Neurosis

The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness

Wolfgang Giegerich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000062380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis began over a century ago as a treatment for neurosis. Rooted in the positivistic mindset of the medicine from which it stemmed, it trained its empiricist gaze directly upon the symptoms of the malaise, only to be seduced into attributing it to causes as numerous as there are aspects of human experience. Edifying as this was for our understanding of the life of the psyche, it left the sickness of the soul that was its actual subject matter, the neurosis which it was supposed to be about, out of its purview. The crux of this problem was of a conceptual nature. As psychology increasingly gave up on its constituting concept, its concept of soul, it succumbed to the same extent to treating its patients without an adequate concept of what both it and neurosis were about. Attention was paid to mishaps and traumas, the vicissitudes of development, and the Oedipus complex. But neurosis, according to the thesis of this ground-breaking book, comes from the soul, even is soul; the soul in its un truth. Indeed, both it and the modern field of psychology are successors of the soul-forms that preceded them, religion and metaphysics, with the difference that psychology's reluctance to recognize and take responsibility for its status as such has been matched by the neurotic soul's clinging to obsolete metaphysical categories even as the often quite ordinary life disappointments of its patients are inflated with absolute importance. The folie à deux has been on a massive scale. Owing their provenance to the supplement they each provide the other, psychology and neurosis are entwined in a Gordian knot, the cutting of which requires insight into the logic that pervades both.

Taking up this sword, Giegerich exposes and critiques the metaphysics that neurosis indulges in even as he returns psychology to the soul, not, of course, to the soul as some no longer credible metaphysical hypostasis, but as the logically negative life of the mind and power of thought. Using several fairy tales as models for the logic of neurosis, he brilliantly analyses its enchanting background processes, exposing thereby, in a most lively and thoroughgoing manner, the spiteful cunning by which the neurotic soul, against its already existing better judgement, betrays its own truth. Topics include the historicity of neurosis, its soulful purpose as a general cultural phenomenon, its internal logic, functioning, and enabling conditions, as well as the Sacred Festival drama character of symptomatic suffering, the theology of neurosis, and 'the neurotic' as the figure of modernity's exemplary man. A collection of vignettes descriptive of various kinds of neurotic presentation routinely met with in the consulting room is also included in an appendix under the heading, 'Neurotic Traps.'

PART 1

The concept of neurosis

All attempts at specific aetiologies of neurosis and corresponding psychological formulations I consider to be conceptual acrobatics.

—C.G. Jung¹¹

I don’t teach how neuroses come about, but what one finds in neuroses.

—C.G. Jung¹²

The psyche is a disturber of the cosmos governed by natural laws.

—C.G. Jung¹³

Turning specifically to neurosis, after having gained a general insight into the nature of what constitutes the standpoint of psychology and how to approach neurosis, it is clear that we need to comprehend neurosis, too, as a self. With the help of ideas developed by Jung we approach this view in two steps.

1. The first step was taken by the early Jung, who developed the idea of the Aktualkonflikt theory of neurosis. Aktualkonflikt, the “presently prevailing, or current, conflict” is the conflict that exists in the present and has its origin in the present. We see immediately that this view is incompatible with the usual view in psychoanalysis of neurosis as being due to fixations that originated in early childhood and, of course, were caused by the conditions under which the child grew up. Neurosis then is also, to be sure, a present state, but it has its deeper origin outside of itself in the past. Past and present: the structure of otherness. Jung from very early on rejected this conception and was at least on the way to a theory that was not governed by otherness and thus came close to an understanding of neurosis as a self, although Jung did not quite see and express it in these terms as yet.

Already in 1912, in his lectures at Fordham University in New York (“Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie,” given in English under the title: “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”), Jung’s “current-conflict” theory of neurosis was basically fully developed. It amounts to a rejection or negation of the past as a full-fledged factor in the theory of neurosis and instead shows a wholehearted commitment to the present. I am not concerned here with whether this theory is correct or not, whether it is truer or not than the rejected view. I am only concerned with the logical move that Jung made and what this move means. I believe Jung’s move was driven by the impulse for the psychologization of psychology. Jung eliminated in effect alterity and sided with sameness.

