Language of Ruin and Consumption

On Lamenting and Complaining

Juliane Prade-Weiss

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501344206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Understanding plaintive language, however, is often prevented by the resentment and fear it evokes. Lamenting and complaining seems pointless, irreconcilable, and destructive. Language of Ruin and Consumption examines Freud's approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guidelines for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older--ritual, dramatic, and juridical--forms in Rilke, Wittgenstein, Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka puts plaintive language in the center of modern individuality and expounds a fundamental dimension of language neglected in theory: reciprocity is at issue in plaintive language. Language of Ruin and Consumption advocates that a fruitful reception of psychoanalysis in criticism combines the discussion of psychoanalytical concepts with an adaptation of the hermeneutical principle ignored in most philosophical approaches to language, or relegated to mere rhetoric: speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to someone.

1

Understanding Plaintive Language: Freud

“But should one believe that Sergei Wolf Man keeps speaking

endlessly to analysts in order not to be heard?”¹

Laments and complaints are at the heart of psychoanalysis. Patients complain before, during, and after analyses about pains, symptoms, or people; complaints about therapies are the impetus for revisions of psychoanalytic theory. Doctors complain about patients, Freud himself laments that this science will never be scientific enough.² “Plaint” is, nevertheless, not a primary concept in psychoanalysis,³ and this is hardly surprising. Complaints and laments undermine the referential stability indispensable for concepts. Plaintive language holds a key operative position in Freud’s writings exactly because of its resistance to terminological stability. While “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” as Lacan headlined, has been analyzed broadly,⁴ hardly any attention has been paid to the language of complaining and lamenting, and this might be due to its instability. Yet it is precisely because complaining and lamenting cannot be narrowed down to a term, a drive, a defense, or “royal road” to the unconscious—because plaintive language remains a phenomenon—that it is a driving force behind the constriction of psychoanalytic therapy and theory. The issue of comprehending complaints and laments, and of what comprehending means here anyway (understanding their occasion, their origin, their aim, or something else) gives rise to many concepts, such as “talking cure,” transference, afterwardsness, and (notoriously) mourning. The endeavor to comprehend plaintive language inspires a multitude of concepts because it remains an unsettled question that, in turn, questions the functioning of theorization, which is to say: whether it suffices in a particular instance, and whether it can be done at all. Freud’s work provides an ideal guide for insight into the structure of plaintive language because his inquiry into how to respond to complaints and laments is engaged in all the discourses any study of this form of language must draw from: literature, anthropology, law, classical, and religious studies.

Exploring the soul and understanding language had long been a domain of philosophy. Freud employs hermeneutic and aesthetic terminology from the philosophical tradition in order to enter into competition with philosophy as a discipline,⁵ pinpointing two of the crucial blanks, which Stanley Cavell highlights: “psychoanalysis and cinema share an origin as responses to the suffering and knowledge of women.”⁶ Modern philosophy after Descartes, in its foundation onto rationality as the faculty of doubting everything and of finding everything uncertain except for its own undertaking⁷ is, according to Cavell, a violent response to the experience of the mind’s limitedness.⁸ Assuring that everything short of the doubt is unsure is a way to immunize thinking against experiences that would otherwise seem lamentable: loss, suffering, death. Plaintive language voices such experiences, thus raising the issue of response emphasized by Cavell. As the following chapters will outline, plaintive language provides no symbolic compensation for damage, pain, or death, but claims hearing for the insufferable while finding every response insufficient. This irreconcilable, restless, and seemingly non-dialogic form of speech is often furnished with a genre or gender codification in order to delimit its apparent impertinence: Ritual laments as well as neurotic complaints have come to be considered female in many contexts while poetic complaints or religious laments are often considered male and part of tragedy, elegy, or prophecy—while, in fact, all, regardless of sex or gender, have always been lamenting and complaining everywhere. Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to understanding plaintive language allows to make a cross-section through these discursive dynamics.

