Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction

Freud's Psychic Apparatus

Jared Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000021165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction: Freud's Psychic Apparatus demonstrates the relevance of deconstructive thinking for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Arguing that deconstruction has been misrepresented as a form of literary theory or a philosophy of language, the book puts Derrida, Heidegger and others working in the tradition of deconstruction into dialogue with debates in the contemporary psychoanalytic field.

Attempting to retrieve what was radical in Freud's portrayal of the mind as a machine, Jared Russell stresses the importance of psychoanalysis for an understanding of the relationship between the human and its current hyper-technological environment. Interventions into contemporary debates address psychoanalytic concepts such as the nature of the clinical frame, the intersubjective dialogue, unconscious communication and the experience of time. Russell argues that deconstruction, and in particular Derrida's work, can anticipate and help clarify ongoing developments at the cutting edge of psychoanalysis today.

Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction: Freud's Psychic Apparatus will appeal not only to a philosophically informed audience but also to clinicians attempting to secure a place for psychoanalytic practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

1

Differance and psychic space

In what should be considered a classic text of the psychoanalytic literature, The Matrix of the Mind, Thomas Ogden (1986) quotes a patient who tells him,

There is me and there is something inside me, not something, but someone, but since that someone is inside me, I can have an idea of who it is and not just be it. Sometimes this is connected with a feeling that it’s a physical space inside my body, but it’s sometimes in my head or isn’t located any specific place in my body. It’s a feeling, not a place, but it feels like a place.

(p. 128)

This is an enviable example of the kind of clinical insight to which all analysts aspire. The patient raises questions about what it means to be a “me” (a subject) with an “inside” (a mind) as a “someone” (an individual) inhabited by a “something” (an other). The difference between the patient’s sense of identity (the “me” that is a “someone”) and of difference (the “something” that is an “inside”) is mediated by an “idea” that differs from or that defers her simply being this other, which would involve a betrayal of herself. Thanks to the work of analysis, thinking inserts itself between the patient and who she is—how she thinks and behaves, which has since become other than and is no longer equivalent to her sense of self. This experience is not static and pre-determined: sometimes it feels different than at other times, and in ways that are experienced as having to do with what it’s like to be inside a body or to be a body with an inside, which is sometimes different from what it feels like to “have” a mind or to be “in” her head. It is a feeling that is also a place, but not necessarily a place that is “in” the body or “in” the mind. The feeling is that this is a place, but there is also an idea that it is something other than or different from a place. It is difficult for the patient to describe exactly what it is that she is feeling or experiencing because what is at issue is the relationship between feeling, thinking and experiencing. This difficulty is not an impasse—to the contrary, it is a moment of integration and of forward momentum in the treatment, even though it is not clear to the patient or to the analyst what exactly it is that she is working to describe. The patient is putting into words the very primitive sense that she can be different from who or what or from the way she ordinarily is—that she is open to other possibilities and to the possibility of otherness. This is what psychoanalysis is all about.

Everyday clinical moments are not always this potent, but they do often contain reference to an ongoing process of development and change through space and over time, even when this is not readily apparent. The twists and turns of the clinical narrative depict the contours of psychological space as this is elaborated and as it evolves: the patient is talking about her boyfriend; suddenly she “has a thought” or “finds herself” thinking of an incident she had witnessed in her parents’ relationship. What links these two thoughts is a space whose dynamically evolving interior can then be fleshed out and filled with associative understanding. By means of this spatializing process, new perspectives can be opened up and new positions in relation to what was previously considered unquestionable reality can be assumed. The owning and integration of these possibilities from which inner experience can be reflected upon are the goals of an insight-oriented approach to treatment. In order to accomplish this, psychoanalysis offers the patient the opportunity to refine the capacity for symbolizing his or her experience, so that the boundaries of agency are expanded—so that I (as a symbolizing subject) might come to be in the place where “it” (unsymbolized experience, to which one feels passively subjected) resides.

At the same time, the therapeutic process must also be understood as a process of temporalization. Telling stories takes time. Narration and transference open up and unfold over the course of the treatment. Symbolization occurs when the patient’s stories begin to reveal to him the interaction of past, present and future. The question governing interpretation of the transference is always: What is the contemporary relevance of the story the patient is elaborating? Why is he telling this particular story now? The very act of selecting and telling stories comes to have meaning, and the unfolding of narratives of the past is understood as significant in its function of representing the present. We understand that in the present we repeat and therefore we symbolically represent our past through our symptoms, interpersonal failures, actings out, etc. What is always more elusive is how, in the act of recounting the past, we represent the present. How is the telling of stories of the past a determining factor in the experience of the present? In treatment, we tell our presents by recounting our pasts. This is why an insight-oriented clinical approach produces a therapeutic effect: to re-present the present is to repeat difference—to allow for the possibility of change. To allow for the possibility of change is to become differentiated: to become oneself in allowing oneself to become other than oneself. This is intrinsic to what is meant by symbolization.

