An Argument Against Psychodynamism

If we reduce psychoanalysis to a study of the mind as a closed system of forces tending towards rest through discharge, do we not lose sight of the ultimate object of our inquiry?

Do we not thereby abandon the abyssal depths of the unconscious, ceaselessly channelling consciousness into a collection of psychological AND physiological processes (and how much antiquity still breathes in our age in that tiny article 'and'!) Consciousness is reduced to a dynamic image of self-reflection, equivalent to flows of energy through the brain, and is no longer comprehensible as light illuminating a world. After all, we must learn how to see even in the depths of the "under-mind." Absent phenomenology, "losing sight," we discover the psyche as its energy, as the intensity and flow of desire, which by an analogy to thermodynamics is bracketed and transformed into a mechanical and closed system where the total energy is invariant.

Hence: emotional intensity consists only in displacement, and persists only through discharge--which is also taken retroactively as evidence that, indeed, the mind-system tends towards a rest-position. But this doesn’t further confirm the initial and flawed hypothesis that the psyche is a closed system; wail, yes, fling all the paradoxes of subjectivity you wish against me, but listen closely: we are not talking simply about being open to the outside but about the unstructured-mind, which is open to infinity as idea.

Once opened, this door can never be closed: the mind is the flow of energy from the infinite-source, which is always and in every case identical to the relative source, whichever machine we’re connected to, extracting relative surplus energy, joy, value... and thus this question of desire which is Puritanically left merely at the sexual question is taken to be a book which is forever closed once the discovery that the unconscious had a structure was made.

But the truth is that this discovery is among a unique class of events in history, those which open a sort of Pandora’s box which, like a door to an unknown place, once opened could never be closed--an irreversible though immediately felt transformation.

It would not be completely wrong to say Freud discovered that desire is an allopoetic machine; but psychodynamic considerations led him to attempt to repress this fundamental insight and reinscribe triangulations into the social and psychic body. The untraceable fourth dimension in which the Other would unfold “it”-self, the spacetime of an Event, is ultimately repressed in the name of Society, but mysteriously reinscribed into the reality of individual neurosis, in other words, this same discovery was re-cognized as meaning: neurosis has the truth as its cause.

This fiery kernel of the Freudian discovery is, anyway, in disrepute and all but forgotten about. But as the essence of his discovery lies in the nature of social and psychic repression, it could almost be predicted from the discovery itself that the discovery itself would be misrepresented, perhaps especially by its discoverer! The status of the real is the critical ambiguity in Freud's text, since it seems that all our perceptions (and not just our dreams) are distorted by repressive forces within ourselves; but then again, that these repressive psychic forces merely mimic or internalize oppressive social power structures. The power of social fantasy is in fact the creation of the human universe; atheist as he was, this thought was perhaps too religious for Freud...

One

What is it to say "we are one"?

The beginning of psychic life is not in principle distinguishable from the beginning of material life [1]. What a laugh to have for so long wrongly conjoined so directly: the mother, the One! A primary narcissism, Freud quips-- as though biology really were our destiny! As though the intermediate steps weren't the most important, those developmental phases whose traversal would precisely trace the outline of the crack between Freud’s Oedipalized unconscious and the event of language: Freud's answer is self-love, presuming the mystical division he would sek to explain. Doctor, how does our subjectivity awaken? Outgrowing a primary narcissism, indeed!

But only a (lost) love: of the One that is the Self that is the One that is the Self... what he means, we must insist, is that the early mind is merely a little repeating-machine: for Freud, the interconnected flows which constitute our psychic life can never be properly said to be identical to those machinic material assemblages which constitute our organic rhizomatic substrate and origin. Is he wrong--is this a broken Oedpial fantasy or merely egoistic and monotonous delirium? Does the emergence of a proto-subjectivity rather constitute the intervention of an alien multiplicity within the "One"--which was not (and never was)?

Being-One with the Mother/Father -- is this not also the primordial diagram/genealogy? The "intrusion" of an alien One, which mystically reproduces itself in the Same by precisely an excess of “primal” self-love? Libido becomes surplus-reality, bodies turned reality-producing machines-- what, then, is this mysteriously doubled One? From what mysterious inner space emerges proto-subjectivitiy, this extra-terrestrial surplus territoriality?

But we are not just "one" with the mother--the flow of desire doesn't begin and end with her Womb, nor even Libido. We won't find the origin by tracing the event of becoming-Other to its symbolic source: we are not just One with God, not just One within a void-enraptured Mother-Father-Me constellation; becoming is about becoming-Universe, becoming-Woman, becoming-Energy, yes, even becoming Mother-Father... but we "become" by a truth-event which is misrecognized as a unity; the Arising of a not-One within the One that really isn't. We are not anti-matter, but a colony of parasites, a multiplicity without a place, with only hungry and open connection-holes, not a rapturous void but music and light-- a not-One connected to an energy field which produces a self-recording as the ghost of a repressed Truth. To speak of a process, or perhaps more radically of the event of becoming, still imagines the Other to be One, still preserves the primordial transcendence of an alien Same within the Other-which-is-me.

