Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  To summarize simply a much longer and more complicated theoretical narrative—I will tell this tale at greater length in what ensues—Lacan accepts as self-evident the early Freud’s assumption that feelings, as feelings, must be felt consciously (with a parallel neglect of the early Freud’s overt, albeit hesitant and rare, speculations regarding unconscious affects). Linked to this acceptance is a corresponding endorsement of a fundamental Freudian dichotomy between, for lack of better terms, energy and structure. In the case of the Lacanian metapsychological articulation of emotional life, this is translated into an opposition between, on the one hand, affects (as necessarily conscious) and, on the other hand, signifiers (as representational structures participating in and constituting the unconscious). In tandem with going back to the lingering Freudian enigma of unconscious affects in light of recent research in affective neuroscience, perhaps it is time both to reconsider Lacan’s Freud-inspired dualism strictly partitioning signifiers and affects and, consequently, to reformulate the psychoanalytic metapsychology of ideational representations (Vorstellungen). These are two of the endeavors that I will attempt to carry out in what follows.

  Overall, the main thesis to be pursued by this project is that affects are reflexive, second-order phenomena (in a way similar to what Lacan, in the opening session of the seventh seminar of 1959–1960, asserts regarding desire: “it is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire”).19 That is to say, instead of being elementary givens that are irreducibly immediate experiences of phenomenal consciousness, the phenomena of affective life involve filterings, foldings, mediations, and redoublings that make these phenomena much more complex and much less self-evident than is usually suspected. One fashion of putting this loosely is that feelings are always the feelings of feelings. And, unconscious forces and factors subsist and operate in the gap between feelings and the feelings of feelings. Advancing and developing this thesis will require combining the resources of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and affective neuroscience in fashions forcing important modifications of both these fields. It also will require repudiating not only Descartes’s (as well as countless other philosophers’) equation of the mental with the conscious20—this repudiation obviously is foundational for psychoanalysis as a whole—but furthermore the Descartes who, when comparing sensory perceptions (as potentially misleading) to affective passions in The Passions of the Soul, declares, “we cannot be misled in the same way regarding the passions, in that they are so close and so internal to our soul that it cannot possibly feel them unless they are truly as it feels them to be.”21

  Contra this Cartesian immediacy and its correlates in quotidian intuitions, my analytically indebted depiction of affects as compound, hybrid, and mediated facets of the lives of psychical subjects, facets capable of becoming far from self-evident, is partially Hegelian in inspiration. Hegel arguably is the greatest and harshest critic in the entire history of philosophy of immediacy in all its guises. He convincingly proves again and again that unrecognized and misrecognized structures and dynamics of intricate, nuanced mediations immanently move within what appears to be the simple straightforwardness of supposedly isolated, self-sufficient givens of a purportedly stable, rock-bottom nature said to be incapable of further analytic decomposition. In manners symptomatic of their occupational tendencies and the preoccupations of their discipline, subsequent philosophers exploring Hegel’s criticisms of various versions of immediacy have tended to devote much less attention to affective phenomena than to those more “cognitive” topics dealt with by Hegel that have pointedly direct epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical upshots. To take a prominent contemporary example, the Anglo-American neo-Hegelian philosopher John McDowell, proudly walking in the footsteps of his Analytic philosophical predecessor Wilfrid Sellars,22 develops a powerful Hegel-inspired reconsideration of perception according to which the mediation of active conceptual spontaneity always already functions within the (ostensible) immediacy of passive perceptual receptivity; McDowell’s concerns, by his own admission, are primarily of an epistemological sort.23 My account of affective life herein fairly could be characterized as, in part, an extension of McDowell’s Hegelian epistemology of perceptual experience (qua cognitive) into the motivational and emotional realms of affective experience.

  A perhaps controversial aspect of my notion of misfelt feelings is its clearly implied claim that there is a truth to certain feelings at odds with what the first-person conscious awareness of the feeling subject takes these feelings really to be and be about. In other words, this concept of mine commits me to the thesis that feelings actually can be other than what they’re (mis)taken to be by the person having them, that people can be in error about their emotional lives. However disconcerting and counterintuitive this initially might be to some readers, it’s a fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis.

  The Marxist tradition (as represented by, for instance, Georg Lukács)24 similarly wagers that sharp discrepancies can and do separate the actual subjective consciousness of a socioeconomic group from what this (lack of) awareness should, could, and would be transformed into if this group were to achieve “class consciousness” based upon a correct comprehension of the objective truth of its social-historical-economic situation. (I am proposing that the latter consciousness, class consciousness strictly speaking, is analogous to, in psychoanalysis, the real feel of feeling masked by the conscious misfeeling of this same defended-against feeling.) Psychoanalysis and Marxism not only both cast weighty doubts on the authority and veracity of the experiences of individual and collective subjective consciousness, thereby rendering the appeals of such consciousness highly suspect; these two orientations share in common a confidence in there being truths to be grasped nonetheless amid these experiences they darken with their suspicions. The traditions launched by Marx and Freud thus come to find themselves moving against the prevailing winds of a postmodern Zeitgeist liquidating everything in the confusing verbiage of cheap relativisms and truthless game-playing.

