The Infinite Question

Christopher Bollas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134026630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In his latest book Christopher Bollas uses detailed studies of real clinical practice to illuminate a theory of psychoanalysis which privileges the human impulse to question. From earliest childhood to the end of our lives, we are driven by this impulse in its varying forms, and The Infinite Question illustrates how Freud's free associative method provides both patient and analyst with answers and, in turn, with an ongoing interplay of further questions.

At the book's core are transcripts of real analytical sessions, accompanied by parallel commentaries which highlight key aspects of the free associative method in practice. These transcripts are contextualised by further discussion of the cases themselves, as well as a wider theoretical framework which places its emphasis on Freud's theory of the logic of sequence: by learning to listen to this free associative logic, Bollas argues, we can discover a richer and more complex unconscious voice than if we rely solely on Freud's theory of repressed ideas.

Bollas demonstrates, in an eloquent and persuasive manner, how the Freudian position of evenly suspended attentiveness enables the analyst's unconscious to catch the drift of the patient's own unconscious. He also shows that to stimulate further questioning is often of more benefit to the analytical process than to jump to an interpretation. Yet whatever fascinating course a session may take, neither the patient nor the analyst can halt the progress of the self-propelling interrogative drive.

The Infinite Question will be invaluable to both the new student and the experienced psychoanalyst, read either on its own or as a practice-based extension of the theoretical ideas elaborated in its companion volume, The Evocative Object World (also published by Routledge).

1

This world without end

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud proposed that a dream organises mental issues of ‘psychic intensity’ that occur during the day into highly condensed images (the dream) that weave such daily experiences into the psychic history of a self. ‘There is no need to underestimate the importance of the psychical intensities which are introduced into the state of sleep by these residues of daytime life,’ he wrote,⁷ curiously anticipating his own subsequent neglect of this form of unconscious organisation.

Discussing the mechanisms of dream formation, Freud explained: ‘The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream thoughts is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out.’⁸ He argued that a dream is organised during the day—indeed, it may take several days to appear—and the demands of the various ideas competing for representation mean that they have to be converted into images that can embody many ideas at one time.

Later in the dream book Freud argued that the manifest dream content reflected the work of a censor—in other words, that the images were distorted in order to avoid transparency. This could indeed be one reason why the unconscious would employ the mechanism of condensation. In opting for a theory of dream life organised centrally around evasion of the censor, Freud seemed to limit his theory of unconscious thought. He was, however, quite aware that there was more to it than this. In his essay on the unconscious he wrote: ‘everything that is repressed must remain unconscious; but let us state at the very outset that the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious’—indeed, ‘the unconscious has a wider compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious.’⁹

In distinguishing between the repressed and the descriptive unconscious, psychoanalysis developed an unnecessary privileging of so-called dynamic, repressed unconscious material over other ideas that happened to be in the unconscious but were not conflictual and were not part of the sexual or aggressive dynamic. However, in order to appreciate fully the richness of Freud’s dream book—especially his crucial theory of condensation—it is necessary to recognise that he proposed, by implication, a comprehensive theory of unconscious thinking that involved far more than the simple concept of repression.

Indeed, readers of the dream book must at times wonder why, if the forces of repression were so powerful, Freud was able to decode a dream with such success. Psychoanalysts working with a patient’s dreams, at least in my experience, do not tend to encounter some powerful censor seeking to divert elucidation of the dream. On the contrary. As one works with a dream, breaking down its single images into thousands of words, the analyst discovers, generally without too much resistance, a remarkable universe of thought. Indeed, long before Freud, we observe a conscious interest of people in what their dreams ‘mean’.

In fact the availability of dreams for associative deconstruction poses quite different problems. The censor here is time itself. A dream opens a door to an infinity of meaning, yet few psychoanalysts and analysands these days are able to devote the time that Freud gave himself in the dream book to the exploration of a single dream.

By opting for the dynamic unconscious—the unconscious that carries conflicted sexual and aggressive dimensions—as the privileged order to which the analyst should attend, Freud finds a concept that assumes the function of a fetish. This theory will now ward off the unknowable depths that face all analysts—as they can now focus on seeking selective facts of a sexual or aggressive type. It is ironic indeed that these two drives would assume this fetishistic function, but it should not be altogether surprising, given Freud’s concept of a compromise formation.

