Abstract
All commentaries of Freud’s work, whether they should be carried out by analysts or non-analysts, raise the question of Freud’s use of metaphors and models, but, as the article on the psychical apparatus from the Vocabulaire shows, what corresponds to this description poses problems of delimitation. One of Derrida’s merits is to have expressly focused on this ambiguous situation, not exactly, however, in order to present the ‘solution to all … difficulties’, as the Wunderblock is purported to do. Far from settling rhetorical matters, ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ shows the extent to which the problem of metaphoricity runs right through Freud’s theoretical edifice. If the essay however does not conclude on this aspect of Freud’s work, it is partly because it, too, involves significant ‘representational relations’.1 When Derrida emphasizes that the origin of memory lies in the ‘contact between two forces’, that ‘at least two hands are needed to make the apparatus function’, or that writing points to the relation ‘between the two apparatuses’, one is not in fact dealing with dual relations.2 Rather, the redoubling implied in ‘two forces’, ‘two hands’, ‘two apparatuses’ and which has been at issue throughout Derrida’s essay, signals that the psyche is constituted by a multiplicity, of ‘layers’ or of ‘traces’. The ‘two’ points to the several: to affirm that ‘at least two hands are needed to write’ amounts to saying that ‘we must be several to write’ (p. 226).3
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Notes
See ‘La Mythologie blanche’ in Marges — de la philosophie (Minuit, 1972). See too R. Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Harvard University Press, 1986), especially Part Three entitled ‘Literature or Philosophy?’, pp. 255–318.
The most recent and exhaustive work pertaining to Freud’s political rhetoric is J. Brunner, ‘On the Political Rhetoric of Freud’s individual Psychology’, History of Political Thought, V, II (1984), pp. 315–31; and ‘A State of Mind: Metaphorical Politics in Freud’s Metapsychology’, in Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 47–144. This work has the merit of drawing attention to political metaphors, in particular to the military language that pervades Freudian thought. However, in spite of its very useful and rigorous repérage, we do not agree, for reasons which should become clearer, with the basic claim of this work: ‘Freud’s individual psychology contains a political thesis, formulated in metaphors and analogies borrowed from the experience of the social world and used as structuring principles in the elusive realm of the mind’ (p. 316). What the author calls the ‘invisible inner world of the mind’ is ‘shaped in terms of the outer world of society’ (p. 317). In so far as the ‘outer world of society’ is conceived as a source of borrowings (p. 331), the study depends upon the sharp separation of two ‘realms’, which it then tries to reunify by claiming that Freud’s thought is essentially ‘political’, rather than being primarily concerned with the ‘inner world’. The main thesis of the book, according to one reviewer Sebastian Gardner, is that psychoanalysis is a political discourse. Gardner begins by praising the author for ‘not assigning to psychoanalysis a single, unequivocal political meaning’ (p. 216) but ends up by putting into question the main procedure for arriving at such a result. Namely, the reviewer raises doubt concerning ‘the transition in Brunner’s argument from a theory’s dependence on analogy to the metaphorical character of its content’ (p. 219) and suggests that the central analogies in Freud might be not so much ‘political’ as more generally ‘intersubjective’. Gardner’s reservations towards Brunner’s thesis around the claims to truth of psychoanalysis calls upon a clarification of the status of models, metaphors and analogies, in particular those belonging to the political realm (European Journal of Philosophy, 5, 2 (1997), pp. 216–19). M. Worbs presents a treatment of Freud’s political rhetoric similar to Brunner’s in Nervenkunst, Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Anthenäum, 1988). Referring to the metaphor of censorship, Worbs writes: ‘das Politische als eine Analogie zum Psychischen ist — nämlich identisch mit ihm’ [my emphasis] (p. 40 note 23), or that, ‘Pressezensur, öffentliche Meinung im Kampf mit dem Herrscher.. . Manipulation der öffentliche Meinung durch eine von einer Minderheit beherrschten Presse — diese Metaphorik ist ein Reflex des politischen Hintergrundes, vor dem die Psychoanalyse enstanden ist. Diese politische Metaphorik ist ein Indiz für Freuds liberale politische Vorstellungswelt’ (p. 43).
In ‘Le Point de vue économique en psychanalyse’ (Évolution psychiatrique, 30 (1965), pp. 189–213), Serge Leclaire notes that ‘the whole of the economic problem [in Freud] is posited in strategical terms: movements of troops, strengths of battalions’ (p. 189) rather than sending us back to the ‘circulation of goods’. See J. Brunner, ‘Psychiatry Psychoanalysis, and Politics during the First Word War’, Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences, 27 (1991), pp. 352–65. Derrida notes the ‘figure stratégico-militaire’ in ‘Spéculer — sur “Freud” ’, in La Carte Postale, de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, pp. 370–1, 382–3.
