Further support for thus demarcating these subdivisions in Freud’s metapsychology of affect are readily to be found by casting a glance backward over the textual ground already covered in the preceding pages. First of all, what Freud circa 1915 indisputably would reject would be any suggestion that feelings-as-Empfindungen could be unconscious, since this would entail indefensibly positing self-contradictory feelings that are not felt. Secondly, if all Empfindungen, as sensed sentiments, are consciously registered “final manifestations” of psychical dynamics set in motion by underlying affective structures or formations, Affekte-qua-Gefühle directly are implied to be, as distinct from Empfindungen, un- or nonconscious (but, perhaps, in a manner different from the un- or nonconsciousness of ideational Affektbildungen and, especially, economic Affektbeträge). In fact, when Freud refers to “unconscious affects” or “unconscious emotions,” both in the title of this third section of “The Unconscious” presently under discussion and elsewhere (before and after 1915), he consistently attaches the adjective unconscious to Affekte and Gefühle, not to Empfindungen. (There is one exception to this rule, maybe the proverbial exception that proves the rule, occurring in the second chapter of The Ego and the Id: therein, Freud stipulates that feelings [Empfindungen] are either conscious or unconscious, but never preconscious.)28 More specifically, apropos the “unconscious sense of guilt” (guilt being the affect Freud [disproportionately] focuses on as possibly unconscious), the term Freud invariably employs is Schuldgefühl. Guilt is unconscious as an instance of Gefühl, not Empfindung. For now-obvious reasons, Freud avoids using the more common, quotidian German word Schuldbewußtsein (consciousness of guilt) to designate the sense of guilt bound up with conscience, save for mentioning it in the paper “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) to stress “the apparent contradiction in terms” involved in speculating about unconscious guilt as a literal “unconscious consciousness of guilt” (unbewußten Schuldbewußtseins).
In response to this pinpointing of Affekt-qua-Gefühl as distinct from both, on the one side, Affektbildung and Affektbetrag as the structural-economic-quantitative part of affective life and, on the other side, Empfindung as the phenomenal-experiential-qualitative part of this dimension of the psyche’s being, one might say that such a move, rather than answering any questions about the metapsychology of affect, introduces new mysteries raising further unanswered questions. But, even if this is all that’s been accomplished thus far, this is indeed an accomplishment. Freud’s account of affect (or, more accurately, accounts), especially in his metapsychological writings from the era around 1915, has been treated by the vast majority of his successors of various stripes, both Lacanian and non-Lacanian, as an open-and-shut matter of established exegetical fact—namely, the alleged fact that Freud flatly and without caveats denies the existence of unconscious affects. What the preceding attentive examination of the details of Freud’s texts shows, if nothing else, is that his metapsychology of affect is simultaneously less consistent and more complex than his commentators and heirs tend to acknowledge.
To take a non-Lacanian example from mainstream Anglo-American clinical analytic literature: Sydney Pulver, in two articles from the 1970s (one in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the other in Psychoanalytic Quarterly), tackles head-on the lingering enigma of unconscious affect(s) bequeathed by Freud to his successors. Pulver’s interlinked pieces are highly instructive in this context. One of the general weaknesses of English-speaking psychoanalytic traditions vis-à-vis Freud—there are exceptions to this generalization—is that these traditions misunderstand a number of Freud’s key claims and concepts because of, in part, a failure to understand adequately his original German statements (such misunderstandings aren’t minor matters of exegetical nitpicking, but have major effects on the theory and practice of analysis). A core component of Lacan’s “return to Freud” is the effort to address this Anglo-American weakness through an insistence on reading Freud to the letter, taking seriously the devils residing in the details of his writings (including those dwelling in Freud’s German). But, this rigorous interpretive vigilance preached and usually practiced by Lacan proves to be lacking as regards Freud’s reflections on affective life; although there are frequent extended meditations on the connotations and resonances of specific German words used by Freud, the related words Affekt, Gefühl, and Empfindung nowhere are cited in either the nine-hundred-page Écrits or the twenty-seven volumes of le Séminaire. Pulver, approaching the Freudian corpus and legacy through a very different set of analytic lenses than those worn by Lacan, nonetheless concurs that Freud bluntly and categorically denies the possibility of affects being unconscious. He then, unlike Lacan, sets about contesting this denial through proposing different ways in which affects can be, and frequently are, unconscious in psychoanalytically meaningful senses. But, a careful rereading of Freud’s pronouncements on affects in relation to the unconscious reveals that many of Pulver’s suggestions already are anticipated by Freud.
