Abstract
Freudian thought is not a philosophy. The prejudicial difficulty that it poses to a philosophical reflection rests on the fact that, besides the concepts which it has properly created, it uses others which have long held a philosophical status (representation, unconscious, ego, subject, object, inside, outside, body, desire, etc.). These concepts however acquire their meanings in the precise theoretical structure where they function … and not from the variety of paradigmatic signifiers, which each of these words can evoke in philosophy. This equivocation is all the more unbearable since it is already very tricky to pick out, to respect and to interpret the often important change through time of the contents of Freudian terms. In brief, it is not possible to integrate the new contents of these concepts in its complexity, by applying them without mediation, because of their community of words, to traditional philosophical problems of the subject, of the ego, of knowledge.1
‘I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct in psycho-analysis.’
—Sigmund Freud, ‘An Autobiographical Study’
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Notes
M. Tort, ‘De L’Interprétation ou la machine herméneutique’, Les Temps modernes, 237–8 (1966), pp. 1461–92, 1487–8.
Ibid. p. 1465. Ricoeur’s essay on Freud is considered to ‘mark a decisive turn in the philosophical attitude towards psychoanalysis in France’, J. Chemouny Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Presses universitaires de France, 1991), p. 77.
The history of the philosophical interest in Freud is characterized by more than one ‘decisive turn’. Consider, for example, how Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Le Titre de la lettre, une lecture de Lacan (Galilée, 1973), speak of Lacan: ‘prior to Lacan, we know (but we should say that for the most part we owe him that knowledge …) that science and philosophy — or the authorities constituted under these names — divided their “reception” of psychoanalysis between a few traditional attitudes: silence (misrecognition or denial), open hostility, annexa-tion, confiscation, or dedication to the immutable ends of this or that theoretical apparatus. More precisely, nothing has been thought which does not take the form of a “reception”, that is to say the subordination of psychoanalysis to a ground, a justification, a truth — that is, most of the time, to a norm’ (trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew [Albany State University of New York, 1992], p. 6).
The authors are in turn described as the ‘rare professional philosophers to have read and published on Lacan in the academy’ in J. Derrida, ‘Pour L’amour de Lacan’, Résistances de la psychanalyse (Galilée, 1996), p. 79.
‘Freud et la philosophie’, L’Arc, ‘Freud’ 34 (1968), p. 108. Tort’s position with respect to what he calls ‘dominant philosophies’ refers us back to Louis Althusser’s seminar on Lacan and psychoanalysis at the École normale supérieure during the academic year 1963–4, the year Lacan was invited to give his seminar in that institution. See L. Althusser, Psychanalyse et sciences humaines, Deux conférences (1963–1964) (Librairie générale française/IMEC, 1996), which provides a useful point of reference for Tort’s invectives against the so-called ideological appropriation of psychoanalysis by philosophy. A passage from Althusser’s lecture entitled ‘Psychoanalysis within the Human Sciences’ [La Place de la psychanalyse dans les sciences humaines] gives useful indications concerning the history of the encounter: ‘the philosophical encounter with psychoanalysis in France passes through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. And the origin of this encounter … is in Politzer [G. Politzer, Critique des fondements de la psychologie (Riefer, 1928)] … It is through Politzer that psychoanalysis has become an object of philosophical reflection’ (p. 34 [my translation]). Between Freud and Politzer, however, Althusser notes the importance of Angelo Hesnard, ‘the first man who has had the courage to speak about Freud in France’ (p. 22), who published L’Oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne (Payot, 1960), prefaced by Merleau-Ponty. In that preface, Merleau-Ponty clearly presents phenomenology as ‘the implicit philosophy of psychoanalysis’ (p. 7). Even if judging on this preface alone, the rapprochement might not be as ‘levelling’ as Tort would make us believe. For, having stated the convergence between phenomenology and Freudian thought, Merleau-Ponty warns against the risk that psychoanalysis may be ‘too well tolerated’ [Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis] (p. 8). Faced with the trivialization of psychoanalytic concepts, which in ‘hav[ing] lost much of their meaning and in hav[ing] become banal’ provide ‘the themes of a new positivity’, Merleau-Ponty declares: ‘one wonders if it is not essential for psychoanalysis… to remain, not, no doubt, an endeavour doomed to damnation and a secret science, but at least a paradox and an interrogation’ (p. 8). On Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalysis, see J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Note sur le problème de l’inconscient chez Merleau-Ponty’, Les Temps modernes, 184–5 (1961), pp. 286–303;
A. Green, ‘Du Comportement de la chair: Itinéraire de Merleau-Ponty’, Critique, XX, 211 (1964), pp. 1017–46.
A. Green, ‘L’Inconscient freudien et la psychanalyse française’, Les Temps modernes, 195 (1962), pp. 365–79, esp. p. 379.