1. This can be thought of as an alternate statement of Chalmer’s Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Bergson (Attention)

"Collecting, organizing the totality of its experience in what we call its character, the mind causes it to converge upon actions in which we shall afterwards find, together with the action which is their matter, the unforeseen form which is stamped upon them by personality; but the action is not able to become real unless it succeeds in encasing itself in the actual situation, that is to say, in that particular assemblage of circumstances which is due to the particular position of the body in time and space... Our body, with the sensations which it recieves on the one hand and he movements which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which fixes our mind, and gives it balance and poise. The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these movements condition what we may call our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex."
(Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 172-3)

Why does the nervous system, like human societies and organizations, seems to beg for analysis and comprehension through the lens or cipher of a pyramidal geometry? The focal point of Bergson's hierarchical schema of consciousness is focus itself, that is, attention or awareness; we have here a series of superimposed triangles (after Lacan's schema) whose pinpoint alternates between polarized modalities: first, the ocular apparatus (itself a double tripartite structure whose apex is the surface of the cornea, with the visual field on one side and the inverted reflection on the other); then, sensation: the body's inter-face with externality, the focal point again being focus itself; then, the spiritual-social: the subject's inter-transposition with the void and the face on either side, an infinite and unterritorializable relation which cuts jagged gashes across and through the "stuff" and matter of subjectivity.

Indeed, Bergson is absolutely correct--everything depends on the cohesion of these jagged, irregular, mobile structures; their tripartite division (mind, body, soul; idea, image, word; object, eye, gaze) expresses the radical separation between any two layers within any structure, which reveals the radical interconnection between structures of awareness. Balance is inevitable, constantly resurging, self-correcting. We deconstruct the layers of awareness (physical, sensible, spiritual) only to discover their essential identity and contradiction in the same movement; it is this very rupture which is objectified in the cogito; this objectification is of course its downfall, as in fact it makes a much stronger case when inverted: we think because we are-- i.e., pure materialism-- but either way, the identity asserted between mind and body represses the fundamental rupture, the void point between or across both which awareness represents. But why does Bergson stand the pyramid upon its point?

The inversion which Bergson here intends is not between our body and its movements, nor between mind (thought, theory, memory, time) versus body (sensation, matter, movement, space); rather, there is a fundamental paradigm of balance and "poise" under which any awareness "decodes" itself through (e)motion, allows a crack in being so that its essence or "charater" may be exposed, and this rupture is rather the empty core of that helix around which body and mind are braided together--that is, the world is neither a stage upon which awareness and expression are performed are performed any more than awareness can give itself means, substance or inspiration to function.

By connecting awareness to balance, to the apex of an inverted pyramid, does Bergson not represent the weight, the burden of existence upon the singular "point" of the subject whose iceberg of unconsciousness is rather bearing down on his conscious attention rather than supporting? Our awareness is white hot and right here--is it not every engaged in an endless dissolution and triage of the mass of memories--which is itself a dissolution, displacement and metaphor for the mass of movements and sensations? Awareness is not thrown, but surges up from beneath a weight, constituted from the very courage to stand, as well as the steadiness to continue.

Yet, this balance is something like a logical rupture between "bodies" as independent, isolated, separate and mentally supervised "movement" as relationity, synchronicity interconnection. Poise is a kind of improvised synchronization with externality, as between "mind" as memories and "body" as pure sensation. This balance is not a solution; rather it is more like the generations, successive improvisations on similar themes; the uneasy balance of the family is structural (and is this still not the most repressed of Freud's discoveries?) but constantly seeking cohesion of disparate personalities, both antagonism and resolution.

Therefore the balance of Bergson's pyramid is as precarious as our attention span, for it is both (a) pure presentation and cautiously maintained, and (b) chronically absent and desperately sought after. Love, faith, understanding: are these are really enough to pacify and balance memory, to sanctify the present assembly, and transform emptiness into holiness? I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes"--if only for the briefest of moments...

Pleasure and Epistemology (Freud's Outline of Psychoanalysis)

It is right here and right now that we must ask: is our knowledge about to commence or already at its end?

The question is not as straightforward as it appears. The issue is whether HERE -- right here where we are right now, at the intersection of sensation and the conscious act, at the imbrication of the mental series into physical 'reality'-- are we at the beginning of what we know, or at the end? Is this all we know, or just an overture?

A delightful antimony-- after all, this is the end of our knowledge, since we certainly cannot know what we cannot also (at least) think, feel or experience. Yet, this is also the beginning of knowledge, as the spark which catches our imagination and causes a shift in our perspective; only through this shift do we come to knowledge at all, which is still confined strictly within the limits of the paranoid: what seems obvious is the identity, the connection, the fundamental 'wholeness' of the body and the mind. Yet this 'certainty' is ruptured by an even more 'fundamental' certainty of disjunction--for the body is NOT the same as 'consciousness,' even if the two are in more intimate proximity than any other entities in the universe, this proximity is not physical, not empirically measurable. As we trace a sensation through perception, imagination and memory, we trace not only its distortions and translations but its transfiguration and transubstantiation; the idea is not the word is not the thing, even though their formal content may appear identical throughout, the primary bearer of meaning is modulated and demodulated. So today we're going to examine this circuit of consciousness and see whether or not we can resolve the question-- is our knowledge already terminated or just being born?

