Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis

Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and the Body of the Void

Touria Mignotte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000766042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, Touria Mignotte explores an innovative conception of cruelty. Integrating the life sciences and quantum physics, this approach shows that cruelty structures the living just as much as the unconscious, and makes it possible to integrate the main psychoanalytic currents, notably Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Klein, and the thinkers of autism, while renewing the place of psychoanalysis as a human science.

The life sciences have given us an insight into the murderous struggles that unfold before the primitive environment consents to the emergence of life as a "primary destructive impulse." This book offers a deep exploration of this primitive cruelty and of the processes of pairing that it induces: Mignotte hypothesizes that cruelty pertains to the dynamics of the void from which the human being originates, and whose creative expansion manifests itself, at each birth, as a sexual excess threatening the primary oneness. Cruelty, Sexualit, y and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis thus posits the necessity of revisiting the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis within a new epistemological framework developed from the laws of the dynamics of the void and based on an analysis of the development of these dynamics through clinical symptomatology. From this new perspective, this book suggests that the narcissistic psychoses and contemporary pathologies may be seen as the enactment of the murder and incest induced by the jouissance of the primitive void.

This book calls on psychoanalysts to become the testamentary witnesses of the inhuman sexuality of the primitive void and to allow themselves to be affected by the ferment of destabilization and dissociation from which it proceeds.

1
Cruelty and absolute dependence

From the “Project for a scientific psychology” (1950 [1895]) to Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud consistently develops a theory of cruelty as a pivotal element in his theory of the psychical apparatus. The topic of cruelty is clearly present in “Thoughts for the times on war and death,” in which Freud contends that not only is “the primaeval history of mankind filled with murder” but also that “if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we ourselves are a gang of murderers” (1915a, pp. 292 and 298). Such a stance is even more observable in Freud’s (1933b [1932]) letter to Einstein, published as Why War? Freud expresses his “entire agreement” with Einstein who postulates “a drive for hatred and destruction – which goes halfway to meet the efforts of the warmongers.”

But it is clear that the development of Freud’s metapsychology, from the first topography of the psychic apparatus conceived as three domains (unconscious/preconscious/conscious) to the second topography organized according to three agencies (id/ego/superego), shows the central role played by the factor of cruelty in Freud’s conception of the psychic apparatus. The agency of the superego explicitly personifies the factor of cruelty underlying the changes that Freud would continue to make with respect to his approach to the narcissistic neuroses and psychoneuroses.

As early as Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915b), when he posits that hatred is more primordial than love and relates it not to sexuality but, from the outset, to the drives of self-preservation, Freud was anticipating the subsequent claims of Moses and Monotheism (1939): such hatred endows the superego with “a harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality” (1923, p. 54). It is inherent in the cruelty of the father of the primal horde and related to the inaugural murder of the father, even though humanity has always continued to identify with him and to carry out his will and commandments. “It may be said,” adds Freud in a footnote, “that the psycho-analytic or metapsychological ego stands on its head no less than the anatomical ego – the ‘cortical homunculus’ ” (ibid., p. 49). It is deeply rooted in such cruelty and draws its life forces from the prehistoric experiences that such cruelty occasioned – experiences that have accumulated from generation to generation.

Each generation transforms primal cruelty into a more or less cruel paternal figure (a personification of the superego), but a tutelary figure nonetheless, because anxiety related to destruction is “the first great anxiety-state of birth,” the true remnant of the cruelty which “occurs between the ego and the super-ego,” instead of turning round upon the subject’s own ego and threatening its existence. “To the ego,” Freud writes, “living means the same as being loved – being loved by the super-ego, which here again appears as the representative of the id” and of “the mute but powerful death drives” (ibid., pp. 58–59) that dominate it.

With the introduction of the notion of the death drive, “the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state” (ibid., p. 40), which is the source of all the other drives, Freud discloses the nature of his concerns regarding this factor of cruelty. In trying to theorize a drive for mastery, a drive of destruction, an aggressive or a sadistic drive, he was less concerned with theorizing one drive-related modality among others and more concerned with shedding light on the original processes that condition how Hominins gain access to humanity and language. Freud’s account of sado-masochism, revised in “The economic problem of masochism” (1924), as well as his analysis of the origin of a sado-masochistic phantasy in “A child is being beaten” (1919a), reveals the existence, at the dawn of life, of a primal form of cruelty which, in the form of “psychic precipitates” or “active mnemic traces” (Freud’s emphasis) encourages doing in both its active and passive forms. While in his first theoretical elaboration, Freud posits sadism as more primal than masochism, in the second he is led to reverse this postulate.

When Freud (1919a) speaks explicitly about “being beaten by the father” and asserts that “the beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous attachment to the father” (p. 198), he endows such primal masochism with an erogenous quality that refers to the Oedipus complex but in its archaic form where the “father-complex” and the ambivalence that characterizes it have not yet been constituted. The father, the object of the incestuous attachment in the phantasy, relates to the “archaic heritage” (p. 193) of the Oedipus complex and therefore to “the dreaded primal father” (Freud, 1921, p. 127). Whereas in the fully mature form of the Oedipus complex, the father has already been recognized, prompting adherence and belief, the father who requires an incestuous attachment is an archaic father, who, through the “active mnemic traces” left by the killing of the primal father, demands to be constituted; herein lies his cruelty. What Freud means is that this drama of origins is not limited to the beginning. It keeps returning with each birth, placing the infant in a state of “absolute dependence” that leads to the formation of a “father-complex” and to the “longing for the father” (Freud, 1912–1913, p. 148) that this state entails.

