Freud’s bizarre idea is that the urge to repeat is, fundamentally, the urge not to add anything more to whatever “attributes of life” have already appeared, i.e. not to further embellish them, and so to remain as close as possible to the original inorganic state, which was upset by the appearance of life. I take this whole idea to be metaphorical. But two things in what Freud says are highly suggestive in the light of what has been discussed so far. First, his formula, according to which the drive endeavours to “cancel itself out”, sounds like an explicit statement of the paradox that he had already implied a couple of pages earlier, of the drive binding itself in the repetition compulsion. Second, what is to be made of the reference to the origin of consciousness? If it is right that the cosmic themes, which begin here and run to the end of Beyond, are metaphorical and not literal, Freud’s comment can be shifted to the level of the human individual – from the origin of all life to the origin of each human subject. As shown above, consciousness and trauma are both described by Freud as free flow of excitation, and just free flow (rather than any quantitative criteria) seems to be what is definitive of trauma, suggesting a close relationship or even identity between Freud’s concepts of consciousness and trauma. Seen in this light, Freud’s train of thought in the three sentences can be deciphered. The meaning would be: “Free flow of excitation, which is both traumatic and is also definitive of consciousness, is evoked in the individual by the action of some force, and the trauma is managed when the free flow is bound by somehow being turned on itself.”
What is the “force” that evokes the free flow, how is the flow turned on itself and why do trauma and consciousness have a common nature? For answers to those questions, I propose going back 25 years in the Freud corpus, from Beyond to the Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895
One striking coincidence between Beyond and the Project is Freud’s resurrection of the concept of “facilitation” (“Bahnung”), which he had left alone for quarter of a century.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.)) As already seen, Freud explains in Beyond that facilitation is the making of a pathway between two “elements” through the complete or partial elimination of a resistance (something like a wall) between them by the action of mobile excitation. Facilitation which demolishes the resistance only partially is equated with