but always of complexes”. Every experience had by someone, in whom repression has occurred, is underpinned by a repressed signifier, which is just the self (the ego) that seems to stand separate from that experience.
What does all of this say about the death drive? I noted that, if consciousness and trauma proved to be the same thing (both consisting of unbound excitation), it would be a most surprising result in view of the calm and contemplative connotations of consciousness. But what is traumatic is the hallucinatory consciousness of psychosis, when the ego is not felt as separate from the content of its experience. When the “Trieb” (free flow of excitation, the tendency of the signifier system to coalesce) has been bound by its own repetition, aka the death drive, this separation is established and the trauma is tamed. Hurrah then for the death drive, the guardian of sanity.
References
Freud, S. (1950 [1895a]). Project for a Scientific Psychology. SE 1.
Freud, S. (1920g). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18.
Freud, S., Fliess, W. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, Trans. and Ed. Masson, J. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press.
Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Trans. Sheridan, A. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1945]). ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ in Ecrits, Trans. B. Fink. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 161-175.
Lacan, J. (2007 [1991]). The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Trans. R. Grigg. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2001). ‘Radiophonie’ in Autres Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, pp. 403-447
Sulloway, F. (1979). Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York NY: Basic Books.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations, Trans. Anscombe, G. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[1] It is often unclear in Beyond whether Freud is theorising in the domain of neurology or of psychology. Mainly he is in the latter, and I will use his preferred term, “mental apparatus”.
[2] Here and everywhere I will use “drive” to translate Freud’s “Trieb” instead of “instinct”, used in the Standard Edition, including substitution in quotes from the Standard Edition. The emendation is now generally accepted.
[3] As established by a search of Freud’s entire published psychoanalytical works (in the Standard Edition translation) in one PDF file, one of many invaluable resources freely available in Patrick Valas’ treasure trove of Freud and Lacan texts at www.valas.fr.
[4] The two letters “un” are bracketed because Freud uses a shorthand in the Project, leaving out letters in words if a German reader could supply the missing letters him/herself.
[5] A short but irresistible remark: viewed in this way Freud’s problem matches that presented by Lacan in his sophism of 1945, Logical Time(Lacan, 2006: 161-175), where a third position, a “moment of concluding”, has to be extracted from a “time for comprehending” that has a binary structure and tends to collapse into a unitary “instant of the glance”. The match, I think, is no coincidence, since Freud, at this juncture in the Project, is stating how he understands primary defence – what he would later call “primal repression” – and Lacan’s sophism is to be understood as illustrating his (I think) correct understanding of Freudian repression. The Project and Logical Time are the first steps in the theoretical elaborations of the originator of psychoanalysis and of his French follower, steps taken exactly half a century apart.
[6] His favourite reference is Letter 52 to Fliess, where Freud makes association by simultaneity the first “layer” of memory registration (Freud, Fliess, 1985: 207-215).
[7] This stirs the question, where on earth could Freud have come across the ideas of structural linguistics before that science was invented? Such was the first question put to Lacan in Radiophonie (Lacan, 2001: 403-407). I think there is a more concrete answer than the one he gives there. I will try to present it in a future article.
[8] In Lacanian terms it is the progress from “alienation” to “separation” (Lacan, 1977: 218).
[9] This can be connected with the mirroring theory in the Tractatus