Self and Emotional Life
Page 18
In the first seminar (Freud’s Papers on Technique [1953–1954]), Lacan argues against distinguishing between the affective and the intellectual such that the former becomes an ineffability beyond the latter. He states his staunch rejection of “the notorious opposition between the intellectual and the affective—as if the affective were a sort of colouration, a kind of ineffable quality which must be sought out in itself, independently of the eviscerated skin which the purely intellectual realisation of a subject’s relationship would consist in. This conception, which urges analysis down strange paths, is puerile. The slightest peculiar, even strange, feeling that the subject professes to in the text of the session is taken to be a spectacular success. That is what follows from this fundamental misunderstanding.”7 Particularly during the first decade of le Séminaire, the primary audience to whom Lacan addresses himself consists of practicing analysts. Discussions of clinical work in Anglo-American analytic circles, both in Lacan’s time and nowadays, indeed frequently do give the impression that prompting patients on the couch to produce verbalizations of feelings in the here and now of the session is the principle concern of analysis; when listening to analysts of the stripe Lacan has in mind in this context, it sounds as though therapeutic progress is measured mainly by the degree to which an analysand is willing and able to struggle to voice affects as he/she is being affected by them between the four walls of the analyst’s consulting room. In short, this is to treat upsurges of emotion irrupting into patients’ forty-five-minute monologues as analytic pay dirt, as self-evident ends in themselves requiring no further explanation or justification (i.e., a spectacular success).8 Although this is an aggressively exaggerated caricature, it informs Lacan’s remarks here. He warns those analysts listening to him not to go down this “puerile path” in their practices.
However, Lacan isn’t saying that affects are irrelevant to or of no interest in analytic practice. He’s reacting to what he sees as an indefensible and misguided elevation of affective life into the one and only alpha-and-omega of analysis. What he actually claims, with good reason, and which has been steadily and increasingly vindicated since the 1950s, is that neither the intellectual nor the affective (or, in more contemporary vocabulary borrowed from neuroscientific discourse, the cognitive and the emotional) are independent of each other, with each standing separately on its own. Not only, contra other analytic orientations guilty of fetishizing the appearance of affects within the scene of analytic sessions, are affects inextricably intertwined with ideas (as thoughts, memories, words, concepts, and the like), but ideas, as incarnated in living speech, are permeated with something other than themselves, affected by nonideational forces and factors9 (as indicated in the quoted passage when Lacan speaks of “the eviscerated skin which the purely intellectual realisation of a subject’s relationship would consist in”).
Lacan’s point can be made by paraphrasing Kant: Affects without ideas are blind (the dynamic movement of the affective or emotional is shaped and steered by the intellectual or cognitive), while ideas without affects are empty (the structured kinetics of the intellectual or cognitive are driven along by juice flowing from the affective or emotional). Of course, given the tendencies and trends within psychoanalysis Lacan is combating at this time, his comments immediately following the ones in the quotation a couple of paragraphs earlier highlight one side of this two-sided coin, namely, the dependence of the affective on the intellectual: “The affective is not like a special density which would escape an intellectual accounting. It is not to be found in a mythical beyond of the production of the symbol which would precede the discursive formulation. Only this can allow us from the start, I won’t say to locate, but to apprehend what the full realisation of speech consists in.”10 This is of a piece with Lacan’s denunciation, in his “Rome Discourse” from 1953 (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”), of an “illusion” plaguing analysts and their practices, one “which impels us to seek the subject’s reality beyond the wall of language.”11 (Fink also points out this connection between the mirage of language being a barrier between those who use it and certain conceptions of affect.)12 In other words, analysts shouldn’t erroneously strive somehow to gain access to a reservoir of feelings and emotions sheltering behind the manifest façade of analysands’ utterances. It’s not as though there really is a transcendent Elsewhere of ineffable qualitative phenomena subsisting in a pure state of extralinguistic immediacy outside of the strictures of the linguistic latticework woven session after session by the patient’s speech. When dealing with speaking beings—analysis deals with nothing but—any affects inevitably will be immanent and impure in a way that is tied up with constellations and configurations of ideational representations (i.e., Freudian Vorstellungen as Lacanian signifiers). At least as regards these particular observations made in 1954 bearing on affects in analysis, Lacan’s position seems to be that the affective or emotional and the intellectual or cognitive are mutually entangled, although, to counterbalance what he considers to be misguided deviations from Freudian orthodoxy, he slants his stress in the direction of underscoring the intellectual or cognitive mediation of the affective or emotional.