On the one hand, Freud sees the issue of response in complaints early on: The Studies on Hysteria is based on the assumption than an insult which remains unanswered becomes a trauma manifest in symptoms; as possible responses, Breuer and Freud list crying, acts of revenge, and “lamentations” (SE2:7). On the other hand, Freud’s understanding of what plaintive language communicates, and of how to respond to it by way of therapy, changes fundamentally over time: In the early concept of theory, complaints and laments are means for discharging affects by way of naming the cause for distress. It seems, however, that a fissure disconnects the patients’ words from their referents, which raises doubts as to who complains about (or laments) what (or whom) in whose words. Reconstructing Freud’s changing understanding of plaintive language expounds fundamental, historical as well as systematic complications that any study of the language of lamenting and complaining faces: The uncovering of supposedly anachronistic, ritual forms in modern subjectivity, the yearning for a juridical, religious, therapeutic, or other compensation that silences plaints, and the undermining of any clear distinction between healthy and pathological organizations. These issues are seminal to the subsequent chapters.

This chapter will outline how the disorganization of linguistic structures in lamenting and complaining cannot be answered by therapeutic intervention or terminological stabilization, that is neither therapy nor theory succeeds in appeasing and silencing plaintive language. A tension marks Freud’s inquiry into lamenting and complaining: He suggests a not at all metaphoric concept of the consumption of linguistic structures in lamenting and complaining that leaves no room for an answer even though it seeks nothing more than response. Yet in spite of these insights Freud, still, holds on to the juridical promise of compensation and restoration since the therapeutic endeavor is otherwise unthinkable. Lagache as well as Abraham and Torok further elaborate the dynamic of the consumption of linguistic structures in plaintive language. A restless center that stimulates theorization, the issue of understanding plaintive language evokes the whole scope of Freud’s works; This chapter will do justice to it only as far as the outline of the structure of plaints requires.

Complaint without a Cause: Treating Hysteria and Forgetting Laments in Modernity

In the 1895 Studies on Hysteria, Breuer and Freud examine “psychical trauma” (SE2:5) as a wound which is characterized by the patient being “genuinely unable to recollect” (2) what, or who, has caused it. Hysterical symptoms replace any recollection of pathological events: patients complain about pains without a cause,⁹ about amnesias, anxiety,¹⁰ hallucinations,¹¹ and sensations without an apparent trigger.¹² At the onset of psychoanalytic therapy, Breuer’s and Freud’s inquiry does not target the sematic or semiotic relation between verbal complaining and physical complaint but the etiological relation between trauma and symptom. Unlike a physical wound, a psychological trauma does not appear as the lasting result of a single occurrence such as a blow, in fact, the cause of the trauma does not occur in the patients’ memories at all and remains incessantly active. In order to eliminate symptoms, Breuer and Freud infer their cause has to be made apparent: “The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance” (SE2:5). In the Studies on Hysteria, the task of therapy is articulation; a verbal expression of the traumatic process is thought to make its symptoms disappear. According to this model, therapy is the substitution of a substitute, for hysterical symptoms are themselves alternative articulations insofar as they share dynamics fundamental to language: association and reproduction. A symptom, formed by associating an affect with a physical phenomenon as its expression, occurs like a word by way of reproducing associations in different contexts. Hence symptoms may even appear to be “‘joining in the conversation’” between patient and analyst (SE2:295). However, a symptom does not, as a symbol does, refer to the trauma but replaces it entirely, even the knowledge of it. The purpose of therapy is to revoke this collapse by way of narrative reconstruction. Speech has two tasks in this process: on the one hand it repeats the events—the propositional part that makes use of conventional statements—on the other hand it expresses the accompanying affect in such a way that it is released and vanishes—the dynamic part and the reason why Breuer and Freud call this “the cathartic method” (SE2:107). The form of speech therapy seeks to attain is able to both show the traumatic events and erase the pathogenic affect they cause: “The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into words” (SE2:279).

Thus, therapy is supposed to supplement the erasure of the affect usually brought about by retaliation or plaintive language. Because whether or not an event becomes a trauma depends not on the nature of the event but on the response, on

whether there has been an energetic reaction to the event that provokes an affect. By “reaction” we here understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes—from tears to acts of revenge—in which, as experience shows us, the affects are discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of the affect disappears as a result. Linguistic usage bears witness to this fact of daily observation by such phrases as “to cry oneself out” …, and to “blow off steam” … If the reaction is suppressed, the affect remains attached to the memory. An injury that has been repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently from one that has had to be accepted. Language recognizes this distinction, too, in its mental and physical consequences; it very characteristically describes an injury that has been suffered in silence as “a mortification” … —The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely “cathartic” effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute [Surrogat] for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation [Klage] or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession.¹³