See also L’Inconscient, VIe Colloque de Bonneval, ed. H. Ey (Desclée de Brouwer, 1966). The passage draws attention to the contrast that commentators of Freud have perceived between ‘the energetic representation (bound and unbound energy, the diverse cathexis and counter-cathexis of this energy [investissements et contre-investissements]) that Freud has of the entire psychical apparatus and the method of “search of meaning” that he inaugurates’,
Jean Hyppolite ‘Philosophie et psychanalyse’ (1959), Figures de la pensée philosophique I -1931–1968 (Presses universitaires de France, 1971), p. 409. Schematically, Freudian thought can be assimilated to ‘biological sciences’ or to a ‘phenomenology’ according to whether one or the other aspect of the contrast is emphasized. Or else, as Ricoeur argues throughout Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Freud’s achievement lies in the way in which it reconciles the two poles. See J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest [Erkenntnis und Interesse, 1968], trans. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), for whom the rift in Freud constitutes what he calls a ‘scientistic misunderstanding’. Habermas describes Freud’s appeal to the explanatory model of distribution of energy and his confusion of that model with what is discovered by means of the therapeutic dialogue (the model for a hermeneutics) as a methodological error, that moves psychoanalysis away from self-reflexion, according to the analysis of positivism throughout the book.
We borrow the expression ‘travail du concept’ from Paul-Laurent Assoun, Introduction à L’épistémologie freudienne (Payot, 1981), who thus refers to ‘the fanstasmatic activity that conditions the metapsychological rationality’ (p. 93 n. 76). See in particular the Introduction, Section 2 ‘Freudisme et phénoménologie’, for an examination of the so-called contrast between the energetics and the hermeneutics that dominates the reception of Freud (pp. 20–30).
We here leave aside what marks Tort’s indebtedness to Althusser’s ‘episte-mological’ reading of Marx. See L. Althusser, Écrits sur la psychanalyse, Freud et Lacan (1964–65) (Stock/IMEC, 1993).
See J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Questions de mots’, Après Freud (Gallimard, 1968), p. 164.
In what follows, we will use these terms interchangeably, as Freud himself does, and designate them ‘collectively’ under the heading of ‘figurative language’ [Bildersprache]. See the beginning of chapter 5 below. The ‘Gesamtregister’ of the Gesammelte Werke encourages the conflation of terms and concepts by establishing indiscriminately the ‘Register der Gleichnisse, Metaphern und Vergleiche’ (GW B. 18). This is underlined by W. Granoff and J.-M. Rey in L’Occulte, objet de la pensée freudienne (1983). The authors insist on the way in which Gleichnis and Vergleich are terms that cannot simply be reduced and translated as ‘metaphor’, if by metaphor, one refers to a domain of study belonging to literary theory. They point out the importance of understanding these terms (comparisons and analogies) at an epistemological level since what is at issue with them is ‘le statut de l’oeuvre de Freud dans son ensemble’ (p. 151).
See Lecture XXXII of the New Introductory Lectures (SE XXII, p. 95) where Freud speaks of the instincts as ‘our mythology’. At the end of chapter 6 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, commenting on the ‘bewildering and obscure processes’, Freud states, by way of justification, that one is ‘obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology (or more, precisely, to depth psychology). We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all, and indeed we could not have become aware of them’ (SE XVIII, p. 60). This is perhaps the most often quoted passage as soon as Freud’s figurative language is at issue. S. Weber discusses it in ‘Observation, Description, Figurative Language’ in The Legend of Freud, (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 26 and J. Derrida in ‘Spéculer sur “Freud”’, in La carte postale, De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Flammarion, 1980), to mention but a few studies which underline the passage.
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis [Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967)] (London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973). Henceforth abbreviated as Vocabulaire. See ‘Historique des dictionnaires de la psychanalyse’, in E. Roudinesco and M. Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Fayard, 1997).