In the ensuing years, this slanted stress seems to lose its status as strictly a tactical counterbalance against prevailing clinical analytic developments, with Lacan coming to contend that signifier-ideas have absolute, unqualified metapsychological priority over affects. That is to say, as is particularly evident between 1958 and 1962 (in the sixth, seventh, and ninth seminars specifically), Lacan tilts the balance in the complex ideational-affective rapport decisively in favor of ideational structures, maintaining that these are the driving, determining variables in relation to affective (epi)phenomena. This rapport, deprived of a dialectic of bidirectional, reciprocal influences between its poles, now appears to be organized by a unidirectional line of influence originating from one side alone, namely, in signifiers and their interrelationships. In a session of the sixth seminar (Desire and Its Interpretation [1958–1959]), Lacan, basing himself on what he takes to be Freud’s metapsychological exclusion of affects from the unconscious (as oxymoronic unfelt feelings) in 1915, claims that affects are only ever displaced within consciousness relative to chains of signifiers as concatenations of ideational drive representatives, some of which can be and are repressed. Stated differently, whereas Vorstellungen as signifiers are able to become parts of the unconscious through being dragged, via the gravitational pull of material or meaningful associations, into the orbit of branching formations of the unconscious, affects, as felt qualitative phenomena, must remain within the sphere of conscious experience. In line with what Freud posits in another paper from 1915 on metapsychology (the essay “Repression”),13 Lacan views repression as bringing about false connections similar to red herrings; more precisely, Lacan thinks the Freudian position here is to assert that affects, after repression does its job and disrupts the true connection of these affects with their original ideational partners, drift within the sphere of conscious awareness in which they remain and form false connections through getting (re)attached to other signifiers.14 As Roberto Harari, in his examination of Lacan’s tenth seminar on anxiety, puts it, “there are no unconscious affects but, rather, affects drift.”15 Both Harari and, in certain contexts, Fink express agreement with this aspect of Lacan’s reading of Freud articulated in 1958.16 In this same session of the sixth seminar, Lacan also underscores Freud’s reservations when speaking of unconscious affects, emotions, and feelings (three terms Lacan lumps together on this occasion). With a calculated weighting of exegetical emphasis, he thereby aims at supporting the thesis that, for Freudian metapsychology, such talk can amount, when all is said and done, only to incoherent, contradictory formulations without real referents.17
The seventh and ninth seminars continue along the same lines. In the seventh seminar (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis [1959–1960]), Lacan denounces “the confused nature of the recourse to affectivity”
so prevalent in strains of psychoanalysis basing themselves on what he alleges to be “crude” non-Freudian psychologies—although he’s careful to add, “Of course, it is not a matter of denying the importance of affects.”18 In the ninth seminar (Identification [1961–1962]), responding to a presentation by his student Piera Aulagnier in which she appeals to an unbridgeable abyss separating affective phenomena from their linguistic translations (i.e., to something akin to the earlier-denounced image of the “wall of language”), Lacan denies that affects enjoy an immediate existence independent from the mediation of words. On the contrary, even in affective life, signifiers (as ideas, symbols, thoughts, and the like) are purported to be the primary driving forces at work in the psyche. Lacan encapsulates his criticisms with a play on words, a homophony audible in French: insisting on affects as somehow primary (primaire) is tantamount to simplemindedness (primarité).19 Instead, affects, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, are secondary, namely, residual by-products secreted and pushed to and fro by the kinetic relations between networks of signifiers. Harari maintains that the true “Lacanian conception” of affects is that which “postulates affect as one effect of the signifier.”20 Soler likewise bluntly states, “affect is effect.”21
