Psychology After the Unconscious

From Freud to Lacan

Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317683230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area.

Psychology After the Unconscious is the fifth volume in the series and addresses three central questions:

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• Why is Freud's concept of the unconscious important today?

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• Does language itself play a role in the creation of the unconscious?

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• How does Lacan radicalize Freud's notion of the unconscious in relation to cultural research?

The book provides a clear explanation of Freudian and Lacanian accounts of the unconscious. It also highlights their role in offering a new way of describing, understanding and working with the human subject in clinical settings and in cultural research. Part One shows how the unconscious is elaborated in Freud's early case studies in Studies on Hysteria, while Part Two focuses on Lacan's re-working of the unconscious and its relationship to language and culture in his influential public seminars. The book also provides access to key debates currently occurring in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, exploring both the clinical dimension and the consequences for psychological and cultural research.

Psychology After the Unconscious is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

Part I
Freud

1 Dimensions of the unconscious in Freud

This chapter was initially prepared for a teaching session at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in 2010, and was pitched at an introductory level. However, it covers a lot of ground and works as a written text better than something spoken.

I review three key dimensions of Freud’s account of the unconscious. I outline the place of a psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious in relation to ethical questions, and against the reduction of ethics to morality founded on a ‘good’, on ‘duty’ or on ‘distribution’. I then, second, situate the development of psychoanalysis in Freud’s work on the aphasias, and the emergence of an account of hysteria that relies on a view of the mind as made of self-sufficient systems of representations. The third dimension is, crucially, that of clinical practice, and the chapter builds on the first two dimensions to emphasize the difference between popular mistaken ideas about the unconscious and Freud’s own view.

I emphasize Freud’s development of the notion of the unconscious out of early neurological research on ‘representations’, and so here you can see biological grounding for our understanding of discursive approaches to psychology that is very different from the neuropsychological or ‘neuropsychoanalytic’ approaches.

We will trace our way through three different dimensions of the unconscious – ethical, material and clinical - but each of these is interconnected with the others, and each aspect brings us face to face with everyday assumptions about the human subject, about the nature of reality and about psychoanalysis itself. Setting out this series as if it were a logical sequence itself conforms to a conscious ordered process, but we need to remember as we go through them that each aspect is complex and overlapping rather than distinct and clear cut.

Clement Freud, who was a Liberal MP, panel-show participant, chef and brother of Lucian Freud (with whom he refused to speak towards the end of their lives), had a nice anecdote about walking in Vienna with his grandfather the psychoanalyst. Clement, a young boy at the time, is walking with Sigmund along the Vienna street when they come across a man in front of a small group of people. The man falls to the ground and starts twitching and writhing, perhaps in the grip of an epileptic fit of some kind. They watch, some people help the man and give him some money. Sigmund and Clement watch and then Sigmund takes Clement’s hand and they walk off. Clement asks his grandfather, ‘Why didn’t you give him anything?’, and Sigmund Freud answers ‘Because he didn’t do it well enough’.

It seems that the man consciously, deliberately, putting on the epileptic show is not of much interest to Freud. There is nothing in this display of something unconscious, at least not of an unconscious demand to Freud as analyst that something be heard and that something might be changed. There is no ‘demand’, as we say, for analysis, which is a prerequisite for us to start to hear the contradictions in that demand, and to explore with someone how they make sense of their desire to change who they have become.

Ethical dimensions of the unconscious

Freud is not interested in making the man who performs his epileptic fit for an audience for money change his ways, and we could interpret this lack of interest as being precisely because the existence of the unconscious throws into question standard mainstream ethical responses in such a situation (Badiou, 2001; Neill, 2015).

One such response would be to say that there is something unappealing if not shameful in the spectacle of the man displaying himself in this way in public, and this would be an ethical response that presumes a standard of good behaviour to which the man and his audience should conform. It would be in line with the assumption that there is a ‘good’ about which we all agree, and Freud could then step forward and appeal to all involved to put a stop to this ugliness, certainly not to pander to this kind of behaviour (Aristotle, 2004). The problem is that each subject taking part – performing, watching, enjoying, wanting to condemn what they see perhaps – is informed by a different idea of the good, and even if they agreed with Freud at this point that what they were watching was wrong, there is no guarantee that each of them was not unconsciously enjoying what they saw. The problem with the notion of the good as a foundation for ethics is that there is the unconscious, and unconscious enjoyment of what is not ‘good’.