  Additionally, the very origins of analysis in Freud’s pioneering early work with female hysterics hinge on the idea that there are indeed reasonable and rationally explicable factors underpinning even seemingly unreasonable and intellectually baffling affective phenomena. Freud took these women seriously and listened for the solutions to their problems in what they themselves had to say, unlike his colleagues and contemporaries, who generally and unsympathetically dismissed them as utterly irrational or labeled them as manipulative malingerers. Freud came to contend that the apparently inappropriate, excessive, and out-of-place affective outbursts of hysterics (e.g., intense anxiety or overwhelming disgust) were, in fact, quite appropriate responses to traumatic past experiences. However, realizing this required the deciphering work of analytic interpretation, in which these repressed traumas were raised to the light of consciousness out of the unconscious and brought into explicit, integrated connection with the conscious patient’s emotions and feelings. The crucial Freudian hypothesis here is that what the hysterical subject misfeels in such telling forms as phobias and psychosomatic conversion symptoms is, so to speak, madness with a method—namely, a rationally explicable distortion (distorted by intrapsychical defense mechanisms) of an originally reasonable affective response to an extremely painful past experience. Uncovering and revisiting past traumas reveals true feelings behind misfeelings. Freud lays down central components of the foundations of psychoanalysis by, in relation to his early hysterics, risking the hypothesis that there are latent and understandable truths behind these subjects’ manifestly incomprehensible and frustrating affects.

  In the spirit of Lacan’s reinterpretation of what is revolutionary in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which was glossed earlier, it could be maintained that one of the things psychical subjects know without knowing that they know (apart from signifier-encoded ideational knowledge) is how they “really feel” apart from their consciously registered self-representations of their underlying emot
ions and affects. Rather than epitomizing a sense of self-certainty (à la “If I know one thing for sure, it’s how I feel”), the phenomena of affective life should be recognized as being just as affected by the subversion of the subject of knowledge (i.e., Lacan’s “sujet de la connaissance”)25 as the mnemic, linguistic, and conceptual components of the psyche’s architecture. Not only does the later Freud suggest this possibility in connection with the topic of guilt; the neuroscience of the emotional brain clearly points to the reality of an affective unconscious that can be ignored by Lacanian and post-Lacanian strains of psychoanalysis only at the cost of their empirical soundness. Burying one’s head in the sands of theoretical doctrine isn’t a real option anymore.

  9.

  FEELING WITHOUT FEELING

  FREUD AND THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM OF UNCONSCIOUS GUILT

  A cursory survey of Freud’s works seems to reveal two incompatible positions situated in two distinct periods of his theorizing apropos the issue of the overlap (or lack thereof) between the domains of the unconscious and affective life. On the one hand, prior to the second topography, he tends to dismiss the notion of unconscious affects as oxymoronic (the decisive articulation of this stance being located in the third section on “Unconscious Emotions” of the metapsychological paper on “The Unconscious,” published in 1915). On the other hand, starting with The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud insists upon the existence of at least one unconscious affect, namely, “an unconscious sense of guilt” (unbewußten Schuldgefühl, unbewußtes Schuldgefühl).1 This shift of position on unconscious affects is integrally related to the introduction of the second topography—more specifically, it’s connected with this new topography’s concept of the unconscious dimension of the psychical agency of the superego. As I already noted (in the previous chapter), there are several serious problems with the simple story of a pre-1923 Freud of the first topography versus a post-1923 Freud of the second topography on the matter of an unconscious side of affective life.