What did Jung say in 1912? “… the cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in the present moment.” (CW 4 § 373) He rejected “the earlier, ‘historical’ conception of neurosis” (§ 409). “… I no longer seek the cause of a neurosis in the past, but in the present.” (§ 570) In another text many years later (1934) the same idea is expressed even more succinctly:

The true reason for a neurosis lies in the “today,” for the neurosis exists in the present. It is by no means a hangover from the past, a caput mortuum, but it is daily maintained [or fed], indeed even generated anew, as it were. And it is only in the today, not in our yesterdays, that a neurosis can be “cured.” Because the neurotic conflict faces us today, any historical deviation is a detour, if not actually a going astray. (CW 10 § 363, transl. modif.)

What we see here very clearly at work behind such statements is a need for a logic of sameness, a commitment to the self-contained today. The “today” is the cause and the reason, it is what continuously feeds the neurosis, and it is the potential of a cure. The “today” has everything it needs within itself. And Jung holds off from it everything that does not belong to the Now.

Because Jung rejects the past and encloses himself theoretically in the present moment, he of course needs to explain in some other way the ideas of fixation, of the “polymorphous-perverse” disposition of the child, and of the “amnesia of childhood.” To the extent that they are based on observed phenomena he explains them in terms of regression: as “the particular use which [the neurotic] makes of his infantile past” (from within the needs of his “current conflict”) (CW 4 § 564, my italics). And to the extent that they have become components of the theory of neurosis, he explains them as a Rückschluß aus der Neurosenpsychologie, an inference [back] or a borrowing from the psychological theory of neurosis and a projection backwards [i.e., a retrojection] of what one finds psychologically in a present neurosis of adults (CW 4 § 369) into the psychology of the child, in which, as Jung says, it is of course quite out of place (§ 293).

I repeat, the main point in Jung’s thinking about the “current conflict” here is his aiming for a theory of self-enclosed sameness without any external Other.

2. But the Aktualkonflikt theory of neurosis does not go far enough. The very idea of a conflict still involves a duality and a fundamental otherness, such as the duality of the desires, or resistances of the individual vis-à-vis the social demands. So we have to go even beyond the “current conflict” idea.

Jung took a second step in which what he more or less unconsciously intended became explicit. This second theoretical move was inspired by alchemical ideas. Jung quotes an alchemical dictum: “‘This stinking water contains everything it needs.’” And he adds, “It [i.e., the stinking water] is sufficient unto itself, like the Uroboros, the tail-eater, which is said to beget, kill, and devour itself” (CW 16 § 454). With this statement we have arrived at the truly psychological logic. For a truly psychological conception, neurosis “begets” itself. It is self-generative, causa sui. Like Athena, who sprang from the head of Zeus completely finished and in full armor, so, too, neurosis comes into being all at once. All ideas of an external cause, of a reaction to external conditions, of object-relations, of an internal compensation for one’s own one-sidedness of consciousness, of a defense against an unbearable reality, have to be left behind, because they all operate with a duality, with some Other outside the neurosis itself, and thereby fixate our thinking in positivity and externality. In fact, these ideas are themselves the very split or dissociation that is the main character of neurosis; they are a neurotic interpretation of neurosis. Quote: “There is no way, it seems to me, how the psychotherapy of today can escape the necessity of having to do a great deal of unlearning and relearning, […] until it may succeed in no longer thinking neurotically itself,” Jung said 80 years ago (GW 10 § 369, my transl.), but it is still true today.

Even the idea of “conflict” has to be kept away from the notion of neurosis. Neurosis is a creative Work, an opus, poiêsis, much like a work of art, and therefore has to be comprehended solely from within itself. Alfred Adler realized that it was an arrangement,¹⁴ and Jung followed him. The idea that neurosis is a Work implies that it has an organic form and an internal purposiveness. The idea of neurosis as a Work excludes any ideas of it as a mere mishap, deformity, something having gone wrong. Neurosis is a staged show, a theatrical mise-en-scène, not a natural event, not something that simply happens. Even if neurosis sometimes imagines its own cause as a trauma in external reality and in the past and imagines itself as a natural, necessary, and thus inevitable reaction to a traumatic event or condition, it nevertheless imaginatively fabricates this allegedly external cause within itself, as an integral part of its own opus, and thus subsequently (nachträglich).

