#treib

Brunnen

In Freud’s essay “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” he describes the subject’s nervous system as an “apparatus having the function of abolishing stimuli which reach it, or of reducing excitation to the lowest possible level. […] Let us for the present not take exception to the indefiniteness of this idea and let us grant that the task of the nervous system is –broadly speaking–to master stimuli.” (General Psychological Theory, pg. 74) [1] It is this propensity towards the mastery of stimuli that will prompt the subject to make an act upon reality to restore equilibrium (see fn. 10), an act which coincides with the formation of the subject’s ego. However, before we arrive at this point we must make a few important theoretical developments. The first of which is the terminological correlation of the libido with the nervous system. It is the nervous system itself that ‘experiences’ reality, however, it is the effect that the nervous system has on the equilibrium of subject’s libido that prompts the ego to act to restore it.[2] The reason for this is a curiosity in human psychosexual development outlined by Freud: humans are subordinated to a mental function which calls for the constant experience of pleasure (in the form of comfort, which serves to, at least metaphorically, equivocate equilibrium with comfort). In the early stages of a child’s development they are ‘polymorphously perverse’: enjoyment is experienced as undifferentiated and diffused across the entire body rather than located in specific ‘sites’ (the genitals, mouth, anus, etc.). The child’s libido is directionless at this stage; it has no object such that the child experiences reality as an undifferentiated sexual organ: all pleasure is in the order of sexual pleasure. The only structure it (the subject) has is that it is narcissistic: it is entirely concerned with the self and it is for this reason that pleasure at this stage is entirely ‘auto-erotic’. The subject’s desire for equilibrium, qua nervous system, subordinates them to the first of Freud’s basic mental functions, described in his essay “Two Principles of Mental Functioning”: the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle amounts to two forces acting on the subject’s libido (via the nervous system): one that is experienced internally and is the cause for the subject’s pleasure seeking and coincides with the subject’s narcissistic auto-eroticism, and one which is experienced as from without by subordinating the subject’s experience of (dis)pleasure to external objects of the ‘vital order’ of necessity (again, food or rather the lack of food is a good example). Initially, it is the excitation of the nervous system in the form of displeasure that compels the subject to act upon reality to find the corresponding object or action that will satisfy their needs.[3] The ‘finding of the object’ inscribes it irrevocably as a ‘libido object’: an object upon which the libido can ‘discharge’ or cathect onto for the experience of pleasure. For the subject the ‘libido object’ retains the cathected energy that the subject invested in it such that its appearance produces a corresponding motor response or excitation through the experience of the object relative to the disequilibrium (displeasure) produced by the objects absence. However, in ‘finding the object’ the subject inevitably runs into difficulty…

This ‘finding of the object’ moves the child from its ‘polymorphously perverse’ state and into a differentiated body: food, for instance, satisfies the empty feeling in my stomach, I thus attach a significance, or rather signification, to food as a means of alleviating a specific type of displeasure by putting it inside my body thus producing pleasure while the absence of food produces continues the displeasurable sensation. By taking the object inward, I correlate the object as the cause of the experience of pleasure or displeasure effect on my body. The negative or positive inscription of the libido object creates corresponding behavior: I seek out or attempt to avoid it in the world. In this way the object gains certain attributes: “The function of judgment is concerned ultimately with two sorts of decision. It may assert or deny that a thing has a particular property; or it may affirm or dispute that a particular image [Vorstellung] exists in reality. Originally the property to be decided might be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘useful’ or ‘harmful’.” (General Psychological Theory, pg. 219) Thus for Freud, the faculty of judgment corresponds with the differentiation of the world into internal and external. As well, a simultaneous development occurs: the subject gains awareness of themselves (their body) and reality (in the form of objects that are not them) through the act of consumption. This is the earliest form of the subject’s ego (or in Hegelese: they become a self-positing “I”). Freud states further on:

The other sort of decision made by the function of judgment, namely, as to the real existence of something imagined […] It is now no longer a question of whether something perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is present in the ego as an image can also be re-discovered in perception (that is, in reality). Once more, it will be seen, the question is one of external and internal. What is not real, what is merely imagined or subjective, is only internal; while on the other hand what is real is also present externally. (General Psychological Theory, pg. 219)

It is in this way that the object somehow becomes more than what it is: it gains identity and difference relative to the subject. The subject themselves is therefore engendered in relationship to an object that they pursue for their enjoyment. This act of consumption, which amounts to negation, constitutes the movement of the object as a pure undifferentiated phenomenal impression to its possession of a ‘specular identity’: the image of the object and its capacity to be discretely identified (via its traits and properties) gives it a unity. For both Freud and Lacan this primordial act of signification amounts to the process of ‘identification’. Identification is synonymous with the transcendental differentiation and recognition of unity implied above in Hegel’s account (re-signified by Lacan as an ‘imaginary’ process, see below) and the Freudian account: “First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie...and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality which is shared with some other person.” (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pg. ) The final mode of identification, i.e. the capacity of the subject to locate a trait in the field of the other that they ‘identify with’, will be the final step in the formation of the subject’s ego.

This affirmation or denial of the reality or attributes of an object bears a strong resemblance to what Hegel develops in §171: the subject is what grants the presentation of nature its signification as a ‘vital order’. Their initial act of negation (putting something outside of me inside of me) was a ‘positing’ that Life was not an undifferentiated universal substance but a finite substance that could be differentiated and consumed. It was this act that structured nature into binaries (subject and object, objective and subjective, internal and external) through the ‘negating’ activity of transcendental imagination (the assertion of identity and difference) so that it was experienced as such.

Hegel states earlier on: “To the extent, then, that consciousness is independent, so too is its object, but only implicitly. Self-consciousness which is simply for-itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative element, or is primarily desire, will therefore, on the contrary, learn through experience that the object is independent.” (PhoS, §168) This ‘experience’ of the object as independent, again, comes from the ‘vital order’ or the subject’s need for sustenance. This primordial desire causes the subject to act on the world and prompts the division of the infinity of nature into discrete, differentiated ‘independent shapes’. For Hegel eating constitutes a negative action that transforms objective reality. Negation in its psychoanalytic conception (outlined by Jean Hyppolite in his spoken commentary on Freud’s essay “Negation” in Seminar I) maintains these Hegelian elements but is highly informed by structural linguistics to achieve a more schematic function: it is the act of making something absent present and vice-versa through signification; it manifests as a ‘not’ or a ‘ne pas’ in relationship to an object. This first act of negation is not the initial ‘consumption’ or ‘destruction’ of the object but the inscription of the memory of unity with the object (the pinning of  a signifier to a signified) and the sense impression of satiation (which, though the act of remembering, manifests as enjoyment). Freud states:

The contrast between what is subjective and what is objective does not exist from the first. It only arises from the faculty which thought possesses for reviving a thing that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as an image, without its being necessary for the external object still to be present. Thus the first and immediate aim of the process of testing reality is not to discover an object in real perception corresponding to what is imagined, but to re-discover such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there. (Freud’s Papers on Metapsychology, Pg. 220)