What was the compromise? Freud essentially paid off the part of him which knew very well that unconscious mental life was deeply complex and far too intellectually attenuated to be guided entirely by sexual or aggressive drives and contents—but he had to offer up something that seemed credible as a stand-in for facing the unknown. Late-nineteenth-century Vienna could accept that dreams were encrypted visions of sex and violence; but it was too challenging to allow that they might be unconscious forms that thought the entirety of psychic life. Freud elected a kind of Reader’s Digest version of mental life—full of the romance of the sexual and the aggressive—to divert attention from the fuller implications of the world he discovered.

And what was that world?

In discovering the dream thoughts—revealed through free association—Freud wrote that they ‘emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible structure, with all the attributes of trains of thought familiar to us in waking life’. As an afterthought he added that ‘they are not infrequently trains of thought starting out from more than one centre, though having points of contact.’¹⁰ Just over two hundred pages later in his dream book, Freud returned to this insight: ‘It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds.’¹¹ No indeed, it was not easy. Freud consistently asserted that all these complex ideas had instinctual origins, but such a view reflected an almost auto-erotic evasion of his remarkable discovery—that the human mind moved according to a vast Mahlerian symphony of lines of thought emerging from different sources, converging now and then, and then radiating out to infinite space.

‘The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings,’ he wrote in the dream book. Approaching this unbounded world—not sealed in the order of the drives —he pushed on: ‘They are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought.’ What, then, could we possibly discover from this world without end? ‘It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close up that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.’¹²

I think Freud puzzled about why certain unconscious ideas are discoverable and others radiate out into infinity, never to be discovered. The challenge this poses—the infinite, the finite—certainly permeates our task in this book as we examine sessions from Arlene, Caroline and Annie. I think we will appreciate the dilemma facing Freud. ‘The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness,’ he wrote, implicitly recognising, in my view, that he knew he could never tell the story of the unconscious.¹³ Twenty pages later he added a coda:

The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communication of our sense organs.¹⁴

Freud (and subsequent psychoanalysts) defended against the complexity of this descriptive unconscious through the fetishisation of sexuality and aggression. It is ironic, therefore, that it was Freud himself who found a way to listen to the logic posed by the infinitely complex world of unconscious articulations.

2

A specially intrinsic connection

Freud acknowledged in The Interpretation of Dreams that there were many kinds of dreams, including those whose meaning was transparent: ‘While some dreams completely disregard the logical sequence of their material, others attempt to give as full an indication of it as possible.’¹⁵ However, it was the more complex, perplexing dreams that most drew his psychological attention. He argued that although such dreams defied easy understanding, this did not mean that they were without their own logic; indeed, they bore within their momentum an intrinsic connective reasoning.

Such dreams, he wrote, ‘reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time’.¹⁶ He then associated to Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican and The School of Athens, in which various poets and philosophers are represented pictorially in one group, brought together by association. ‘It is true that they were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top,’ he wrote, ‘but they certainly form a group in the conceptual sense.’¹⁷

It is at this point in his thinking that Freud concludes that dreams have a certain temporal logic. Acknowledging that dreams present details with precision, he notes:

Whenever they show us two elements close together, this guarantees that there is some specially intrinsic connection between what corresponds to them among the dream-thoughts. In the same way, in our system of writing, ‘ab’ means that the two letters are to be pronounced in the single syllable.¹⁸

Moments later he declared that there were two observable causalities in thought. ‘In both cases causation is represented by temporal sequence: in one instance by a sequence of dreams and in the other by the direct transformation of one image into another.’¹⁹

Here, pulling back perhaps from impossible questions—What does a dream mean? What does it represent?—Freud rests on the rocks of phenomenology to catch his breath. He notices, almost in passing, that a dream’s logic resides in part in its sequence of ideas.

From his observation that dreams flow according to a sequential logic, Freud would then discover his laws of free association. So far as the speaker was concerned, this was designed to be a discourse free of conscious linear sense—the subject was to enjoy a certain liberation from the knowledge of logical thought. Crucially, however, Freud realised that the order in which a person said what was on his or her mind revealed its own intrinsic logic.

This leap in Freud’s theory of the unconscious, however, was—and is—relatively unexplored. His theory of repression rested on the dramatic ‘accidental’ moment the slip that was to become linked to his name, when a person would spill the beans and have to grin and bear it. However, he never abandoned this other theory of unconscious communication. True to his observing mind, he had noticed a less juicy and more mundane aspect of speech: the temporal logic of unconscious articulation. All the time the patient was talking, he or she would be exposing through the simple order of spoken thoughts a hidden logic that was ultimately more revealing than the embarrassing moment heralded by the slip.

As we shall see in the cases to follow, it is this serial logic that discloses the subject’s desire, anxiety, memory and conflict. Embedded in the clusters of association—the assemblage of many lines of thought—Freud found the voice of the unconscious. Unlike the slip of the tongue or the relation between signifiers, this unconscious thinking functions not only in the verbal context, but also in the worlds of musical thought, painting thought, movement thought—indeed in all expressive arts, as each articulates its own contents through a sequence within its form.

3

Weaving in the factory of thought

In asking a dreamer to free associate, Freud was not soliciting the dreamer’s ideas about his or her dream. He was not turning to consciousness, either his own or the analysand’s, to see how they could figure it out. Instead, he took the view that the dreamer should simply report what he or she was thinking in the moment, regardless of how insignificant it seemed. In the days of the dream book Freud asked patients to shut their eyes when talking: ‘I began the treatment by assuring him that if he shut his eyes he would see pictures or have ideas, which he was then to communicate to me.’²⁰

The strategy was clear.

Freud asked his analysands to situate themselves in a dream-like place because he found that ideas spoken in this free manner (deferring conscious scrutiny until later) connected to the latent contents of the dream. We might say that the method of free association set up the rails down which those trains of free thought could then travel. It was not simply that Freud saw free association as a part of the dream—extended in part by the sleep-like disposition of the free-associating analysand; he regarded free associations as intrinsically interpretive.

The meaning of the chains of ideas being articulated would not, of course, be clear to begin with. The analyst would have to be patient and remain quiet. However, this stoical stance—the analyst frozen in neutrality—was to become an unfortunate form of practice embodied by those analysts who were waiting for the rarefied returns of the repressed: those golden moments when a signifier seemed to tell it all, or when a slip of the tongue arrived as a divine unconscious intervention. In the beginning, in the truly classical era of psychoanalysis, the analyst remained quiet because he was deeply engaged in a mutual process in which both participants were facilitating a flow of ideas that would prove illuminating.

It is crucial to our understanding of the cases to follow, as well as to our appreciation of this particular form of Freudian practice, to realise that Freud was not waiting for singular moments but was unconsciously following many lines of thinking. In ‘Studies on Hysteria’ he gave us some insight into the psychic form of a line of thought:

The logical chain corresponds not only to a zig-zag, twisted line, but rather to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one. It contains nodal points at which two or more threads meet and thereafter proceed as one.²¹

The three cases in this book will help us to see how complicated a process this form of listening is. Freud tells us that comprehending any logical chain of thought means following a zig-zag. But what exactly does this mean? Because of the nature of the dream-work—condensation, displacement, substitution, composites, and so forth—any unconscious idea is going to travel through many different forms. It may be packed inside an image containing other ideas, displaced as an affect onto another ‘innocent’ thought, substituted by a stand-in, compromised by melding with another single object. To follow any logical chain means travelling along tracks that move through many different forms of representation. So, as an unconscious idea follows its sequential path, it moves in and out of various modes of articulation in order to complete itself.

Freud ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 This world without end
• 2 A specially intrinsic connection
• 3 Weaving in the factory of thought
• 4 Listening
• 5 To catch the drift
• 6 Scoring the unconscious
• 7 ‘Arlene’
• 8 ‘Caroline’
• 9 ‘Annie’
• 10 Unconscious work
• 11 The infinite question
• Appendix
• Notes/References
• Index