Before proceeding further along these lines, I need briefly to indicate that my focus on guilt is not dictated by the reasons and worries of practical philosophy. That is to say, my exploration of affective life at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology isn’t steered by ethical or moral interests and agendas. I am much more concerned here with description over prescription (to resort hesitantly in passing to a problematic and unstable dichotomy). I dwell on guilt in particular because it’s the one affect above all others to which Freud almost always refers when he speculates about the possibility of affects being unconscious. This pride of place in Freud’s texts is what leads to the prominence of guilt as a paradigmatic example in my discussions.
Regarding the preceding philosophical thread, if guilt indeed is a fundamental philosophical affect in relation to ethics—at least in Kant’s shadow, it certainly seems to be—then Freud’s psychoanalytic discoveries and their aftershocks (both within post-Freudian psychoanalytic movements and in wider circles without) introduce some serious complications. These complications have to do with both the consciousness of guilt (as conscience) and affective mental dynamics more generally. To begin with, analyses of the workings of conscience are part of what prompted Freud to undertake a massive revision of his basic theoretical framework in the middle of his mature career (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920), a revision in which the pleasure principle is dethroned from its previously central position as the inviolable law of psychical life. Self-inflicted suffering in the form of conscience-induced guilt is somewhat more difficult to explain under the pre-1920 metapsychological regime (i.e., the “first topography” or “topographical model” of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious), which is centered on the hegemonic pleasure principle. Along with this sweeping shift “beyond the pleasure principle,” Freud after 1920, in The Ego and the Id (1923), introduces the agency of the superego as part of the new triumvirate (including the id and ego) of the “second topography” (or “structural model”). The outlines of this agency already are foreshadowed in the seminal paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in which an intrapsychical function of surveying and supervising the ego’s position vis-à-vis the ego-ideal (i.e., what the ego aims to be), identified by Freud as “conscience,” is highlighted.2 However, despite Freud’s employment in 1914 of the everyday word conscience for this mental ministry of judgment and punishment, it soon becomes apparent to him that his later renaming of this as superego amounts to more than the superficial semantic substitution of technical for quotidian language.
One of the crucial philosophical upshots of the Freudian conception of the superego is that not all of conscience is conscious. With the transition from the first to the second topographies in Freud’s thinking in the early 1920s, the triad of the conscious-preconscious-unconscious isn’t simply dislodged and replaced by that of the id-ego-superego; moreover, for numerous reasons, one cannot legitimately establish one-to-one correlations here such as “consciousness = ego” or “unconscious = id” (which are based on the erroneous notion that the transition between topographies involves nothing more than simple substitutions). Instead, the three terms of the first topography change from being nouns (designating metaphorically spatial sectors within a map of the psyche’s regions) to operating as adjectives. As adjectives, they modify the three agencies of the second topography. Specifically apropos both the ego and superego, this means that there are unconscious as well as conscious dimensions to these two agencies.3 Considering this, Freud declares, in connection with the psychoanalytic positing of an unconscious side of conscience, that “the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows.”4 If much of the content composing the superego (i.e., injunctions, prohibitions, and the like) is inaccessible to self-conscious introspection, circumstances easily can arise in which someone unknowingly has violated a command or rule to which he/she holds him-/herself accountable without being cognizant of this hidden standard. Put somewhat more straightforwardly, a person can disobey his/her conscience without being conscious of doing so. As Freud sees it, although the conscious ego isn’t aware of the infraction, the intrapsychically omniscient superego certainly is. And, there are consequences.