When the infant experiences their ‘object’ a second time to replicate the remembered positive feeling of satiation and by chance they find it lacking then they experience the disunity between the remembered sense impression and the actual experience such that they become divorced. The memory becomes a transcendental ideal, the satiation experienced now manifests as lost enjoyment which the subject attempts to replicate through repetition, the ‘object choice’ and the need that it satisfies become divorced as well: the object is now experienced to recapture enjoyment rather than fully being for the sake of self-preservation. It is at this juncture that human’s become irrevocably separate from animals. As well, an important similarity and difference emerges between Hegel and Freud: the Freudian subject is profoundly nostalgic in that it desires an originary unity with the ‘libido object’ such that has a passing similarity to the alienation from the object that the Hegelian subject experiences (earlier on in A. Consciousness). A notable difference emerges when one considers that, while Hegel’s subject is profoundly alienated from the object (such that it starts consciousness’s phenomenological activity), it is not a necessarily primordial unity that they are looking for at this stage. Rather, the subject is looking for ‘self-certainty’. It is this difference that points towards a striking similarity in both Freud and Hegel’s accounts: it will be the presence or absence of the other (qua object) such that it can be negated that will affirm the subject’s self-certainty. It will be this desire for self-certainty that will cause both subjects to eventually forego self-preservation for the sake of an object. This is anticipated by Freud when we consider that we already have a subject who is ready pursue an object which persists as an internal presentation (in their memory) –in other words, a subject who is compelled to repeat an original pleasure. In this sense, human desire emerges as always-already abstract and necessarily exceeds the concerns of self-preservation.[4] The extreme example of this is the Hegelian ‘struggle to the death’ for ‘pure prestige’ in the master/slave dialectic. For Freud, the other will emerge in the primordial experience of the mother: a specular image that is comprised of various vital libido or ‘partial objects’. Hegel will in turn posit that the experience of ‘nature’ (the vital order of necessity) necessarily implies an other…

In §171 consciousness relearns its independence and discovers the mutual dependence of the objective and subjective, nature and man, perception and reality.[5] Life or nature is not independent rather “Life consists in being the self-developing whole which dissolves its development and in this movement simply preserves itself.” (PhoS, §171) Or in other words, it is the simultaneous movement of its own mechanisms (the vital order of necessity) and the subject’s intuition of it as such. Thus “Life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus.” (PhoS, §172) Specifically, Life points to ‘the other’ properly: another consciousness. It is with this other consciousness that the subject will undergo the same dialectic it underwent with nature: they will have to recognize their mutual identity, reality, and codependence (PhoS, §173). In the subject’s encounter with the other they self-posit their truth or reality by negating and destroying them. In their encounter they experience their Desire. The subject behaves psychotically by asserting their nothingness and treating them like an object to be consumed:

The simple ‘I’ is this genus or the simple universal, for which the differences are not differences only by its being the negative essence of the shaped independent moments; and self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life; self-consciousness is Desire. Certain of the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner. (PhoS, §174)

The “I” at this phase is undifferentiated and simple (corresponding to the infant in the Oedipal complex). The only way it can affirm itself and affirm difference by being the ‘negative essence’ of ‘independent moments’ (that is repeating the negative act of ‘reaching out’ grabbing an object and consuming it). However, the enjoyment garnered from the destruction of the other makes the subject aware that the object (the other) has its own truth or independence. The temptation here is to phrase this in terms of literal violence: the subject comes to rely on this satisfaction from killing the other as the means of positing themselves (granting them their self-certainty) and in doing so becomes reliant on the other. Implied in this reading is that the subject finds more ‘others’ to kill to affirm their self-certainty (presumably until they encounter a ‘master’ with which they struggle until they are enslaved). However, Hegel’s vocabulary is technical, the destruction or negation of the object does not coincide with the disappearance of the other. Further, the ‘side’ that the other emerges on is not clearly objective or external. Thus,

…self-consciousness, by its negative relation to the object, is unable to supersede it; it is really because of that relation that it produces the object again and the desire as well. It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of Desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has itself realized this truth. But at the same time it is no less absolutely for itself, and it is so only by superseding the object and it must experience its satisfaction, for it is the truth. On account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself; and it must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is. (PhoS, §174)

