Abstract
Relatively little has been written on the role of trauma in conceptions of the unconscious. This paper explores Freud’s conceptions of the unconscious, comparing his ideas with the original French notion of “double conscience” and exploring their implications for technique. Whereas Freud’s concept of the unconscious mainly depends upon a theory of internal drives, Ferenczi’s ascribed a central role to trauma, shifting the focus to the individual in the context of relationships. The comparison is illustrated with a case history.
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Notes
Alan Gregory (2003, p. 57) notes that in Coleridge, “The fancy is essential to the mind’s experience of itself as a subject within the subject-object relation…Like Medusa, it looks ‘death into everything’ so that the subject has experience of objects, distinct and at a distance, as it were, from its own subjectivity…Without the fancy “there would be no fixation, consequently, no distinct perception of conception”: consciousness would be a delirium… The fancy, then, corresponds to a preliminary stage of human cognition, that of the subject, whereas the imagination further constitutes the knower as “soul”…The soul perceives the “living being…thro the Body which is its Symbol and outward and visible sign” (p. 57).
The fascination with what lay beyond reason and logic in the world of Freud entailed also a fascination with power, as is clear, for example in the film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (used in the well-known book of Siegfried Kracauer, 1947, From Caligari to Hitler).
It is a tragic fact that four of Freud’s five sisters died in concentration camps, and that Freud himself required the adamant assistance of a number of friends to leave Austria and escape to London.
The rough English translation would be “a coming apart subconscious,” something that is incoherent, something that does not hold together.
The well-known concept of the “unthought known,” of Christopher Bollas (1989), derives from these more complex ideas. Like Freud, Bollas omits “conscience” from his “unthought known.”
E.T.A. Hoffmann was an influential German Romantic author at the beginning of the XIX.c., with a taste for horror and the macabre. He influenced many, including Poe, Dickens, Kafka, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky and more, including Hitchcock.
In his discussion of the Schreber case, Freud notes, “The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe” (1911, p. 70). This is the withdrawal of investment in others and in the outside world. But such a withdrawal is distinct for Freud from the death instinct, although one wonders why that should be.
In this sense, Ferenczi echoed Janet’s critique of Freud: that Freud unnecessarily limited his interpretation of traumatic memories to a search for primarily sexual events and sexual causes (Janet, 1923, p. 25).
This theme was picked up, by Hitchcock (1945) in his film “Spellbound,” in which recovering the lost memory of the traumatic event is explicitly tied to a love relationship.
Compare Ferenczi’s text “To whom does one relate one’s dreams” (1912) to Freud’s emphasis on dreams as text.
See Kilborne (1978, 2013) for a discussion of the function of dreams and interpretation from Asklepios to Descartes to Freud.
Quoted by John Banville in “A Different Kafka,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2013. He also quotes Kafka’s diary entry for August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.” Like Freud, Kafka sought refuge from the traumas of the external world in his own inner world. Although Kafka did not live to witness it, because he died at age 40, years before the Holocaust in 1924, his three sisters were killed in concentration camps as were Freud’s sisters.
Delusions are by definition believed in. But if the matter in question is implausible or viewed with disbelief, it is no longer a delusion. Freud was a genius in invention, but not all his inventions are to be believed.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been immeasurably improved thanks to the comments of a number of friends and colleagues: Kathleen Kilborne (to whom I always and will forever owe so much), Sibel Mercan, Giselle Galdi, André Haynal and Galina Hristeva.
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A version of this paper was presented at the International Ferenczi Conference, Faces of Trauma, in Budapest, May 31–June 3, 2012.
1Ph.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, International Psychoanalytic Association. Associate Editor, American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
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Kilborne, B. Trauma and the Unconscious: Double Conscience, The Uncanny and Cruelty. Am J Psychoanal 74, 4–20 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2013.35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2013.35