Among many other similar statements, consider that of the psychoanalyst François Roustang: ‘I underlined on numerous occasions the extent to which Freud’s style is adapted down to the slightest detail to the content of what it expresses… which is, after all, a banality for a style. What is less so, however, is that here the style is the creator of the object, which is to say that container and the contents are no longer separable, are even interchangeable. The psychical apparatus that Freud builds throughout Chapter VII is Chapter VII itself. It begins by appearing at a distance from us, through the telescope, in the simplicity of a few elements; and as we get closer to it, we see it diversifying itself.. . Each time that a new piece is introduced in the system, the entire system is transformed and must be expounded anew. But it is this expository work, which is the genuine construction of the system, which is the system itself. The psychical apparatus is the system that gives an account of it’ [Roustang’s emphasis, my translation], ‘Du Chapitre VII’, Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 16 (Autumn 1977), pp. 65–97, 86–7. See S. Weber’s formulation of the question in The Legend of Freud, Expanded Edition (Stanford University Press, 2000 [1982]): ‘can psychoanalytic thinking itself escape the effects of what it endeavours to think? Can the disruptive distortions of unconscious processes be simply recognized, theoretically, as an object, or must they not leave their imprint on the process of theoretical objectification itself? Must not psychoanalytic thinking itself partake of — repeat — the dislocations it seeks to describe?’ (p. xvi). The specificity of psychoanalysis is elsewhere understood to lie in its endeavour to ‘conceive of the psychical apparatus by means of observations that are of the same nature as the observed object’ [my translation], P. Lacoste ‘Destins de la transmission’ in S. Freud, Vue d’ensemble des névroses de transfert, Un essai métapsychologique, ed. I. Grubrich-Simitis (Gallimard, 1986), p. 168. See too the important work of I. Grubrich-Simitis, who displaces the question away from Freud’s style towards his manuscripts, and provides an analytic reading of them in Zurück zu Freuds Texten. Stumme Dokumente sprechen machen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fisher, 1993).
See M. Schneider, ‘Philosopher après Freud’, in L’Univers philosophique, Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, ed. A. Jacob (Presses universitaires de France, 1989), p. 726. For the psychoanalyst Sabine Prokhoris, the method of the science of the unconcious ‘puts into practice a paradox still without parallel: the method is traversed, invested, even constituted by the very object it seeks to construct. Hence it cannot maintain its object at a distance from itself, since the object intimately affects both the practice and the learned discourse which seeks to enframe this object; it likewise affects the relationship between this practice and discourse. Accordingly, the theory — metapsychology — can by no means pose a strictly conceptual construct engendered by an act of pure reason, which has formalized a certain experience and so rendered it intelligible, while maintaining a perfect neutrality vis-à-vis the experience … Indeed, metapsychology can only function as a metaphor for its object, because, even though it carries its object within itself, it can come into being only at the price of putting an end to this state of affairs’, The Witch’s Kitchen. Freud, Faust and Transference [La Cuisine de la sorcière (Aubier, 1988, p. 14], trans. G. M. Goshgorian, Foreword M. Schneider (Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 4–5.
The unification of style and object, however, depends, to a large extent, upon the idea that unconscious processes ought to be and are only ‘disruptive’. Hence, the impossibility of theorizing otherwise than in an ‘odd’ style proves the heterogeneity of unconscious processes to rational, conscious thought. We could oppose to this valorization of ‘disruptiveness’ everything throughout Freud that promotes the ‘ingenuousness’ of unconscious processes, and their capacity to mimic rational processes [see, for example, ‘The Subtleties of a Faulty Action’ (1935), and obviously Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)]. Classical norms of theorization are also at the disposal of the unconscious, and although Freud acknowledges the possible disruption unconscious processes may bring upon his work, he is striving towards a rational understanding — as the end of The Future of an Illusion (1927) clearly states. See M. Moscovici, ‘La dictature de la raison’, Nouvelle revue française de psychanalyse, 27 (Spring, 1983), pp. 65–84, and the end of chapter 4 below.
See D. E. Leary ‘Psyche’s Muse’, in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, ed. D. E. Leary (Cambridge University Press, 1990): ‘a taxonomist would have to work long and hard to classify Freud’s many metaphors, which were drawn from social and political life, from the fields of physical dynamics and hydraulics, physiology and natural history, anthropology and mythology, archeology and ancient history, military life and technology, the classics and popular literature, and from other realms as well. As Freud utilized these metaphors — of energy and force, flow and resistance, repression and conversion, defence and aggression, and all the rest — he was clearly following his own advice to change analogies and comparisons as often as necessary. Freud’s use of multiple metaphors was occasioned by his awareness of the insufficiency of any single metaphor’ (p. 18)
De la grammatologie, pp. 27–30, 63. For a succint presentation of the problem of metaphor, see G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Seuil, 1991), especially ‘La Métaphore’, pp. 114–26. See too R. Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Harvard University Press, 1986).