Although, starting the following academic year (1962–1963), Lacan significantly refines and enriches his metapsychology of affect, it isn’t as though this poorer, less refined treatment of affects as mere aftereffects of the interactions of ideational representations falls entirely by the wayside. For instance, in the text of the published version of Lacan’s appearance on television from 1973, he reiterates his earlier opinions on affect. Complaining about “the story of my supposed neglect of affect,” a narrative by then quite popular and widespread in the poststructuralist intellectual climate of Paris in the wake of May 1968, Lacan indignantly retorts: “I just want an answer on this point: does an affect have to do with the body? A discharge of adrenalin—is that body or not? It upsets its functions, true. But what is there in it that makes it come from the soul? What it discharges is thought.”22 The word thought here functions as a synonym for ideational representations as signifiers, as chains of multiple linguistic-symbolic constituents. The affected body is affected by words and ideas; even though the effect might be somatic, the cause is not. Lacan adds: “All I’ve done is rerelease what Freud states in an article of 1915 on repression, and in others that return to this subject, namely that affect is displaced. How to appreciate this displacement, if not so the basis of the subject, which is presupposed by the fact that it has no better means of occurring than through representation?”23
From the vantage point reached through the preceding examination of the literal details of Freud’s writings relevant to the debated enigma or problem of unconscious affects, Lacan’s professions of modesty are in danger of ringing false: even in his papers on metapsychology from 1915, Freud, as seen, doesn’t limit himself to saying solely that affects are invariably conscious experiential qualia displaced relative to the shifting ground of webs of representational contents—and this in addition to those numerous other places in the Freudian corpus, both before and after 1915, where affect is discussed in ways relevant to the issues at stake here, places neglected by Lacan’s highly selective and partial rendition of Freud’s metapsychology of affect. In struggling against the excessive overemphases on affectivity, embodiment, and energetics promoted by a range of figures and orientations (non-Lacanian analysts, disenchanted ex- or post-Lacanians, existential phenomenologists, feminist theorists, and so on), Lacan sometimes succumbs to an equally excessive counteremphasis on the foundational, fundamental primacy of “representation” in psychical life.
Along the same lines and echoing remarks made in the seventh seminar, Lacan, in the twenty-third seminar (Le sinthome [1975–1976]), sidelines the topic of affect as too bound up with vulgar, unsophisticated psychologies based on the “confused image we have of our own body”24 (i.e., mirages mired in the Lacanian register of the Imaginary). In a late piece from 1980, Lacan contrasts the indestructible fixity of desire with the “instability” (mouvance) of affects, an instability symptomatic of their status as volatile fluctuating displacements within consciousness buffeted by the achronological machinations of the unconscious formations configuring desire in its strict Lacanian sense25 (the latter, not the former, thus being identified as what is really of interest in analysis). Once again, at the very end of his itinerary, Lacan insists that intellectual or cognitive structures, and not affective or emotional phenomena, are what psychoanalysis is occupied with insofar as the unconscious, as constituted by repression and related mechanisms, is the central object of analytic theory and practice.