A second ethical response would be to say that the man should show some self-respect, that he is failing to conform to a duty to himself and others, and if Freud were to act in line with this ethical position, that we each have a duty to do the right thing, he might step forward and demand that the man pull himself together (Kant, 1785/ 2009). Now, however, we would be embroiled in a deeper problem, which is that a self-righteous demand that others do their duty is itself in line with a ‘duty’ that we might feel impelled to show to others what we think is right. And there is no guarantee that doing one’s duty means that one does the right thing. So, the problem with this notion of ‘duty’ to underpin ethics is, once again, that there is an unconscious, and that we conform to many unconscious demands that are self-sabotaging and damaging to others.

A third ethical response might be for Freud to step forward and get the crowd to agree about who needs what, and to share out their resources. This would be in line with an ethical position that assumes that there should be an efficient distribution of the goods available, that if the man was given his fair share, he would not need to beg (Bentham, 1823/ 2009). It would also assume that eventually Freud would be able to persuade the rest of the crowd to agree. The problem with this ethical response is that someone, perhaps it would be Freud if he took the initiative, would have to step forward and be the boss of it all, be the one who would determine what each and every person needs and how their needs should be balanced out. And the problem, again, lies in the existence of the unconscious and the enjoyment of the one who manages the enjoyment of all the others, thinking that he knows what that enjoyment is and how it should be distributed.

Each of these three standard ethical responses is actually a moral system to which we have to adapt in order to enable them to work. Freud, at least, seems to want to have none of this, and psychoanalysis that takes the unconscious seriously lays the basis for ethical deliberation that is not reduced to a moral system.

Let us turn to a second dimension of the unconscious, which is the materiality of our condition of being human, the question of biology.

Material dimensions of the unconscious

A first reference point for understanding the nature of the unconscious in Freud’s work lies in his medical interest in aphasia. A detailed account of this history is given by John Forrester (1980) in his book on the importance of language in the history of psychoanalysis, which I rely heavily on in my account here. Freud did come from a background that looked for physiological causes for disorders, but his work on aphasia led to a radical reinterpretation of the role of language in mental disorder. Freud (1891/2011) argued, well before he developed psychoanalysis, against the prevalent explanations of aphasia which traced it to lesions in the brain. Aphasia is a disturbance of language, and most definitions of it simply place it in a tautological loop that links it to a lesion in the brain. These are the kind of explanations that are still popular today, but Freud was making a break with that way of thinking about things, a break that had consequences for how we now think about the place of the unconscious.

In the late nineteenth century there were two main themes at work as a background for being able to account for aphasia. The first was concerned with cerebral localization, the second concerned with the association of ideas. Taking the cerebral localization account first, some researchers were working on the assumption that aphasias resulted from physical brain damage. One key example here is the work carried out by Paul Broca in 1861. Broca correlated loss of speech with a lesion in the middle part of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Contemporary understanding of the localization of speech in the left hemisphere flows from this work, and of course there is, as a consequence, the marking of this in the ‘Broca’s area’ on the left side of the brain.

Later researchers into aphasia (such as Meynart and Munck) were then to follow on from Broca’s work, and they argued for a one-to-one mapping of disorders into the brain. The most important idea within this tradition of cerebral localization research for the development of psychoanalysis, however, was put forward by John Hughlings Jackson. Jackson was an English neurologist who argued for a strict parallelism between physical and psychological processes. According to Jackson, aphasics suffer from a lesion in the brain, and this is the notion that is picked up and used as the grounding assumption in most medical research on aphasia today. A lesion is an injury of some kind, with very broad physiological meaning, ranging from destruction of tissue to a tumour, an abnormality of functioning. A consequence of the lesion, according to Jackson, is that the ‘nervous arrangements’ that were about to discharge are, as it were, caught in the act of imminent discharge. These nervous arrangements then form a closed circuit which carries on resonating, but it is unable to find release. The aphasic’s disorder therefore follows from this isolation of nervous arrangements and concomitant inability to express what has been trapped in them as a result of the lesion.

What is particularly interesting about Jackson’s description is his proposal that this isolation of the closed circuit can be mapped along two axes. The first axis runs from the organized to the unorganized. The second axis runs from the automatic to the conscious. For Jackson it is not the unorganized state that is the more primitive, which would be the way that a commonsensical understanding of the relationship between disorganization and primitive states would have it, but the organized. To be organized was to be primitive, and to be unorganized, less organized, was to be more highly developed, as far as brain processes are concerned at least. Organized thought is strictly tied to instinctual or habitual patterns, while it is the fluidity of thought which characterized higher level processes. So, if we now bring in the second axis, running from the automatic to the conscious, for Jackson, it is the organized, more primitive thought, that is automatic, and the more fluid, less organized thought that is conscious. Creative conscious activity is fluid.