The development of symbolizing capacities promotes enhanced reflection on the complexities of experience. It is worth rehearsing the fact that the concept of reflection itself contains both spatial and temporal dimensions: it implies a certain distance between consciousness and the object of contemplation as poles between which reflection occurs, as well as the repetition of a previous encounter between the two (reflection). Over the time of reflection, the space of reflection opens; in the space of reflection, the time of reflection unfolds. Consciousness, as the experience of the self reflecting itself into itself in ways that can potentially cultivate openness and transformation, might best be understood in relation to this space and this time.

Despite the crucial interplay of spatial and temporal metaphors in both psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice, spatial metaphors historically have been granted the upper hand. Until relatively recently, time has not been a subject of great attention for British and American analysts, with Loewald (1962, 1972) and Winnicott (1971) being notable exceptions. Even today, the concept of psychic or inner space always implicates a notion of time in a way that remains generally unthought. Distinguishing between the subjectively internal and the objectively external has traditionally depended upon space as a metaphor for comparing the two. It is certainly not an accident that the familiar conceptualization of subjective interiority appeals to space instead of to time in this sense. To contemplate “inner time” would require an effort to think an outside that inheres within time itself. This is not a familiar concept; it is, however, a concept—or rather an effort to think something that remains unfamiliar to the extent that it tests the limits of ordinary conceptual understanding—at the very heart of the project of deconstruction.

As a critique of the general organization of the Western tradition as a “metaphysics of presence”—an uncritical valorization of the present now and of self-presence or self-identity as the model for thinking the essential natures of mind and world—deconstruction, and Derrida’s work in particular, provides the resources for an attempt to consider the representative functions of space and time in any effort to outline a scientific approach to the study of mind—that is, an approach that addresses and is therefore not determined by its own tendencies toward idealism and metaphysics. Carried out to its most rigorous and exacting limits, this effort would also allow for a consideration of the loss in representation that these functions necessarily involve—that is, the extent to which mind as thoughtful self-reflection cannot be all-encompassing but must always generate some remainder of unthought difference.

Since the serious study of mind is a complex and sophisticated effort, a complex and sophisticated theoretical approach is warranted. This does not mean that we should lose sight of the at least formal simplicity of the questions to be addressed: To what are we referring when we use the concept of psychic or inner space? How do we account for the intuitive coherence of such a concept, and why does a complementary concept of “inner time” not similarly and readily recommend itself? What are the implications of thinking inner experience in terms of space, what opportunities are opened up to and which are closed down? Perhaps thinking about individual experience in terms of psychic or inner space limits what can be experienced as internal, and to the extent that a sense of the internal is already a spatially determined articulation of our experience. In that case, are there other ways of thinking about psychic reality that the concept of psychic space leaves inaccessible? These are very general questions that cannot be treated in their entirety. My concern is with the way one might open these questions, and to do so will require an attempt to think rigorously and precisely the sense of their “opening.” To borrow from Derrida (1978, p. 199) a way of stating the problem: We are not asking what is psychic space, but what is space, and what is the psyche if it can be represented by space?

Psychic space and the mother-infant

Examining the history of spatial metaphors in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud would be a potentially interminable project. Very complex treatments of space as an interior dimension are already present in Freud’s earliest reflections on the psyche. However, while Freud’s writings certainly reflect a spatialized sense of the unconscious—the “contents” of which were to be the object of the new “depth psychology”—it was with Melanie Klein’s work that a more definitively spatialized rendition of mental life was realized. Moving away from the temporal dimension implied by the concept of unconscious memory, Klein’s focus on the impact of internal objects implicitly described the psyche as a spatial environment by establishing a symmetry between introjection and projection. Whereas Ferenczi (1913) had earlier described introjection as an expansion of ego boundaries rather than as an induction of psychic material, Klein thought introjection as the installation of object-phantasies “within” the mind, and projection as their removal “outside” the mind. While a spatial understanding of mind was not explicitly argued for, by casting both development and psychopathology in terms of the vicissitudes of introjection and projection, Klein invented an entire tradition of thinking about psychic processes in spatially absolute terms.

Winnicott was the first to attempt an understanding of the origins and development of psychic space explicitly conceived of as such. In order to understand how an individuated psyche might come into existence through its interactions with an already constituted parental psyche, Winnicott introduced the concept of a potential or transitional space. It is this transitional space that facilitates the mother’s adoption of her infant as her own, and that cultivates in the developing child the sense that there is a world at large worth connecting up to and investing in. The theory of transitional phenomena attempts to situate shared experience within a thinking that is not governed by a classical subject/object logic or framework.

“Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” is the pivot around which much of Winnicott’s most important work turns. Playing and Reality (1971) is a return to and an expansion of the themes initially laid out there. Here Winnicott offers a meditation on the difficulties inherent in attempting to grasp the concept of potential space and its relation to our familiar understanding of the absolute division between subjective and objective experience. Over and over again, Winnicott struggles to convey the sense of potential space as a concept that exceeds our familiar way of conceiving the split between inner and outer reality, individual and other.