With some justification, Pulver blames what he views as Freud’s untenable dismissal of the concept of unconscious affects on a metapsychologically lax taking-for-granted of the everyday, folk-psychological association between the notions of “feeling” and “experience,” an association in which both notions connote awareness.29 This rare instance of complacency on Freud’s part, Pulver implies, leads him to overlook various ways in which affects can be kept outside of the restricted sphere of conscious awareness (Pulver provides several clinical illustrations of these ways). Pulver’s main concern is to argue for a distinction between two basic categories relevant to conceptualizing nonconscious affective life: “unconscious affects” and “potential affects.” He contrasts these categories thus: “Unconscious affects are those in which the affect is aroused and experienced, but kept from awareness through some defensive process. Potential affects are those affects which are particularly susceptible to arousal but have not yet been aroused.”30 In a sequel article entitled “Unconscious Versus Potential Affects,” he further clarifies and refines this distinction: “Stated simply, unconscious affects exist in an activated or aroused state outside of awareness. They may be either preconscious or dynamically unconscious. They are ‘activated’ because they exist experientially in a dynamically active state; that is, they have an effect upon motor or psychic activity at the moment under consideration. Potential affects, on the other hand, may arise from a dispositional state in which the affect is not aroused and active, but is ‘more ready than usual’ to be so.… Unconscious affects, then, are items of mental content, whereas potential affects, strictly speaking, are not affects at all, but structural dispositions to produce affects.”31
Pulver subsequently summarizes this as follows: “Affects of which the individual is unaware may exert their behavioral effect in two different modes, as unconscious affects or as potential affects. Unconscious affects are those which exist in an activated state outside of awareness. Potential affects are those which may arise from a dispositional state of the individual in which the affect is not aroused and active but is ‘more ready than usual’ to be so. Unconscious affects are items of mental content; as such, they are in the realm of subjective experience. Potential affects, on the other hand, are, strictly speaking, not affects at all but structural dispositions to produce affects and, as structures, they are not in the realm of subjective experience.”32
One might rename what Pulver calls “unconscious affects” “nonconscious affects,” since, as he specifies, such affects can be either preconscious (as “feeling tones” activated in the here and now but not attended to by self-conscious attention) or unconscious (as these same sort of tones defensively avoided by self-conscious attention).33 What both of these types of nonconscious affects have in common is the occurrence of phenomenal states of being affected minus an accompanying explicit cognizance of these same states. In the terms of Freud’s metapsychology, an affect registered by the perception-consciousness system i
s neglected, whether for defensive or nondefensive reasons, by the attentive awareness of (self-)consciousness. (In defensive instances, unconscious mechanisms are topographically situated between perception consciousness and consciousness proper, contra the standard, misleading depth-psychological imagery frequently foisted on Freud’s thinking, situated internally and immanently within the very surface of consciousness.) Translating Pulver’s concept-phrase “potential affects” back into Freudian parlance, one can say that this concept-phrase designates those constellations of repressed ideational representations with the potential to give rise to a corresponding affect or affects, namely, constellations of unconscious ideas (Vorstellungen) liable to provoke particular feeling-states under specific conditions.
What evidence is there for either of Pulver’s two categories of affects? He specifies that: “The evidence we are looking for to support the existence of unconscious affects consists of situations in which the individual shows physiological, ideational and motor behaviour usually associated with a central feeling state, in which he indicates a lack of awareness of that feeling state, and in which he is incapable of reporting such awareness after an ordinary effort of attention.”34 This criterion concerning evidence speaking in favor of there being unconscious affects ought to be reminiscent of the “as if” phenomena Freud alludes to, in “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in connection with the possibility of the existence of an unconscious sense of guilt in certain neurotic analysands. For his part, Pulver, among other examples, highlights reaction-formations (as in, for instance, feeling fondness as a way of avoiding feeling anger, the latter thereby remaining an unconscious affect in a peculiar fashion) and behavioral tactics of unknowingly avoiding circumstances and situations apt to arouse defended-against (potential) affects.35
From his reflections on this topic, Pulver concludes that, in addition to clinical observations and data testifying to the existence of unconscious affects, nothing testifies against the legitimacy and accuracy of positing sides of affective life outside of the limited scope of the conscious ego’s (self-)awareness36 (save for what Pulver diagnoses as Freud’s uncritical, mistaken acceptance of the everyday, ordinary-language lumping-together of affects and consciousness). However, after having passed through the preceding examinations of Freud’s pronouncements bearing upon unconscious affects, Pulver’s proposals seem familiar. Apart from Pulver overlooking all of those occasions when Freud entertains the hypothesis that actually activated affects indeed can be unconscious in Pulver’s sense of “unconscious affects”—one need only point to the recurrent invocations of Schuldgefühl in Freud’s writings—he also ignores what Freud terms “affective structure” (Affektbildung). Pulver’s category of “potential affect” designates, despite his not acknowledging this, the same thing as Freud’s affective structure. But, the merit of Pulver’s articles resides in their helping to pull together a less cloudy vision of nonconscious affects than the one floating around in fragments scattered throughout Freud’s oeuvre. Pulver brings into sharper relief a picture of unconscious affect(s) arguably implicit and latent in Freud’s texts.