It follows from what I said that I cannot agree with the idea of a “repetition compulsion.” Of course, this idea of Freud’s was highly speculative and, as Laplanche and Pontalis said, rather muddled from the outset. And it has caused quite controversial discussions in psychoanalytical literature, also because it involves controversial ideas such as those of the pleasure principle and the death drive. But however difficult the specifics of this concept may be, in the practical thinking of wide circles of psychotherapy the popularized idea of the repetition compulsion has been quite effective, regardless of whether it was correctly understood and whether the theoretical background of this idea was also taken over or not. At any rate, the repetition compulsion is viewed as an autonomous factor. It suggests that the present compulsive repetition of a neurotic behavior points back behind the present into the past: that this presently powerful urge receives both its momentum and its ultimate cause from past events. It is of course true that the reason for a neurotic behavior today does not lie in the obvious present situation in which the neurotic finds himself, e.g., not in what others are now doing to him. But nevertheless I insist that the neurotic behavior has its source within itself, within the present—only not in the external surface reality of today, but in the presently prevailing highest ideals and needs of the invisible “soul.”

Neurosis has to be comprehended as a product of freedom, the freedom, however, of what, with a mythological personification, we call “the soul.” In this spirit Jung said, “The word psychogenic suggests that certain disorders come from the soul” (cf. CW 7 § 4), and he stated, as already quoted, that neurosis “is daily maintained and indeed even generated anew, as it were” (CW 10 § 363, transl. modif.).

To avoid misunderstandings, I want to stress here that the idea of “neurosis as a product of freedom and as self-caused” does not imply that it is caused by the free will of the ego-personality (nor by the Self in Jung’s sense either). It is caused by itself. It has, as I said, its cause within itself: it is its cause. (To see things this way amounts, of course, to a revolution of consciousness.)

The obvious fact that neurosis, if seen from outside, goes along with tremendous suffering from it, with feelings of helplessness with respect to its compelling force must not fool us. When a friend once visited Alexandre Dumas père, and found him at his desk wet with tears, he asked him what had happened and was told that Dumas had just killed his dear Pothos, his favorite figure from The Three Musketeers, in one of the sequels to this novel. This rather trivial example shows how the internal necessities or the internal logic of a creative invention can have a compelling effect on the empirical person in and through whom the work is born. The personal, subjective feeling experience gives us only the external or “ego” view. But we have to learn to appreciate neurosis from within, as a self.

Of course, creative works in the realm of art are much more straightforward. Neurosis, by contrast, is essentially tricky and cunning, devious, sly. It is dissociation, ultimately self-contradiction. Other than a work of art it is the very point of the opus called neurosis to be something “impossible”: the positively existing contradiction in itself. And thus it is inherent in the truth and message of neurosis to present itself as the opposite of itself—in the present context to present itself as caused by an external necessity, whereas in fact it is a work of freedom, or as being about the positively existing person that suffers from a neurosis, whereas it is about itself. It is the job of neurosis, as it were, to fool itself, and this is why it is also so much more likely that we let ourselves be fooled by it. This is why Jung once pointed out that “The fright and the apparently traumatic effect of the childhood experience [of a particular hysterical patient discussed by Jung] are merely staged, but staged in that particular […] way that the mise en scène is almost exactly like a reality” (CW 4 § 364, transl. modif.). What is actually a staged performance presents itself as hard-core reality, as a natural event. It conceals its Work character, its artful-creation nature. For this reason alone Jung’s already cited statement is still relevant today, his statement that “There is no way, it seems to me, how the psychotherapy of today can escape the necessity of having to do a great deal of unlearning and relearning, […] until it may succeed in no longer thinking neurotically itself” (GW 10 § 369, my transl.).