Before directing sustained critical attention toward the tenth and seventeenth seminars, in which determining the status of affect in Lacan’s thinking is a trickier task, mention must be made of a peculiar German term employed by Freud and singled out as being of crucial importance by Lacan: Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (a compound word whose translation, as soon will become evident, raises questions and presents difficulties not without implications for analysis both theoretical and practical—hence, its translation will be delayed temporarily in this discussion). Lacan’s glosses on this word’s significance, as used by Freud, often accompany his pronouncements regarding the place of affect in the Freudian framework.26 In the third section on “Unconscious Emotions” in the metapsychological paper “The Unconscious” (1915)—as is now obvious, these three pages of text lie at the very heart of the controversies into which I have waded—the Repräsentanz represented by the Vorstellung isn’t a representation that is an idea distinct or separate from an affect, but instead an affectively charged (i.e., “cathected,” in Freudian locution) ideational node. To be more specific and exact, a Repräsentanz is, in this context, a psychical drive representative that is a mental idea (representing a drive’s linked aim [Ziel] and object [Objekt]) invested by somatic drive energy that is the affecting body (consisting of a drive’s source [Quelle] and pressure [Drang]). Such cathexes are the precise points at which soma and psyche (and, by extension, affects and ideas) overlap in the manner Freud indicates in his contemporaneous paper on “Drives and Their Vicissitudes.”27 Vorstellungen are ideational representations that represent representations-as-Repräsentanzen once these Repräsentanzen have been submitted to the vicissitudes of defensive maneuvers rendering them unconscious (à la the patterns of “repression proper” in connection with “primal repression,” as described by Freud in his metapsychological paper on “Repression.”)28 As Freud words it in “The Unconscious” apropos the concept of an “affective or emotional impulse” (Affekt- oder Gefühlsregung), “Owing to the repression of its proper representative [eigentlichen Repräsentanz] it has been forced to become connected with another idea [anderen Vorstellung], and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea.”29 The violent cutting of repression tears away affects or emotions from their own primordial and initial accompanying representatives (Repräsentanzen). Thereafter, they move in, along, and about “other ideas” as Vorstellungen associated, however loosely and indirectly, with their original Repräsentanzen.
Incidentally, Fink, on a couple of occasions, indicates that Lacan identifies the Vorstellung as a primordially repressed Real (i.e., a pre-Symbolic “x” inscribed in the psyche as a protosignifier) and the Repräsentanz as the Symbolic delegate of the thus repressed, unconscious Vorstellung (i.e., the signifier signifying that which is primordially repressed).30 However, the preceding sentence from “The Unconscious” (quoted in the previous paragraph) indicates that this reverses Freud’s metapsychological usage of these two German words. Moreover, in Freud’s contemporaneous metapsychological paper on “Repression” (a text Lacan refers to apropos Freud’s use of the compound word Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), the German makes clear that Freud identifies the ideational representatives of drives (Triebrepräsentanzen) that are submitted to repression (both “primal” and secondary or “proper
” repression [Urverdrängung and Verdrängung]) as Repräsentanzen, not Vorstellungen.31 Contra Fink (and, perhaps, Lacan himself), the Freudian usage will be respected throughout the rest of the ensuing discussion.32
This Lacanian (mis)reading of Freud aside, an upshot of the preceding to bear in mind in what follows is that affective elements (intimately related to the drives of the libidinal economy) are infused into these ideational representations right from the start. One cannot speak, at least while wearing the cloak of Freud’s authority, of intra-representational relations between Repräsentanzen and Vorstellungen as unfolding prior to and independently of drive-derived affective investments being infused into the ur-Repräsentanzen constituting the primordial nuclei (i.e., the primally repressed) of the defensively eclipsed unconscious. In Freud’s name, one might (as does Green)33 venture positing as an axiom that a Repräsentanz is a strange locus of convergence in which energy and structure are indistinctly mixed together from the beginning. Rather than theorizing as if affective energies and ideational structures originally are separate and distinct, only subsequently to be brought together over the course of passing time in unstable admixtures through ontogenetic processes, maybe this metapsychological perspective needs to be inverted: the neat-and-clean distinction between energy and structure, between affect and idea, is a secondary abstraction generated by both the temporally elongated blossoming of the psyche itself (a blossoming made possible in part by repressions) and the psychoanalytic theorization of this same emergence. In short, one might speculate that energetic affects and structural ideas, separated from each other as isolated psychical constituents, are fallouts distilled, through repression and related dynamics, from more primordial psychical units that are neither/both affective energies nor/and ideational structures.