Moreover, a statement made by Pulver productively serves as a bridge to the examination of Lacan’s treatment of affects to ensue in the next chapter: “‘pure feelings’ do not exist in nature.… Rather, affects from the very beginning of psychic life are linked with perceptual, cognitive and motor processes.”37 While this assertion is true, this same truth can be grasped and put to work in strikingly different ways. On the one hand, it can serve as a base axiom for projects (including this one) seeking to enrich, extend, and deepen, in conjunction with contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific resources, Freud’s less-than-fully-elaborated metapsychology of unconscious affects. On the other hand, it can serve as a justification for downplaying affects as secondary, residual by-products of processes fundamentally governed by the dynamics of structures comprising ideational representations. This latter path is the one Lacan tends to follow. It is to his handling of affect that I turn now.
11.
FROM SIGNIFIERS TO JOUIS-SENS
LACAN’S SENTI-MENTS AND AFFECTUATIONS
As the Lacanian analyst and scholar Bruce Fink correctly observes, Freud is far from consistent in his theorization of affect.1 Yet another illustration of this Freudian inconsistency, apart from the shifts and vacillations already highlighted, is to be found in the metapsychological paper on “The Unconscious,” a mere two paragraphs after the invocations of affect (Affekt), emotion (Gefühl), feeling (Empfindung), and affective structure (Affektbildung) examined in chapter 10: the distinction between affect and feeling, in which the latter designates qualitative phenomena that must be felt consciously in order to be, looks to be revoked to the extent that Freud soon proceeds to relapse, at the end of the third section of this paper from 1915, into again conflating affects with felt feelings registered by the awareness of consciousness (“in actuality … the affect does not as a rule arise till the break-through to a new representation in the system Cs. has been successfully achieved [der wirkliche Vorgang… ist in der Regel, daß ein Affekt so lange nicht zu stande kommt, bis nicht der Durchbruch zu einer neuen Vertretung im System Bw gelungen ist]”2). What absolutely must be acknowledged is that Freud is indeed genuinely and entirely inconsistent apropos a metapsychology of affect, erratically oscillating in indecision between various speculations regarding the existence and nature of unconscious affects in particular. Lacan, perhaps strongly motivated in this instance by what could be deemed (in his own parlance) a “passion for ignorance”3 (perhaps a passion for ignorance about passion), tends not to admit even this much; as will be seen soon, he repeatedly insists with vehemence that Freud unflinchingly bars affective phenomena from the unconscious qua the proper object of psychoanalysis as a discipline. By contrast, Fink at least concedes that Freud wasn’t of one mind on this issue, especially concerning the topic of guilt.4 However, Fink’s concession is tempered by a very Lacanian qualification to the effect that, despite his superficial changes of mind concerning affective life, Freud’s metapsychological apparatus is, at a deeper and ultimate theoretical level, consistent in ruling out a priori the existence of unconscious affects.5 And, following closely in Lacan’s footsteps, Fink likewise ignores the letter of Freud’s original German texts by conflating as synonymous affect (Affekt) and feeling (Empfindung) so as to sustain the claim that affects are felt feelings and, hence, cannot be unconscious strictly speaking.6
Most other Lacanians simply pass over in silence those numerous textual occasions in which Freud mobilizes the hypotheses that (certain) affects can be and, in actuality, are unconscious. These followers of Lacan present an utterly false portrait of a Freud steadfastly unwavering in his dismissal of the notion of unconscious affect as a muddleheaded contradiction in terms inadmissible to correct psychoanalytic reason. Although somewhat superficially faithful to the letter of Lacan’s text, such Lacanians flagrantly flout its spirit, failing to “return to Freud” by not, like Lacan before them, reading Freud’s oeuvre as closely and carefully as possible; they are content to accept the Freudian corpus as digested for them by Lacan. Recalling the fact that, in relation to the topic of the psyche’s affective side, Lacan uncharacteristically makes no references whatsoever to the German words Affekt, Gefühl, Empfindung, and Affektbildung as these words operate literally in Freud’s texts, one might risk asserting that Lacan violates the spirit of his own endeavor when discussing the Freudian metapsychology of affect. One only can guess why this breakdown befalls Lacan. Why does he turn a blind exegetical eye, typically so sharp and discerning, to everything Freud says about affective life in addition to, and in a way that is often at odds with, the far-from-unqualified denial of unconscious affects connected to the claim that solely ideational representations (ideas as Vorstellungen, to be identified by Lacan as “signifiers”) can become unconscious through repression?
And yet, like Freud, Lacan too isn’t thoroughly consistent in t
he manners in which he addresses affect in psychoanalysis. Although his wavering and hesitations on this matter are more muted and less explicitly at the fore than in Freud’s work, they are audible to an appropriately attuned interpretive ear. Especially in his tenth and seventeenth seminars (on Anxiety [1962–1963] and The Other Side of Psychoanalysis [1969–1970]), Lacan does more than just underscore the nonexistence of unconscious affects for a psychoanalysis grounded upon properly Freudian concepts. But, before turning to focus primarily on these two seminars, I must foreground the nuances and subtleties of Lacan’s own contributions to a yet-to-be-systematized Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affect, which requires establishing a background picture of his general, overarching account of affects. This is best accomplished via a condensed chronological tour through the seminars, with topical detours into corresponding écrits and other pieces.
Self and Emotional Life Page 17