One is reminded of how the mass (and the neighbouring concepts such as ‘people’) remain undefined even in dictionaries. See, for example, the concluding line of the entry ‘peuple’ in Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, ed. Ph. Raynaud and St. Rials (Presses universtitaires de France, 1996): ‘la philosophie politique ne sait au fond pas que faire du peuple’, p. 423.
SE III, p. 60, quoted in J. Strachey ‘The Nature of Q’, SE I, pp. 395–6. 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 française de psychanalyse, 5 (1972). We could append to the remark at the end of ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1895) what Freud says in Totem and Taboo (1912–13) where a problem of quantity also arises: ‘No one can have failed to observe, in the first place, that I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind [wir überall die Annahme einer Massenpsyche zugrunde legen], in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual … It must be admitted that these are grave difficulties; and any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a kind would seem to be preferable … Without the assumption of a collective mind [einer Massenpsyche], which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology [Völkerpsychologie] cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire its attitude to life anew, there would be no progress in this field and next to no development’ (SE III, pp. 157–8).
Ibid. See ‘First Principal Theorem: the Quantitative Conception’, ‘The Project’, SE I, p. 295. See M. Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Harvard University Press, 1961). The transformations of the concept of Q correspond to the way in which the ‘unknown entity’ takes on a more or less material character throughout Freud’s work.
See Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, SE XXIII, p. 97. See S. Weber, ‘The Blindness of the Seeing Eye: Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics, Entstellung’, in Institutions and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): ‘were one to characterize what distinguishes Freud’s writing so radically from that of almost all his students and followers, one could hardly do better than to examine the place it accords to the unknown’ (p. 73).
New Introductory Lectures, SE XXII, p. 73. Freud refers to Geoges Groddeck, The Book of the it: Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend [Das Buch vom Es (Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1923)] (C. W. Daniel, 1935). He warns us against the mistake of confusing the spatial representation of the psychical apparatus with the theory of ‘cerebral localization’ on numerous occasions. In The Interpretation, for example, he writes: ‘ideas, thoughts and psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might say, between them, where resistances and facilitations [Bahnungen] provide the corresponding correlates’ [Freud’s emphasis] (SE V, p. 611).
‘The Unconscious’ (1915) describes the way in which ‘unconscious processes only become cognizable by us under the conditions of dreaming and of neurosis, that is to say, when processes of the higher, Pcs., system are set back to an earlier stage by being lowered (by regression)’ (SE XIV, p. 187). See P.-L. Assoun, ‘La Philosophie et l’obstacle conscientialiste’, in Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (Presses universitaires de France, 1976), pp. 23–42.
L. Binswanger quoted in Figures de la subjectivité. Approches phénoménologiques et psychiatriques ed. J.-F. Courtine (Éditions du CNRS, 1992). (Lecture IV, SE XV, p. 61). Let us recall that in The Introductory Lectures, Freud begins by discussing parapraxes, then moves on to dealing with the dream and finally, with neurosis. Some commentators, such as Sarah Kofman, speak of ‘the circle of Freudian method’ in so far as ‘works of art served as model of understanding for dream processes; the symbolism of the dream and of its processes served in turn to interpret works of art’ [my translation], L’Enfance de l’art (p. 134).
For an interesting exploration of how day-dreams relate to night-dreams in a ‘circular’ manner, see R. Bowlby ‘The Other day: The Interpretation of Day-dreams’, in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. L. Marcus (Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 160–82, esp. p. 166.
We cannot here enter into a discussion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of ‘general will’ to which Freud’s comparison seems loosely to appeal. For a discussion of the relation between Freud and Rousseau, see M. Ansart-Dourlen, Freud et les Lumières, Individu, Raison, Société (Payot, 1985). See ‘Psychanalyse et psychologie’, in Psychanalyse et sciences humaines, Deux conférences (1963–1964) (Librairie générale française/IMEC, 1996) where Louis Althusser discusses how (Lacanian) psychoanalysis stands in relation to the ‘famous eighteenth-century problem, that of the passage from the state of nature to the state of society’ with reference to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, pp. 92ff.
See among others, C. Schorske, Vienna, Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld, 1980)
H. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (Basic Books, 1970)
J. Le Rider, M. Plon, G. Raulet and H. Rey-Flaud, Autour du ‘Malaise dans la culture’ de Freud (Presses universitaire de France, 1998).
For one of the earliest discussions of Freud’s essay Mass Psychology in France, see G. Bataille, ‘La Structure psychologique du fascisme’, Oeuvres complètes, Premiers écrits 1922–1940, vol. I (Gallimard, 1970), pp. 340–71 and for a historical discussion of it,
see E. Roudinesco, ‘Bataille entre Freud et Lacan. Une expérience cachée’, in Georges Bataille, Après tout (Belin, 1995).
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Surprenant, C. (2003). Quantity, Mass and Metaphor. In: Freud’s Mass Psychology. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_3
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