Freud was in no position, however, to ponder on the links between “absolute dependence” and the infant’s environment, a factor Winnicott was to endow with vital importance and which Freud held as pre-established.¹ Yet the significant elaborations that Freud devotes in his second topography to the notion of the ego offer valuable insights into the issue of cruelty in relation to “absolute dependence” as long as one is willing to credit the Nebenmensch² – instead of the infant’s “still feeble” ego – with the battle waged against the id’s demands. It is the Nebenmensch that either succeeds or fails to prop up the infant’s “still feeble” ego. It is again the Nebenmensch that provides assurance for the primitive part of the ego, namely, the superego, which “is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own” (1923, p. 25). Its ability to withstand the active traces which reactualize the inaugural drama³ with each birth is what determines the infant’s possibility to transform the primal father’s cruelty into “a longing for the father” or, conversely, into a cruel and sadistic superego. In particular, its capacity to undergo the numerous transformations that are required to substitute the multiple “object-cathexes of the id” into identifications – in other words, its propensity for fragmentation, dissociation, and multiple identifications – is vital in “an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory” (ibid., p. 31).

I think that it is at this very early stage of the constitution of the ego and its “dependent relationships,” long before it is possible to refer to a subject articulated in language and the symbolic, that Freud somehow circumvented the obstacle by returning to heredity, by attaching cruelty to an innate death drive.

* * *

A reflection on cruelty that seeks to extend Freud’s thought by extricating it from the rut of heredity in which it had become bogged down requires a closer investigation – closer than Freud was able to do – of the elements that characterize this state of “absolute dependence.” For it is this state that constitutes the first stage of the diphasic development of humanity as well as that of young human beings. Freud draws a parallel between the era of totemism and polytheisms and the primary narcissism of the infant (infans = before it can speak). In the evolution of humanity as well as that of its youngest members, it is once the first stage has been implemented that the father is established as the initiator of faith, the father of monotheism in the history of Judeo-Christian and Muslim civilization, or the father who founds each new individual’s access to the symbolic dimension. Now, in both cases, absolute dependence is the fundamental feature of this first step and it implies collective processes capable of absorbing the active traces left by the inaugural murder. In totem societies, such processes are embodied by the members of the clan, while in primary narcissism they can be attributed to what one may call the “plural mother.”^* Absolute dependence conditions the diphasic establishment of human sexuality as well as infantile neurosis, while its deficiencies underlie the various forms of psychotic anxiety.

The unrepressed unconscious

The first difficulty that arises when taking “absolute dependence” into account in the context of the present study is that we must first take a step backwards. Indeed, it implies returning to the infant’s state at the beginning of life in order to consider the forces at work in the circumstances that precede its emergence, as well as those that immediately follow it. This forces us to rely on the language of “things” to tackle that which is not yet linked to word-presentations.

Arguably, Freud did not overlook such a setback, so much so that in 1923 he was led to question the theoretical edifice he had elaborated on the basis of repression as the keystone of the unconscious and its formations. Freud’s first topography of the psychic apparatus, divided into the unconscious/preconscious/conscious domains, is based precisely on the repression of cruelty, seen as an integral and innate part of the sexual drives. In the first topography, conflict is thus inherent to the psychic apparatus and it opposes the sexual drives and the ego’s self-preservative drives. It is expressed by the return of the repressed, in the form of repressed unconscious thoughts that have been distorted by censorship and which can gain access to consciousness by virtue of their links with word-presentations. The aim of analytic treatment consists in the lifting of repression by following the metonymic and metaphorical displacement of the return of the repressed that directs the patient’s discourse.

But in the light of his clinical experience, Freud became aware of the limitations of his conception of analysis based on the lifting of repression due to its failure to overcome the resistance of some patients who exhibit a negative therapeutic reaction and counter any successful outcome for the treatment.

The patient’s resistance led Freud to turn his attention towards the infant, towards an in-depth study of the ego and its dependent relationships at the earliest stages of its formation. He then faced, as he acknowledges, “the necessity of postulating a third Ucs., which is “not repressed” (p. 18, my emphasis) in addition to the repressed unconscious and the latent unconscious. The unrepressed unconscious – the basis for Freud’s elaboration of the “id” – manifests itself, Freud explains, at the beginning of life, through the exertion of “driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion” (p. 22).

Freud postulates a second topography of the psychic apparatus, involving three agencies as well: the id, the ego, and the superego. He therefore redefines the conflict which is no longer seen as intrapsychic, opposing the ego’s drives of self-preservation and the sexual drives, as posited in the first topography, but between forces that are radically external to the psychic apparatus⁴ and the life drives which include ego drives and sexual drives.