This has an important consequence for the way we would understand regression. Regression, in Jackson’s account, is the capture of nervous arrangements in closed circuits as a result of a lesion, and this regression is regression to a more organized automatic state. This has huge consequences for psychoanalysis, because it sets a background set of assumptions for the nature of non-conscious activity that does not treat that non-conscious activity as fluid and disorganized, but precisely as more organized, more automatic.

Back to Freud. Freud moved from the cerebral localization approaches, the first theme in late nineteenth-century research on aphasias, to an account which was more concerned with the association of ideas. Freud did believe that a lesion occasioned aphasia, but he did not accept that you could discover a one-to-one correspondence between the mental and the physiological. He broke then from the assumption that now underpins most research in what is termed ‘neuropsychoanalysis’, which attempts to map different psychoanalytic processes onto different parts of the brain, that is, a return to the cerebral localization tradition (Solms and Saling, 1986). This reductive account is contested by those inside the International Psychoanalytic Association concerned about the limitations that it places on clinical work (Blass and Carmeli, 2007). Freud proposed that there was a hierarchy of independent levels of association, or a series of levels of association. A crucial level of association for Freud, and for studies of aphasia generally of course, was the level of ‘word presentations’. The most important aspect of the word presentation was the ‘sound image’. This sound image is the primary meaning which is attached to the word when it is first heard or first spoken. Another level of associations were thought to be those of the ‘object associations’ which were primarily visual. This distinction between different levels of associations – word and object associations – led Freud to argue that it is possible to group aphasias into two categories. There are those kinds of aphasia which are verbal, and the problem here was the association between the word presentations. The second category would group together the so-called ‘asymbolic aphasias’ in which the association between the two levels, that is, between the level of word and object associations, was disrupted.

For Freud, ‘the aphasias simply reproduce a state which existed in the course of the normal process of learning to speak’ (Freud cited in Forrester, 1980: 26). What we can see here is that Freud was developing an account which is concerned with the association of ideas, but he is also drawing on Jackson’s notion of functional regression to explain failures of speech, and of regression to more primitive, organized, automatic circuits in which discharge has been prevented, trapped in the circuit. For Freud, then, aphasias reproduce states which existed at earlier levels of development. A key point to hold onto here for an understanding of the unconscious is that Freud was moving to a notion of self-sufficient systems of representations.

This view of aphasia then led Freud to an understanding of hysteria. Hysteria could be seen in a similar way to aphasia in the sense that it was a problem to do with the operation of speech. And already, of course, we have an assumption at work in Freud’s reading of this connection between aphasia and hysteria which grounds psychoanalysis, which is that it is speech that must be fundamental to any account of mental disorder and of a curative process. For the hysteric, it was a specific idea which was shut out, pushed out of the system of word presentations, pushed out of language. The symptom that the hysteric then suffers is an expression, an attempt to express by means other than language, of the lost words. So the similarity with aphasia was that the problem lay in the relationship between the representations of words and representations of objects, between the two levels of association.

Freud then reworked the distinction between the two levels so that the first level is the level of ‘word presentations’, and the second level is the level of ‘thing presentations’. For Freud, the unconscious is composed of thing presentations, while consciousness comprises thing presentations which are linked to word presentations. There are some consequences here for the way that we account for the work of language, of words, in the unconscious, and there is some ambiguity in the terminology that Freud himself uses which leaves open the possibility that the particular kind of ‘thing presentations’ that are at work in the unconscious are still in some sense ‘representational’; they are not seen by Freud as being at a deeper level of things in themselves that are completely mute, that are completely outside language.

But there is also a difference between aphasia and hysteria that we need to take into account before we move on. The difference between aphasia and hysteria, for Freud, lay in the possible link between causation and cure. This link, of course, was partly to do with the fact that the cause was not a physical lesion, but as it were, the ‘lesion of an idea’ (Forrester, 1980). Hysterical symptoms were formed when an unpleasant experience resonated with repressed memories from the past infant state. The contemporary idea joined with the repressed ideas and so themselves lost touch with the moderating influence of verbal consciousness. They were lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: psychology after the unconscious
• Part I Freud
• Part II Lacan
• References
• Index