The reproduction of this satisfaction can now only be performed by the other’s negative action. If we recall, in the Oedipal complex the mother herself is struggling for identity in relation to the infant (what could said to be a desire for recognition). Truly, and somewhat absent from the more phenomenological description of Freud’s theory of object relations above, the subject has only been interfacing with their mother. At the stage described above she is only a ‘libido object’ and thus has the status of a ‘partial object’: a bundle of different ‘libido objects’ or objects of desire that arrived upon the infants cry or call. The way in which she gains her own specular unity beyond that of a partial object is through her presence and absence that coincides with the presence and absence of the subject themselves. Hegel here is explicit: satisfaction is what drives the subject to undergo this negating relationship with the other. The subject’s self-certainty emerges as fragile, it will disappear if there is no other to negate, or rephrased, it will disappear if the desire of the other is absent such that the subject is unable to comport themselves in relationship to it. In so far as the ‘other’ that the subject is encountering is the Freudian mother: her capacity to be negated coincides with the status of the subject relative to their own being: existent or nonexistent. Following Hegel, she must be willing to be negated in order for the subject to affirm themselves. In this way, the subject divines that the presence of the breast, voice, or gaze (the partial libido objects that constitute the subject’s pre-Oedipal world) is contingent upon a subject (an other) who desires to be negated. The mother’s desire unifies the partial objects of the infant’s world into a being proper: a being whose unity is recognized in the presentation of a specular image. Or rephrased, the desire of the other is recognized in the convergence of these partial objects into a unified being implied by a specular image that can be present or absent (and thus affirm or disaffirm the subject) according to their (the other’s) caprice. And it is through the experience of this image that the subject truly begins to constitute themselves as “I”. Specifically, the “I” that is the cause of the other’s desire.

[1] Freud, Sigmund, and Philip Rieff. General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. New York: Touchstone, 2008.

[2] This is a theoretical oversight in Freud that forces him to abandon his biologistic model of the subject and their desire to restore equilibrium with their environment (outlined in his Project for a Scientific Psychology). Lacan in Seminar II notes experiments popular in Freud’s time of putting acid on a frogs leg to trigger a motor response or ‘reflex’ in the frog’s nervous system to ‘rid itself’ of the acid. This ‘reflex arc’ is a model used in contemporary physiological psychology: a stimulus enters through a ‘receptor’ into a sensory neuron where it is channeled into a ‘sensory cell body’; in turn it is processed in the spinal cord through an ‘association neuron’. The stimulus then ‘exits’ by being channeled through a ‘motor cell body’, then a corresponding motor neuron which acts on an ‘effector’ in the form of a response. This stimulus/response model is used by Freud himself and he attempts with The Project to make his theory of the unconscious compatible with contemporary neurology. That is until he runs into a problem which does not follow the rule of equilibrium. Lacan states: “He realizes that what comes out of one of the systems – that of the unconscious – has a very particular insistence… what has been translated into French as automatisme de repetition, Wiederholungzwang [compulsion to repeat].” (Seminar II, pg. 61) The reason for this is the disequilibrium is the introduction of the ego in the form of repression which coincides with the creation of the unconscious. As well, this disrupts Freud’s theory of the libido as ‘hydraulic’ or ‘pressurized’. This will be developed further on.

[3] “A new function is now entrusted to motor discharge, which under the supremacy of the pleasure-principle […] it is now employed in the appropriate alteration of reality. It is converted into action.” (General Psychological Theory, pg. 4)

[4] It is this curiosity that ultimately breaks the Freudian account of the pleasure/reality principle given above. Lacan’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle affirms that it is the death drive that marks the zenith of Freud’s theory and places Beyond as the site of a pressing theoretical tension in Freud’s work. In Lacan’s elaboration in Seminar XI ‘death drive’ is simply rephrased as ‘drive’. He homogenizes Freud’s account of instinct (or Trieb in Freud’s usage, a usage that implies that Lacan’s reimagining of the drive was already implicit in Freud’s work), the pleasure/reality principle, and the death drive into something more theoretically felicitous but conceptually horrifying: drive is that which makes the subject disappear, sunders the other into partial objects, and plunges the subject into the abyss of the real. It is a radically heterogeneous impulse: it has no object, it is internally contradictory, and fragments and misconstrues the body into various erogenous zones. It structures the subject’s behavior in the form of a subterranean motivation of which the subject has no awareness of and achieves its aims at the expense of the subject themselves. It cannot be understood in any normal sense as it resides beyond language. It can only be traced: the drive ultimately manifests as repetitive painful enjoyment (such that it cannot be recognized). This will be elaborated further on.