By analogy with the repressed unconscious which gives rise to unconscious ideas, Freud believes that the “unknown and uncontrollable forces” of this “unrepressed unconscious” yield “unconscious feelings” (Freud’s emphasis) which, unlike unconscious ideas, “are themselves transmitted directly” (ibid., p. 22, my emphasis) to the conscious, without the prerequisite of connecting links to word-presentations. This is how such forces besiege the “ego” and “exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion” (ibid.). As such, they are viewed by Freud as a “second class of instincts,” a class that is difficult to elucidate (p. 40). Freud is led to “recognise sadism as its representative” (ibid.). He consequently upholds a dualistic classification of the drives, comprising the second class of drives which he calls “the death instinct” and the first class referred to as “the life instinct.” On the basis of theoretical reflections supported by biology, Freud comes to identify cruelty in the midst of the death drives, for their task is to disintegrate living substance into particles and “lead organic life back into the inanimate state” (ibid.) whereas the life drives, “by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life” (ibid.).

(a) Death drive or expanding void?

The insight that psychic life is dominated by the conservative tendency to return to the previous state of things attests to the brilliance of Freud’s thinking. Such an insight paves the way for the prehistory of cruelty, for the time that precedes its fusion with the sexual drives and its foundation of human desire.

A century after Freud, I wish to engage in a new series of reflections, supported by the recent findings of quantum physics and by the insights that it yields into the complex biological systems that make up the primary environment of individuals.

I will therefore be proposing a new reading of Freud’s hypotheses from this perspective. It is my contention that Freud’s insight into the tendency to return to the previous state of things refers, unwittingly, to the characteristic property of what physics defines as a void, namely, the return to the lower energy state. In quantum physics, a void is a set of quantum fields that are subjected to energy variations resulting from interactions with electro-magnetic fields and animated by the emergence and disappearance of matter. The emergence of matter within a void leads to a shift from the so-called lower energy state to the so-called excited state, where it exerts its forces of return to the previous state, requiring matter to be annihilated. In physics, a void is defined as a “minimal state of being” (Cassé, 1993, p. 97), it is thus not equivalent to nothingness. It is “the mode of non-excitation, of hibernation of matter” (p. 134) according to Michel Cassé, and, as such, it cannot be equated with the nothing of ex nihilo genesis.

By specifying that “the emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death,” Freud (1923, pp. 40–41) locates the prehistory of cruelty within the economy of the “physical void”^* (a void from which individuals emerge and within which their growth has developed), without being able to examine it further. The hypothesis I am advancing, without claiming to be able to back it up with a convincing scientific explanation, is nonetheless based on the advances of the complex molecular biology of the placenta processes involved in the establishment and unfolding of gestation. This hypothesis was reinforced, moreover, by the theories developed by physicists who have postulated an isomorphism between psychic reality and quantum reality. On my hypothesis, the materialization of the foetal soma implies that the physical void, constitutive of matrix cells, is subjected to constant densification adequate to the central void represented by the cavity in which the embryo develops, and that this is the case at each stage of the embryogenic process. In this way, the global symmetry is constantly maintained between container and contained in spite of foetal growth. This matrix void, which constitutes the primitive inside as an “included third” imprisoned in the envelopes of the foetus, thus passes from an initial state of lower energy to an increasingly saturated state, until the threshold of irreversibility is reached, determining the end of pregnancy.

Birth necessarily comes as a transgression of the “monarchic” economy of this void, which only accepts the growth of the foetus within it if it is paid or enriched in return. So much so that when the rupture of membranes occurs, this void, which has accumulated such an intense force as a result of its saturation that it manifests its need for expansion, scatters, and in so doing it is so radically dispersed that its extension has to be unlimited. From my perspective, such dispersion is “natural law,” as posited by Nietzsche, and it manifests itself through “unknown and uncontrollable forces,” as Groddeck (cited by Freud, 1923, p. 23) puts it – the same forces Freud attaches to the unrepressed unconscious, which, at the beginning of life, expresses this same centrifugal force by its compulsive tendency to return to the previous state.

The hypothesis that I will be developing throughout this book is that cruelty is intrinsic to the expansion of the matrix void^* which passes from the state of included third^5* to the state of excluded third^*. From the point of view of the prehistoric infantile subject, this represents the loss of an origin that the latter still has vital need of a base of support to free himself from the enclaved state in which the excluded third leaves him at the moment when the membranes break. Biological birth does not suffice to deliver him from this harsh primitive inside to which foetal organogenesis is strictly subject. Yet this vital need for deliverance is to do with a need to break out from the world of the void contained by the envelopes or membranes (henceforth referred to as “Mothers”^*). It is necessarily this same world to which the human infant wants to ret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Preliminary note
• 1 Cruelty and absolute dependence
• 2 The primary unity called “destruction”
• 3 The void and the “system tending towards unity”
• 4 Immortal life and the feminine phallus
• 5 “WOMAN” and the myth of Prometheus
• 6 Prometheus: the bringer of fire
• 7 Topography of the included third and the basic autistic structure of the subject
• 8 The totalization of a “masculine body”
• 9 The Rat Man: the split-off function of the mother
• 10 The hidden third and negation
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• References
• Index