The interactive engagement of spatial and temporal metaphors throughout the book approximates another central concept Winnicott develops: playing. Playing is a word that Winnicott appropriates from everyday language and makes thoroughly his own, yet this is something that his readers often seem not fully to have grasped. At times it is space that is grasped as the crucial point of reference for the exposition of this concept, and in other places it is time. In virtually every case where the one is privileged, the other emerges in turn to capture what is being lost:

I make my idea of play concrete by claiming that playing has a place and a time. It is not inside by any use of the word (and it is unfortunately true that the word inside has very many and various uses in psychoanalytic discussion). Nor is it outside, that is to say, it is not part of the repudiated world, the not-me, that which the individual has decided to recognize (with whatever difficulty and even pain) as truly external, which is outside magical control. To control what is outside one has to do things, not simply think or wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing.

(Winnicott 1971, p. 41; emphases in original)

Winnicott chooses to italicize and insist on the idea that “playing has a place.” There is a place of play, a space in which—or as which—the activity of playing transpires. The idea that playing has a time is not similarly italicized. In attempting to describe this space of playing, Winnicott concedes that it cannot be thought with reference to an understanding of the (adult) distinction between inside and outside. In order to think the idea that “playing has a place”—a place that resists our thinking of space as coordinated in relation to the opposition between inside and outside—Winnicott appeals to the experience of time. Because playing occurs in a place that is neither inside nor outside our experience of space, because it extends beyond our experience of space as determined by the opposition of the inside and the outside, it can only be articulated with reference to time understood as an outside or as an other of space itself. The infant’s transition from omnipotence fantasy to the recognition of a reality that can be tested requires that the infant “do things.” And according to Winnicott, doing things in the space of playing takes time: “doing things takes time.” Here time is italicized and insisted upon. In the brief space of a single paragraph, Winnicott transitions from privileging space to privileging time in his attempt to articulate the site of playing. Later he writes:

It is perhaps worth while trying to formulate this in a way that gives the time factor due weight. The feeling of the mother’s existence lasts x minutes. If the mother is away more than x minutes, then the imago fades, and along with this the baby’s capacity to use the symbol of the union ceases. The baby is distressed, but this distress is soon mended because the mother returns in x + y minutes. In x + y minutes the baby has not become altered. But in x + y + z minutes the baby has become traumatized. […F]rom the effects of x + y + z degree of deprivation, babies are constantly being cured by the mother’s localized spoiling that mends the ego structure. This mending of the ego structure re-establishes the baby’s capacity to use a symbol of union; the baby then comes once more to allow and even to benefit from separation. This is the place that I have set out to examine, the separation that is not a separation but a form of union.

(1971, pp. 97–98; emphases in original)

Here Winnicott attempts to give time its due in thinking about shared experience. The continuity of the baby’s experience is constantly under a barrage of breakages as the mother appears and disappears within the perceptual field. The mother’s presence effects a mending of ego structure if it occurs following a brief period of absence. Following a longer period of absence the baby is traumatized and the capacity to use physical interaction as a symbol of unity is lost. The mother’s reappearance, to the extent that it is reinforced by “localized spoiling,” reestablishes the baby’s ability to use their interaction as a symbol through which the illusion of union can be maintained and separation can be gradually negotiated. The interplay between continuity and discontinuity in the infant’s experience is dependent upon the mother’s behavior as it contrasts with the infant’s fantasies of omnipotence. The timing of the difference between moments of continuity and discontinuity can be traumatic, but the mother’s ability to repair the ego can allow the baby to use this timing in the service of separation. The difference between temporal continuity and discontinuity is thereby itself enlisted in the symbolization of experience. The organization of this difference is the “outside” of the experiences of temporal continuity and discontinuity that functions to sustain the infant’s fragile psyche over time. Winnicott calls this the “place” with which his thinking is concerned.

Winnicott’s developmental schema traces the emergence of potential or transitional space in the mother-infant matrix, by way of which the mother and the infant are able to emerge as fully differentiated beings. In a Winnicottian vein, Ogden (1986) writes, “The study of psychological development is not simply the study of the growth of the infantile psyche from primitivity to maturity; it is also the study of the development of the mother-infant into a mother and infant” (p. 172). The development of the mother and infant dyad out of the mother-infant unity depends on the mother’s ability both to protect the infant from, and simultaneously to introduce him to, reality as separation and difference. In advancing the theme of a potential or transitional region of experience, Ogden outlines how the concepts of the mother-and-infant dyad and the mother-infant unity are no l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Differance and psychic space
• 2 The spectrality of the clinical frame
• 3 A new metrics of clinical time
• 4 Psychoanalysis and pharmacology
• Postscript: The trauma of the clinic of the telepathic machine
• Index