This negotiation of the response in traumatic pathology points out that the catharsis crucial to Breuer and Freud’s approach to therapy has two dimensions: the aim of therapeutic catharsis is adopted from humoralism’s notion of cleaning by way of purgation, the media of catharsis are adopted from Aristotle’s theory of tragedy.¹⁴ Therefore, Breuer and Freud consider revenge the regular affective response, and speech only its surrogate. This notion is by no means antiquated: in 2003, Kowalski lists “venting feelings (catharsis)” as the main purpose of the “annoying behavior” of complaining.¹⁵ In Freud’s terms, an event that causes an affect does not become traumatic if a response answers the blow intensely enough to equal the triggered affect, thus annihilating it. Without such a response, in passive or silent toleration, the affect is internalized and damages the organism “like a foreign body” causes “a reactive inflammation”—or, Freud corrects, “far more like an infiltrate,” since the difficulty of psychic traumas is that the pathological structure is impossible to “cleanly” separate from the healthy ones (SE2:289). In order to form a regular recollection of events, it is crucial that its accompanying affect be expressed; internalization bars memory. “Linguistic usage” testifies to the necessity of externalization, Breuer and Freud remark, because it appears itself as linguistic process: “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (SE2:6), from an ever-present past, because psychical traumas are an exception to what Breuer and Freud call Usur (GW1:86), “the normal wearing-away processes by means of abreaction and reproduction” (SE2:10) that results in the “fading of a memory or the losing of its affect” (7). Traumas are, literally, useless; they do not connect to anything else in memory or speech and are thus inaccessible to “linguistic usage” (7). The “cathartic method” of psychotherapy seeks to generate a substitute for the missing original reaction, yet it suffers from an eminent shortcoming: Notwithstanding all emphasis on affect and response, the “cathartic method” centers on a reconstructive narrative in statements and misses the patients’ complaints, the one element of hysterical symptoms analogous to a regular affective response by way of lamentations.

Breuer and Freud’s early characterization of trauma as a lack of Usur—a term later dropped, conventionally denoting the abrasion by usage of bones or teeth—still provides useful orientation in current trauma theory debates: Unavailability to usage and wearing-away means that trauma is not, as such, unknowable, as Caruth’s trauma paradigm would hold,¹⁶ yet indeed an obstacle to verbalization resulting in the disorganization of speech, or text,¹⁷ notably in plaintive language as a means to avert as much as to indicate traumatization. For while Breuer and Freud introduce lamenting and complaining as responses that prevent trauma, the discussion of plaintive language in this and later works is based on the ambiguity of “response” as deflecting and/or indicating a blow.

As regular ways of an affective response, Breuer and Freud list very different things: somatic expressions like crying, acts of revenge, lamentations, and confessions. What all of these have in common is an emphasis on address, reaching out, obtaining attention, and touching someone. In terms of semantics, lamentations, confessions, and insults say very different things, but what matters to all of them is that the expression is formed in order to obtain a hearing. Regular affective reactions, which prevent traumatization, do not comprise a truthful portray of the affecting events; they are not at all concerned with truth claims. Benchmark of the adequacy of the utterance is whether it equals the affect. The “cathartic cure,” however, is based on a truthful reconstruction of the traumatizing events—something that can, even in regular cases, be articulated only after the events have been separated from the fear, anger, or other affect they raise. The separation of events from their accompanying affect is the aim of a regular response such as crying, revenge, or lamentations, but it is also the condition of the possibility of hysterical symptoms and a complication in the attempt to understand the patients’ complaints. For these, too, are utterances testifying to an affect rather than portraying their cause. The “cathartic method” takes this into account when the “‘talking cure’” (SE2:39), as Breuer’s patient Anna O. calls her treatment, seeks to articulate whatever had been traumatizing until “a symptom was being ‘talked away’” (36...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Permissions
• Introduction: Getting a Hearing
• 1 Understanding Plaintive Language: Freud
• 2 Ritual and Modernity: On Silencing Plaints (with Aeschylus, Rilke, Veteranyi)
• 3 Voicing Pain and Destruction: Wittgenstein and Scholem
• 4 Lament of Nature: Benjamin, with Herder
• 5 (No Way) From Complaining to Legal Action: Kafka
• Conclusion: Transgenerational Trauma and the Inability to Lament
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint