Anamnesis & Regression: A Critique of Transparency (and Freud's Kant)

more reflections on Brayton Polka's "Depth Psychology, Interpretation, and the Bible"

Freud makes a very interesting reference to Kant in The Unconscious (which Polka is quite keen to break down):

Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object.

What does Polka think of Freud’s Kant? Well, his verdict is rather brutal:

His understanding of Kant remains pre-critical or animistic. Indeed, it is clear, I think, that his uncritical notion of inference reflects his primordial notion that human beings begin in immediate certainty of their own consciousness. This idea is reflected everywhere in his metapsychology, from the notions of original narcissism, the primal father, the primary process, and the pleasure principle to the priority of autoerotism over object relations (that is, the relationship of subjects) and of internality over externality.

Animistic? Yes, animistic. This is all made quite explicit by Freud in The Unconscious:

The psycho-analytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external perception.

In Kojin Karatani’s terms, this appears almost like a direct articulation of the perspectives associated with his two modes of gift exchange; mode A, the “closed,” nationalistic form, based on the affective projection of magic and spiritual self-overcoming to the circulation of the gift (as in the case of “hau” profiled by Marcel Mauss), and mode D, the “open,” cosmopolitan form, which he associates strongly with Kant’s philosophy, the form of the “unreciprocated gift” that allows us to orient towards the logic of the gift morally, without relying on the affective crutch of projecting consciousness in such magical terms.

Freud at once requires both assumptions to profile and interpret the unconscious; is this not, very roughly, a sort of “primary process” and “secondary process” distinction? What happens, then, when you submit Kantian transcendental critique to the primary process, as Polka is accusing Freud of doing? Karatani is quite defensive of Freud here, and seems to interpret his theory of the death drive as the possibility of the emergence of a “moral” secondary process out of the primary process itself, the self-binding of libidinal excitation. But is that really a “secondary process” at all? Is that not just a radicalization of the primary process? Despite himself, in his reading of Freud, I believe Karatani is closer than he wants to be to those “romantics” like Schelling who conceived of the unconscious as ontologically primordial. Karatani’s mode D is arguably a “cosmopolitan” form of precisely this—as I noted in a previous post, Polka extends Karatani’s critique of Jung’s “substantial unconscious” to Freud himself. I would maintain it can even be extended to Karatani—and to anyone who privileges something like the death drive (or even Eros—in its Platonic form, it’s death drive enough) as a metaphysical principle.

Now, let’s return to another claim of Polka’s regarding Freud: “his uncritical notion of inference reflects his primordial notion that human beings begin in immediate certainty of their own consciousness.” This is, effectively, Freud’s Cartesianism (or, if you prefer, his “metaphysics of presence”). Agata Bielik-Robson, herself a rebellious sort of psychoanalytic theorist, never ceases to point out how Cartesian Freud is. In Psychotheology of Forgetting, she compares him unfavorably to Nietzsche on this point:

The reason why Nietzsche and Freud differ so strongly on the issue of active forgetting (or motivated forgetting) is their very disparate conception of human subjectivity. Nietzsche rebels against the Cartesian paradigm of representing subjectivity as a substantial self-conscious centre of reflexive self-control and opts for a new understanding of the self as, above all, the subject of life. But Freud, despite his discovery of the unconscious, which only seemingly ruined the Cartesian paradigm, still operates with the Cartesian dogma that privileges reflexivity – and with it, memory, as one of the most important reflexive tools – over living practice.

Now, I am not so sure how stable this dualism is—the “substantial self-conscious centre of reflexive self-control” vs. “the subject of life”; “reflexivity” and “memory” vs. “living practice”—but it does open more seriously this question of life’s transparency to itself within the conscious mind, or “psychic apparatus.” Effectively, Freud is departing from consciousness on the premises of “naive” consciousness itself, whereas Nietzsche can already imagine consciousness at a certain distance from living process insofar as it is mere consciousness—nothing in itself and without any real immediacy to itself. However, it is easy to see how all of this just indicates Nietzsche’s own form of the metaphysics of presence, as the presence-to-self of the living organism, the living body’s will to power, and so on. Both Freud and Nietzsche share a certain sort of “animism” in this way; it is just that Freud’s is more “mental” whereas Nietzsche’s is more “vital.” The underlying principle of both approaches is to identify and inhabit a projective immediacy that then becomes the affective foundation of their post-romantic materialist metaphysics.

In Psychotheology of Forgetting, Bielik-Robson, interestingly, promotes a non-Cartesian reading of Donald Winnicott as a solution to the Nietzschean (and otherwise existentialist—she mentions Sartre) challenge to psychoanalysis:

Not all psychoanalysis is so devoted to the ideal of absolute memoriousness and self-transparent veridiction as was Freud, rightly called by Philip Rieff the ‘mind of the moralist’, obsessed with the issue of honesty, both personal and theoretical. The British psychoanalytic school knows significant deviations from this ideal, and so comes closer to Nietzsche’s suspicious position on ‘truth that kills’. For instance, Donald Woods Winnicott says, very much in accordance with Nietzsche, that the developing psyche needs an initial protection of darkness and unknowing in order to constitute what he calls a ‘deep self’. Unlike the ego, whose role is an ‘official’ representation of the whole of psychic life, the deep self, or the ego’s secret shadow, rests buried in the folds of the unconscious until it feels ready to rise to the surface. ‘It is joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found’, says Winnicott in Playing and Reality, pointing to the peculiar, narcissistic game of hide-and-seek, which the deep self plays with the external world. The self grows in hiding, and, as Winnicott goes on to imply, has an explicit need of non-communication. The self, therefore, is the instance which, psychoanalytically speaking, repeats the trauma of separation by simultaneously undoing its traumatic aspect: It breaks the continuity with the whole of the world, it forgets the pleromatic experience of the child’s communion with the mother, to establish itself as a ‘unit’, a singular distinct being. The self’s concealedness is driven by a secret timing that governs its slow and delayed process of maturation. It experiences joy in being hidden and then suddenly found. But the self does not want to be found before its time: to be found too early would mean to destroy ‘the murky shop’ (Nietzsche again) of its slowly ripening sense of distinction. Winnicott believes that without this break and active forgetting, which the deep self commits in secrecy, the future life of the adult will be plagued by the constant repetition of his or her family romance; in other words, there will be no future, only the past incessantly coming back in a series of transferences.

Does this Winnicottian psychoanalytic ethic advocated by Bielik-Robson require a rethinking of Freud’s notion of “consciousness” itself? Polka’s reading of Freud, quite aligned with Bielik-Robson’s in many respects, certainly would seem to indicate that it does.

Part of Polka's agenda here is to claim that we do not need to have such a clear neo-Cartesian "consciousness" which would require an unconscious utterly or radically alien to it—consciousness is already unconscious and vice versa, but the boundary between the two becomes more obvious, and more intense, the more we reify consciousness into an immediacy. This implies, equally, that the less immediate that consciousness is to itself, the more the boundary loosens, and the more complex and dialectical the relation between the within and the without of consciousness becomes— i.e., if we're grasping for a clear and immediate transparency of subjective experience, everything we exclude from that cognitive grasp becomes more "violently" opposed to it qua unconscious, but a more "two-way traffic" is possible, a dialectic of unconsciousness.

All of this, it seems to me, casts a really interesting light on Lacan's brilliant thesis from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that the psychoanalytic subject of the unconscious is a sort of Cartesian subject from the inside-out.

In a way, Lacan's "reductio" of Freud (which looks quite a bit like Polka’s, with the main difference being that Lacan accepts roughly the same radicalized Freudian position that Polka rejects on ethical grounds) is to privilege this unconscious cogito mechanism, instead of the conscious one; while Freud’s rhetorical bias is towards making the unconscious conscious, Lacan’s orientation is a more subtle one of helping us to plunge deeper into the unconscious and live to tell the tale, so to speak. But both Freud and Lacan are psychic "accelerationists" in a certain way—there is nevertheless a certain teleological goal they're constantly pressing for more of (imaginary though it may be, is the death drive not precisely teleology in its pure form?). Each of them position themselves along these two different sides of the cogito, but both effectively want this cogito to swallow up as much as possible—or assume that, regardless of our petty fantasies of individuation, it simply must.

Bielik-Robson's interpretation of Winnicott here allows for a "playful" navigation of the psychic split that doesn't so much privilege the cogitative force of one or another side; it's really just up to us how we want to work on positioning things. There's nothing to tell us that a single cognitive directionality is to be presupposed as desirable, and certainly not as compulsory, due to being under such a “shadow of death” that it forgets, perhaps, how much leverage we do have in transforming the precise conditions under which we live and die. That is to say, Freud’s Kant is “animistic” at precisely the point at which his is a Kant without any semblance of “freedom.” Can we not maintain a productive tension between the “animistic” productions of the primary process, and a “regulative idea” of potentiality which refuses to confuse itself essentially with, so to speak, what it is told about itself by its own sense of conscious or unconscious (im)mediacy?

This privileging of compulsion is intimately connected to the privileging of the primary process qua death drive, certainly. There's this element of both Freud and Lacan that is oriented towards this fantasy of infantile regression—any teleological “cognitive realization,” whether in “consciousness” or in “the real,” is just as much a form of regression into the infantile primary process, into the minimum degree of excitation which is the “ends” to which the pleasure principle constantly strives in its reversal into its opposite as the death drive.

Whether it's making-conscious or making-unconscious doesn't make much difference—it's two faces of the death drive, and they accompany each other at all times, so to speak. It’s the problem of “hypermnesia”—what Derrida describes as “the manipulative operation of hypermnesic reappropriation” in Ulysses Gramophone. Derrida describes Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a “hypermnesic machine”—remember, it’s precisely this book which provides the model for Lacan’s “sinthome,” which became the fundamental orienting psychoanalytic ethic of his teaching in its last period!

This is the root suicidality of the subject—to be amnesic is to be living, to be alive, and something in this seems unbearable. Plato's anamnesis is just as much an expression of a death drive principle; it's like mind turning to a stone. "Ah! I can feel the Platonic solidity from all sides! Panoramic photograph!" snap. It is, literally, the reduction of the self to an object—the immortal soul, the agalma, the objet a within that is too good for this amnesic world. Truth against the world, baby! It's the suicidal hatred of being a subject, of subjectivity. Most people really have no idea how deep this goes—just how many of our cultural neuroses are poorly worked-through death drive compulsions? Rather, it’s just how many aren’t that seems like the harder question. I think perhaps Freud's greatest insight is how foundational this is to the affective experience of so many people—I think every fantasy of escape, of "liberation" and so on, follows basically this logic. People don't want to hear it, but that's what it is. We're never satisfied with incremental changes insofar as what we want is death in life, a workable infantile regression. This isn’t just a critique of political radicals, but in a certain more fundamental way I would insist that it is the immanent logic of capitalism itself, as a certain practical realization of the death drive compulsion on a mass scale.

Because it is exactly this regression that the bourgeoisie are resolute in trying to achieve practically—a pure cocoon of self-expanding wealth. Of course all of these rich kids just do drugs and get high unto death—that's precisely what their parents worked for! In a certain perverse way, being an addict is as close as you can get to being bourgeois without really being one.

It's like what Kiarina Kordela says in Being, Time, Bios. People are constantly trying to simulate the experience of eternity in passive form, as consumers—whatever gets you that mystical high, the retreat into the cocoon. It's much harder to "generate" it through the “third kind of knowledge,” as Spinoza put it; to generate the sense of eternity without destroying or suspending anything, without regression, but just as a style of connection.