But, what, exactly, are these consequences? The most common and, for psychoanalytic metapsychology, least problematic consequent phenomenon is a consciously experienced feeling of seemingly groundless, irrational guilt, a sense of culpability minus the awareness of a transgression as a preceding cause. (This situation sometimes results in what Freud characterizes as individuals becoming “criminals from a sense of guilt,” that is, precipitously acting out in transgressive manners so as paradoxically to create a definite cause for a preceding, already-felt sense of indefinite guilt that is free floating:5 in 1916, Freud discusses these sorts of individuals as instances of typical “character types” dealt with in analyses.) In the case of seemingly inexplicable guilt feelings, consciousness of guilt as an affect is cut off from its appropriate ideational correlates, from its corresponding representations (Vorstellungen that, in this instance, remain unconscious). This sort of guilt-in-search-of-a-crime is indeed a phenomenon encountered in analytic work. More generally, analysts from Freud onward consider the occurrence of affects split off from their real representational partners to be ubiquitous phenomena regularly surfacing within the four walls of the consulting room. However, as I will demonstrate later, other potential consequences of driving a wedge between conscience and what is conscious via the hypothesis that there are unconscious dimensions of the superego generate theoretical problems for both Freud and subsequent psychoanalytic theorizing, problems that, arguably, have yet to be satisfactorily resolved at the level of coherent metapsychological conceptualizations.
In connection with the affect of guilt, one can get a preliminary sense of the difficulties Freud comes to face through considering the following questions: Does guilt actually feel different when one is cognizant of its true cause as compared with how it feels when one isn’t cognizant of this? Is the latter experience always going to register itself consciously as a feeling that could or would be called “guilt,” at least by he/she who registers it? If not, what other feelings, if any other than a clear sense of culpability, will arise instead? Additionally, is it possible for someone to feel guilty without being (fully) conscious of feeling this way? If so, what justifies, both clinically and conceptually, supposing that one can feel without feeling that one feels, namely, that there can be, so to speak, unfelt (or, more accurately, misfelt) feelings?
Interestingly, as I indicated earlier, guilt is the primary affect Freud mentions when entertaining speculations about the existence of unconscious affects in certain of his patients. A standard scholarly story about this topic is that, until the second topography, Freud dismisses the notion of unconscious affects as incoherent and self-contradictory. If feelings, as feelings, always are felt, then how could it make sense to speak of affects as anything other than experiences transpiring within consciousness? Then, so the story goes, with the developments of the second topography as regards the topic of the superego, Freud is compelled to reconsider, if not wholly abandon, his prior metapsychological conviction that affects must be conscious phenomena. As will be seen herein shortly, matters are much more complicated.
As early as 1907, Freud muses about the need to posit the existence of “an unconscious sense of guilt.”6 Hence, one should note that this notion occurs to Freud well before the foundational manifesto of the second topography published in 1923 (The Ego and the Id). More importantly still, this occurs to him before the metapsychological paper on “The Unconscious” (1915). Therein, in the third section, “Unconscious Emotions” (“Unbewußte Gefühle”), Freud appears categorically to rule out the theoretical legitimacy of hypothesizing affects that aren’t conscious.7 And yet, there are arguments to be made to the effect that this section of “The Unconscious” has been repeatedly misinterp
reted by numerous commentators (Lacan included): if, in 1907, Freud already entertains ideas about unconscious emotions, then maybe his remarks in 1915 about this topic need to be carefully reread in light of this generally overlooked textual fact. What’s more, this rereading, to be carried out subsequently, reveals Freud to be, once again in yet another fashion, quite ahead of his time. In particular, his metapsychological distinctions, contained in the third section of “The Unconscious,” between “affective structures” (Affektbildungen), “affects” (Affekte), “emotions” (Gefühle), and “feelings” (Empfindungen)8—he also points to how these phenomena might be “misconstrued” by those experiencing them9—foreshadow the insights and results of the latest cutting-edge research in affective neuroscience (especially the work of Antonio Damasio, but also that of such researchers as Joseph LeDoux, Jaak Panksepp, and Mark Solms, among others).