For a discussion of the discrepancy between Freud’s ‘intuitions’ and his ‘concepts’, see M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Préface’, to A. Hesnard, L’Oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne (op. cit.). I consider this issue in relation to the concept of ‘form’ in ‘In Spite of Appearances’, Fragmente ‘Psychoanalysis and Poetics’, ed. D. Marriott and V. Lebeau, 8 (Summer 1998), pp. 39–53. Concerning the ‘the gap [décalage] between the discovery and the concepts’ see also, P. Ricoeur, ‘A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud’, in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics [Le Conflit des interprétations, Essais d’herméneutique (1969)], ed. D. Ihde (NorthWestern University Press, 1974): ‘In Freud’s case the shift [décalage] is manifest. His discovery operates on the levels of effects of meaning, but he continues to express it in the language and through the concepts of energetics of his masters in Vienna and in Berlin.’ Ricoeur speaks of a ‘dissonance’ indeed of an ‘anomaly’ (‘this anomaly on the part of Freudian discourse …’) and ends up by explaining the dissonance in terms of the two levels of coherence or of the two universes of discourse with which psychoanalysis operates: that of ‘force’ and of ‘meaning’. The ‘mixed discourse’ results from the fact that psychoanalysis lies at ‘the flexion between desire and culture’ [trans. modified]. Such a mixed character is not however a ‘category mistake’, Ricoeur continues, ‘it comes close to the very reality which our reading of Freud revealed and which we called the semantics of desire’ (pp. 166–7).
Chris Johnson argues that cybernetics provide a model for Derrida’s analysis of Freud [Revue internationale de philosophie 52, 205, (1998) p. 3]. He speaks of a ‘dialogue’ between Freud and Derrida, while Marian Hobson in Jacques Derrida, Opening lines (Routledge, 2000), speaks of the ‘assimilation’ of one problematics to another. Freud himself uses quotations marks abundantly and conspicuously, and, as we will see, notably around his own concepts.
Derrida, p. 200. S. Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1950 [1895]), SE I, p. 299. Henceforth abbreviated as ‘The Project’ with references inserted in brackets.
See A. Green Le discours vivant. La conception psychanalytique de l’affect (Presses universitaires de France, 1973) and ‘De L’Esquisse à “L’Interprétation des rêves”: coupure et clôture’, Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 5 (Spring, 1972).
For a study of the ‘The Project’ which considers the relationship of metapsy-chology to cognitive theory and neurophysiology, see K. Pribram and M. M. Gill, Freud’s ‘Project’ Re-Assessed, Preface to Contemporary Cognitive Theory and Neuropsychology (New York: Basic Books, 1976). The contemporary interest in the relation between neurophysiology and psychoanalysis falls outside the scope of this book.
See for example, M. Gauchet, L’inconscient cérébral (Seuil, 1992).
Derrida’s argument opens up the question of technè, which he argues, Freud has not been able to raise. For an examination of this question in relation to Freud, see B. Stiegler, ‘Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus’, Tekhnema, Journal of Philosophy and Technology, 3 (1996), pp. 69–112.
See Marie Moscovici’s description of phylogenesis in ‘Un meurtre construit par les produits de son oubli’, as ‘a controversial and enigmatic aspect’ (p. 127), which is either ‘left aside’ or considered to be ‘inessential’ (p. 129). The essay shows how the question of a genealogy of the psyche is intimately linked with the hypothesis of an archaic inheritance, that stands as a ‘beginning’ towards which all ulterior events converge. The idea of model runs through Moscovici’s analyses, up to the point where the ‘phylogenetic idea’ itself is described as a ‘prototype’ of the relation of love and hatred of the other in me. L’Écrit du temps 10 (Autumn, 1985). See also I. Grubrich-Simitis, ‘Métapsychologie et métabiologie’, and P. Lacoste ‘Destins de la transmission’ in S. Freud, Vue d’ensemble des névroses de transfert, Un essai métapsychologique (op. cit.). For a recent discussion of this issue, see among others, A. Green, Cent ans après (Gallimard, 1998), pp. 112–25.
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© 2003 Céline Surprenant
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Surprenant, C. (2003). Psychoanalytic Concepts. In: Freud’s Mass Psychology. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_2
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