So neurosis is its own cause and not a natural reaction to bad circumstances. But are there not in fact terrible events that can happen to children and terrible conditions under which they have to live? And do such events and conditions not possibly have serious, maybe even disastrous natural effects? Of course. However, we have to keep our concepts clear. We have to distinguish between two kinds of illnesses which I label “psychic” illnesses (or illnesses of the “human psyche”) in the one case versus “psychological” illnesses (or illnesses of “the soul”) in the other. While psyche is natural and exterior, “soul” is contra naturam. My differentiation of the meaning that I assign to these words is of course a bit arbitrary, but it is necessary. While “psychic” refers to what has been called the “behavior of the organism,” we could also say: the behavior of the human animal, the word “psychological” contains “logical” in it; it refers to the noetic or intelligible quality of that to which it refers, and designates it as already reflected, as interpretation, and this is what distinguishes the one type of illness from the other.

Just like vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition during the first few years of life cause bodily impairments often for all of life, so can also lack of emotional and body contact, lack of attention and attachment, deprivation of perceptual and intellectual stimulation, cruel treatment, etc., in the early months and years of a child indeed cause lasting psychic damage. But this is then psychic harm, psychic impairment, disorder of the human organism and its functioning, which as such belongs to the wider field of human biology, not to psychology. It belongs to the natural stream of events.¹⁵ And because such disorders are indeed firmly embedded in the cause-and-effect nexus of natural events, they have ipso facto nothing to do with neurosis as a truly psychological, “psychogenic” or self-generated illness and as a free creative arrangement. Not every non-somatic disorder is to be subsumed under the category of neurosis. We need a strict, specific concept of neurosis.

On account of our clear criterion for neurosis, we also have to exclude two further types of problems often confounded with neuroses. By way of an example for the first form, we read in MDR (p. 343, transl. modif.) that, “A great many individuals cannot bear this isolation [brought by an individual soul secret]. They are the neurotics, […]. As a rule they end by sacrificing their individual goals to their craving for collective conformity […].” But, as I see it, there is nothing per se neurotic about sacrificing one’s individual goals for the benefit of gaining the love or approval of one’s environment (just as there is nothing neurotic about a monk’s sacrifice of his sexual drives and his worldly riches for a life solely devoted to the praise of God). It is simply a free choice that such a person takes, maybe a bad, a stupid, a highly problematic choice, or maybe not, but at any rate it is not per se neurotic. In general, one-sidedness and specializations are phenomena of normal life.

In the next paragraph Jung gives an example for the opposite extreme (p. 344). He speaks of the fact that sometimes an individual “finds himself involved in ideas and actions for which he is no longer responsible. He is being motivated neither by caprice nor arrogance, but by a dira necessitas which he himself cannot comprehend. This necessity comes down upon him with savage fatefulness, and perhaps for the first time in his life demonstrates to him ad oculos the presence of something alien and more powerful than himself in his own most personal domain, where he thought himself the master.” Jung uses also for this type of psychological situation the label neurosis, which in such cases he tends to consider either a morbus sacer (CW 11 § 521), or as “nature’s attempt to heal him [the man who is ill]” (CW 10 § 361), or even an (incomplete or unsuccessful) attempt to heal a general, collective problem (cf. CW 7 § 438 and § 18). But here again I have to say: there is nothing neurotic about such situations of a dira necessitas. They may lead to pathological conditions, but not every psychopathology is neurotic.

Both types mentioned lack the dissociation in the sense of self-contradiction that is the sine qua non of a neurotic condition. In the first type, the dissociation is avoided through the sacrifice or repression of the one of the two options, in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Neurosis from the perspective of the soul’s logical life
• Part 1. The concept of neurosis
• Part 2. The historicity of neurosis. Its historical enabling conditions
• Part 3. The internal logic and functioning of neurosis
• Part 4. Neurosis in the context of normal life
• Part 5. The soul issue, meaning, and purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon
• Part 6. The Absolute’s further-determination in its striving for its incarnation as immediate present reality. Or the semantics of neurosis
• Appendix
• Index