So, at this juncture, perhaps it sounds as though what is to be done in the present context is merely to integrate this subcomponent of the Freudian apparatus more thoroughly into the overarching framework of contemporary neuro-psychoanalysis. However, what goes by the name “neuro-psychoanalysis” these days is an English-speaking orientation whose psychoanalytic components are drawn almost exclusively from Anglo-American strains of post-Freudianism (i.e., ego psychology, object-relations theory, and so on). Save for such remarkable exceptions as Slavoj Žižek, François Ansermet, Gérard Pommier, and Catherine Malabou, few thinkers versed in Lacanian (and, more broadly, French) styles of psychoanalytic theorizing have made attempts at reconciling Lacan’s concepts with the discoveries of the neurosciences. There is as much additional work to be done here as there is resistance to the pursuit of such labors. The historical, cultural, political, institutional, theoretical, and other reasons for this resistance are myriad; an attempt at exhaustively delineating the multifaceted background behind the deeply ingrained hostility to the life sciences so pervasive within the relatively recent intellectual traditions rooted in Continental Europe is something for another occasion.10 For now, suffice it to say that, as will be argued here (and as I argue elsewhere),11 the deliberate, principled neglect of biology and related fields is no longer justified or defensible, psychoanalytically or philosophically, on either Lacanian or non-Lacanian grounds. Moreover, both Lacanian psychoanalysis and neuro-psychoanalysis stand mutually to benefit from being interwoven in ways motivated by a meticulous reconsideration of Freudian theories of affect in conjunction with data from the scientific investigation of the emotional brain. In particular, various yet-to-be-resolved difficulties plaguing Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology, including the problem of unconscious affects bequeathed by Freud to his successors, can be reconsidered now in a new, more empirically sound manner. A priori fist banging and foot stamping about these issues has ceased to be effective, credible, or necessary.
Of course, not only is Lacan’s apparent allergy to the life sciences well known; he is notorious, particularly among those of a poststructuralist bent, for allegedly ignoring affects altogether.12 A chorus comprising Lacanianism’s discontents tirelessly rehearses the charge that Lacan, going against what is said to be essential to the psychoanalytic endeavor both within and beyond the clinical setting, neglects everything that won’t be squeezed into the confines of the conceptual boxes constructed along the lines of classical structuralism. The tyranny of the signifier ostensibly imposed by Lacan is, from this perspective, to be countered through recovering and reemphasizing Freud’s energetics, including his reflections on affective dynamics (but not through engaging in the least with what the sciences have to say regarding these matters).
Admittedly, Lacan is not without his own direct responses to this line of criticism. His reaction to this charge of affect neglect consists in a mixture of questionable consistency involving both protests of innocence (à la “I devoted the entirety of my tenth seminar of 1962–1963 to the topic of anxiety”) and aggressive counterattacks targeting the foundational assumptions of his critics (à la “Freud himself stipulates that the unconscious, as the proper object of psychoanalysis, is woven solely of Vorstellungen, and not affects”). The latter predominates: Lacan and his followers repeatedly appeal to Freud’s remarks from 1915 in “The Unconscious” regarding affects to defend their being relatively downplayed in Lacanian psychoanalysis. (The Lacanian analyst Colette Soler reiterates this line in her book on Les affects lacaniens, published in 2011.)13 If this appeal to Freudian authority is undermined by a reexamination of Freud’s texts (i.e., another “return to Freud,” conducted at least in the spirit of Lacan, if not to his letter) as already outlined in preview, then what are the ramifications for the Lacanian handling (or, maybe, mishandling) of affective life? Is Lacan’s sole remaining fallback option his discussion of anxiety in the tenth academic year of le Séminaire?
The tenth seminar indeed deserves sustained attention in the context of this discussion of affects. Additionally, a flurry of recent activity by various notable Lacanians latches onto remarks made by the later Lacan regarding shame (honte) in the seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. As with anxiety, here too there seems to be exculpatory evidence in favor of Lacan against accusations of ignoring affects. Additionally, Lacan’s articulations concerning jouissance and related notions perhaps harbor resources for addressing productively the worries and reservations of his poststructuralist critics. I will be making further moves pushing off from this later. For instance, an illuminating contrast between honte and pudeur (both sometimes are translated somewhat misleadingly into English as “shame”) will be highlighted and deployed so as to bring into sharper relief core features of the hybrid psychoanalytic-neuroscientific-philosophic account of affects to be formulated by me in the present project. This clarifying distinction between honte and pudeur, although implicit within Lacan’s oeuvre, has been left thus far unthematized and unelaborated by both Lacan and his readers. Its implications dovetail in surprising ways with the neglected nuances of Freud’s oft-misunderstood metapsychology of affects both conscious and unconscious.
