian dichotomies," but I wonder what alternative genealogies underly "mind v. context."
"Sapir first met Harry Stack Sullivan at the University of Chicago in 1926. Their meeting occurred shortly after the death of Sapir's wife, who had long suffered from mental illness. Sapir requested Sullivan's counsel and their initial interaction quickly emerged into a productive friendship and collaboration that would lost until Sapir's early death in 1939. It was through Sapir that Sullivan encountered the work of the Chicago School of Sociology, which would strongly influence the development of interpersonal theory... As Regina Darnell suggests, this led to a remarkable cross-fertilization of ideas: "Sullivan's interpersonal approach stimulated Sapir's emerging emphasis on society as an intermediary between the individual and culture... Psychiatry could teach anthropologists how to do justice to the individual in concrete cases through life histories; anthropology could teach psychiatrists how to place the individual in a cultural world" (Darnell, 1986, p. 162)" (378)
I hope to read Sapir and Sullivan side-by-side with the new knowledge of their collaboration. Frie cites the "Chicago School of Sociology" as an influence on the development of interpersonal theory -- I wonder what specific role George Herbert Mead's theory of self played in this story.
"By contrast, Erich Fromm's writings convey no ambiguity with respect to the negative effects of social adaptation. Indeed, Fromm equates social conformism with a kind of neurotic relatedness that can and must be resisted. For Fromm, it is precisely the process of revealing and resisting social and cultural deformations of selfhood that is relevant to the maintenance of emotional well-being. Whereas Sullivan views human development in a social interactional context, Fromm's critique of social mores and institutions derives from his Marxist background and his work as a founding member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, more commonly known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory" (383)
I returned to this passage after our discussion in class about adaptationism and the problem of how systems of domination co-opt methods of resistance in order to further dominate. Is Frie's account of Fromm: social life or context is "a done deal," a prison from which the individual needs to discover their genuine self (or at least the ways in which their self has been deformed) in order to escape? Is conformity (or systems of power/domination) always waiting to chew up and swallow the individual? The language of deformity hints at an already existing individual with a genuine self separate/separable from their sociocultural context. Are there ways out of this imaginary that are not individualist (Fromm's issue) or adaptationist (Sullivan's issue), "mind v. context? I think Frie discusses Fromm's "way out" here:
"Society and the individual are not "opposite" to each other. Society is nothing but living, concrete individuals, and the individual exists only as a social human being. His individual life practice is necessarily determined by the life practice of his society or class and, in the last analysis, by the manner of production of his society, that is, how this society produces, how it is organized to satisfy the needs of its members. The differences in the manner of production and life of various societies or classes lead to the development of different character structures typical of the particular society. Various societies differ from each other not only in differences in manner of production and social and political organization but also in that their people exhibit a typical character structure despite all individual differences. We shall call this "the socially typical character," (Fromm, 1937/2010, p. 58, emphasis in original)" (384)
To which I would add Sullivan's keen insight, also mentioned by Frie:
"Sullivan emphasized the "conflicting influences" within cultures that undermined any "common central principle" (Sullivan, 1950/1965c, p. 208)" (385)