So the question is in a sense about action, what aspects of the self must be involved, what we must have in order to say: "this constitutes a conscious act." In answering this, are we at the beginning of what we know, or at the end? What seems obvious is the separation (mind/body); what seems obvious is the strict identity (mind-body.) At this level where it is possible to sensefully say both division and unity reign, we are caught in an epistemological circularity which allows us to assert knowledge on the basis of an irreducible gap. Our desire is to avoid 'nothingness'; this vacuity causes anxiety, uneasiness. We fervently wish to complete the blank: __________. Filling in the hole is desire, a fantasy that the subject can be 'reconstituted' as an unfracture whole.

Now, we simply cannot speak meaningully of the subject's existence as a singularity or as a plurality; we must recognize the fundamental inconsistency, imbalance and rupture at the basis of identification. So we cannot posit either division or unity as the origin of subjectivity--the ontological categories don't fit the phenomenological factum (qualia are neither rational nor irrational, but non-rational; they are felt, not known.) Axioms represent the assertion of knowledge at this pivotal crux, which is (as we have seen) an irreducible rupture, the subject's non-identity with herself. Since as such the ego does not coincide with the subject, the 'I' cannot
correspond precisely to the mind or the body. Yet the mental and physical series are inextricably interwoven, as a complex tapestry; the question is not: whether there is a mind-body dualism, or monism, or some kind of inconsistent multiplicity-- but what such a theoretical position would even amount to structurally: how consciousness exists. How is this ex-centric subject/ego rupture produced and maintained?

In order to see if a solution lurks upon the surface, we look at Freud's paper An Outline of Psychoanalysis:

"In consequence of the pre-established connection between sense perception and muscular action, the ego has voluntary movement at its command. It has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events, it performs that task by becoming aware of stimuli, by storing up experience (in the memory), by avoiding excessively strong stimul (through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and finally by learning to bring about expedient changes in the external world to its own advantage (through activity.) As regards internal events, in relation to the id, it performs that task by gaining control over the demands of the instincts, by deciding whether they are to be allowed satisfaction, by postponing that satisfaction to times and circumstances favorable in the external world or by suppressing their excitations entirely. It is guided in its activity by consideration of the tensions produced by stimuli whether these tensions are present in it or introduced into it. The raising of these tensions is in general felt as unpleasure and their lowering as pleasure."

I like what he's working with here. If you read carefully, it's almost a force-based model. Tensions arise in the gap or struggle between the inside and outside, produced by stimulation whether the tension is present in the ego or introduced into it. These tensions guide the activity of the ego: should we not already say push and pull with the pressure of seeking marginal pleasure increases?

"...The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure. An increase in unpleasure that is expected and foreseen is met by a signal of anxiety; the occasion of such an increase, whether it threatens from without or within, is known as danger."

So the ego, unless it is asleep, is engaged, connected with the external world, pulled along by the
tension/distension of pleasure-forces. "Tension" seems to be an aggregate. Now since pleasure is not uniformly distributed, we're not getting pulled equally in all directions (in which case there's a net force of zero) but this is not the case: we're always imbalanced, drawn unevenly and asymetrically towards and away these tension-filled gaps between reality and desire. At the surface, we're pulled outwards by the Other who is deeper inside the liquid, flowing external reality. The ego is drawn to pleasure and is intensely attracted to this surface tension with which we easily identify, the ordinary confusion of reality with an appearance of generic depth. Yet this "surface" tension is always a percieved need, a lack of relaxation, a deficiency of release--but only lacking, needed because it is expected (in the way dissonance can lead to consonance.)

Freud continues: "The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged."

Here of course we're talking about the super-ego, which attempts to reconcile the demands between the id and of reality. The super-ego as a "precipitate" seems at first glance to bear out a chemical meaning, i.e., the solid formed in a solution during a reaction; the reaction in question seems to be a supersaturation of authority, which "chemically" changes the disciplined body, compounds the complexity of interaction and leaves behind a symbolic residue of cultural normativity. The super-ego is shitted out of the reaction as the excrement of the oedipal relation; the obscene call sinks to the bottom where it screams to be obeyed, commands us to believe, controls and supervises our enjoyment. The tension between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is never wholly resolved and indeed the amount of tension, the amount of displacement is not the absolute amount of displacement from the position of the subject--which is nowhere, an empty square--the tension which is felt is not an absolute displacement, but "something in the rhythm of the changes" (as Freud puts it) since the true distance from you to yourself doesn't exist. The two never coincide: me/my reality, super-ego/ego, ego/id; all these antagonisms are only fictionally united out of a desire for wholeness. Immediately after naming the ego as the pleasure principlce ("The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure") Freud speaks of anxiety, of the knowledge of danger. Isn't all knowledge dangerous in this sense, founded upon nothing but subjectivity, uncertain, paranoid? But anxiety is not known directly, only through a symbol-signal; what is felt (and not known) is the tension, between the reality/pleasure principle, a disjunction which although managed by the superego can never be completely erased.

(More later...)