At the broadest of levels, there’s a real irony in Lacan’s treatment of the psychoanalytic (in)significance of affects in light of his depiction of what is truly revolutionary in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which is distinct from this concept’s earlier historical forerunners and precursors. Lacan sees an unconscious capable of highly elaborate and complex cognitive maneuverings, and not a simple nonconscious domain of raw, unthinking animalistic instincts acting as brute, stupid mechanisms.14 For instance, in his 1960 écrit “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan appropriately corrects Freud’s self-misunderstanding of the status and implications of his subversive breakthrough. As is common knowledge, Freud compares his decentering of human beings’ mental lives away from consciousness, a decentering according to which “man is no longer master in his own house,” to the steps taken by such explorers as Copernicus and Darwin before him.15 According to Freud, just as heliocentrism evicts humanity’s earth from the center of a universe-become-centerless, and just as evolution turns the transcendent crown of creation into an immanent by-product of contingent monkey business tracing back to the muck of a primordial ooze, so too does the psychoanalytic doctrine of the psychical primacy of the unconscious inflict yet another wound on human beings’ narcissism, their sense of somehow being at the central helm of things, if only within the limited realms of their own minds. But, Lacan observes, Freud’s emphasis on this wounding effect of such Copernican-style revolutions, however accurate it may be in particular respects, risks leaving silently passed over, and certainly involves no mention of, a powerful narcissistic secondary gain (to put it in Freud’s own terms) accompanying such upheavals in knowledge. Although the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin lead individuals to reconceive of themselves as insignificant, smaller-than-specks blobs of cosmic dust floating in a disorientingly vast void of incomprehensible dimensions, these same individuals at least can take s
ome pride and joy in knowing that they are blobs who know just how miniscule and meaningless they are.16 In a very different context of concerns, Pascal already expresses this well: “Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched” (La grandeur de l’homme est grande en ce qu’il se connaît misérable. Un arbre ne se connaît pas miserable).17 He continues: “Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched” (C’est donc être misérable que de [se] connaître misérable; mais c’est être grand que de connaître qu’on est misérable).18 What Lacan succeeds at revealing is that Freud’s comparison of his psychoanalysis with Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Darwin’s evolution is misleading insofar as it obscures from view a more profound injury to humanity’s sense of itself, an injury covered over by the superficial picture of the narcissistic wound of intellectually acknowledging certain scientifically revealed decenterings. This injury afflicts knowledge itself, the source of the Pascalian feeling of “greatness in wretchedness” spontaneously secreted as a salve for human beings’ narcissism by the very same wounding breakthroughs with which Freud inaccurately compares his own advances.
From Lacan’s perspective, Freudian psychoanalysis, unlike heliocentrism and evolution, subverts the figure of the traditional subject of knowledge, of knowing being anchored in the psychological phenomena of a transparent-to-itself self-consciousness. One of the implications of Freud’s barring of any straightforward equivalence or synonymy between the mental and the conscious is that one can think without thinking that one thinks, that one can know without knowing that one knows. (This equivalence is a long-standing assumption in the philosophical tradition that Freud had to fight fiercely against and that nowadays has been utterly invalidated by a deluge of facts uncovered by other, nonpsychoanalytic approaches to the mind.) Hence, knowledge itself, rather than remaining as a comforting narcissistic secondary gain alongside Freud’s mislabeled Copernican revolution, is threatened to various extents, cast into a morass of doubts in the shadow of the psychoanalytic unconscious. But, what is the previously mentioned irony in the Lacanian depiction of affective life in relation to his critique of the Copernican metaphor for the Freudian revolution? Whereas Lacan insists that one can think without thinking that one thinks and that one can know without knowing that one knows, he nowhere, not even for the briefest of fleeting moments in connection with Freud’s vacillations apropos whether affects can be unconscious, entertains the idea that maybe one somehow can feel without feeling that one feels. The key question is: why not?
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