  In his paper on “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), Freud refers to a guilt that remains unknown. He states: “We may say that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt [Schuldbewußtseins], of which, however, he knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious sense of guilt [unbewußten Schuldbewußtseins], in spite of the apparent contradiction in terms.”2 Several features of this statement deserve attention. To begin with, what testifies to this “sense of guilt” (Schuldbewußtseins), despite this German term’s link to the word “consciousness” (Bewußtsein), is not a self-reflective awareness of an internal feeling-state, but rather sets of interconnected thoughts and actions (i.e., the insistent ideas and ritualized behaviors that are the symptomatic hallmarks of obsessional neurosis). These thoughts and actions exhibit an “as if” association with what one might expect from someone who feels guilty. That is to say, the obsessional neurotic’s “compulsions and prohibitions” testify to his/her registering, on one level or another, a conviction that he/she is culpable of something—and this even though an accompanying, affectively charged cognizance of an explicitly thematized knowledge of being guilty can be, and often is, evidently absent. Furthermore, Freud’s discomfort with this passing supposition of an affect (guilt) being unconscious is clearly signaled in the quotation: he directly points to “the apparent contradiction in terms” (in line with his view at this time that affects, as feelings, must be felt and, hence, be consciously registered) without explicitly resolving the tension between his prevailing metapsychology of affect from this period of his thinking and this hypothesis from 1907 of there being, at least in certain neurotics, an unconscious sense of guilt. What’s more, in German, the “contradiction in terms” Freud feels compelled to resort to is quite glaring, since a more literal English translation of unbewußten Schuldbewußtseins is “unconscious consciousness of guilt.”3 Among other things, Freud’s open acknowledgment of this tension indicates that he isn’t willing to finesse the problem by recasting this special sort of neurotic guilt allegedly legible in obsessionals as a virtual potential for possibly coming to feel consciously guilty in specific situations. Such a recasting would allow him to stipulate that, because it is unconscious, guilt isn’t so much an affect as a protoaffective ideational formation or structure inclining in the direction of a readiness to experience guilt (or related affects like anxiety and shame) under certain conditions at whose psychical or subjective realization analysis aims. (As will be seen in the next chapter, Freud elsewhere, and others after him, flirts with this solution.)

  Is there anything else bearing witness to the obsessional neurotic’s unconscious sense of guilt other than his/her intrusive, repetitive trains of thought and stylized, idiosyncratic patterns of activity? Immediately following the conjecture regarding an unknown guilt, Freud proceeds to speak of anxiety. He talks about “a lurking sense of expectant anxiety, an expectation of misfortune”4 (i.e., the obsessional neurotic’s vague but convincingly powerful dread that a particular disaster will befall him/her, especially if he/she fails to perform, under a painful, burdensome compulsion, the requisite ritualized defensive behaviors striving to conjure away the imagined danger). Now, this anxious negative affect indeed does constitute a consciously registered feeling-state of which its sufferer is undeniably aware.

  Already in 1907, there are grounds for suspecting that Freud’s metapsychology of affect, appropriately interpreted, might allow for the occurrence of what I am identifying in this present project as “misfelt feelings.” How so? Guilt and anxiety can be considered to be part of a single constellation of family resemblances within the sphere of affective life. Many of the psychical and somatic experiences associated with guilt (e.g., some of the uncomfortable bodily sensations and agitating mental nervousness usually accompanying a cognizance of culpability) are quite similar to those associated with anxiety (something Freud subsequently observes, as will be remarked upon later). Maybe one of the factors that makes for the differences between the self-consciousness of consciously feeling guilty and the self-consciousness of consciously feeling anxious is not so much the psychical and somatic experiences associated with these affects, but instead the ideational parsing of these feelings, a parsing that subtly inflects how feelings feel (assuming the thesis that, contrary to certain deeply entrenched common assumptions, feelings are never immediate, straightforward phenomena, but involve, in the subjectivities of speaking beings, metalevels shaping the feel of feelings). As Freud notes of unconsciously guilty neurotics in “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” these neurotics, caught in the pressing grip of their anxious expectations and the defensive activities these expectations provoke, are not conscious of the connections between the ideational representations (Vorstellungen) acting as the mental content (i.e., the associations between ideas, memories, symbols, words, and so on) catalyzing their obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions.5 Hence, due to the lack of a self-aware understanding of these connections, such individuals, although they still consciously feel their guilt, feel it as anxiety rather than as guilt per se. In other words, the guilt per se is not consciously registered, but a being affected by guilt forcefully makes itself (mis)felt in the form of what is self-consciously experienced as anxiety. (Perhaps an aspect of what makes guilt feel like guilt proper is a conscious awareness of a sense of culpability, an awareness bound up with and requiring ideational representations, accompanying the psychical and somatic experiences constitutive of feeling anxious.) Thus, regardless of whether the authorial intentionality of Freud intends anything along these precise lines, maybe one could claim that unconscious affects in the strict Freudian sense are feelings, involving interconnected somatic and psychical states palpably felt by consciousness, as well as reflexively felt by linguistically and conceptually mediated self-consciousness as other than what they are or refer to. (Two examples familiar to clinical analysis of this are self-consciously experiencing the sensible pangs of inaudi
ble conscience [i.e., the unconscious voice of the superego] as anxiety instead of guilt,6 and undergoing pleasurable excitement defended against by mechanisms entwined with a given form of restricted consciousness as unpleasurable agitation.) Such a claim obviously gets around the dead end, perceived by Freud, of having to speak in a self-contradictory way of unconscious affects as utterly feel-less feelings. However, further clarifications of these proposals will require not only a much more extensive examination of Freud’s observations and comments regarding an unconscious sense of guilt and related issues (including central components of his metapsychological account of affects in general); the resources yielded by neuroscientific investigations into the emotional brain are absolutely indispensable to this task of elucidating what persists as a still-obscure problematic in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.