The psychoanalytic intervention in our history of ideas - from the history of philosophy to the history of science - has played out in a way that is reminiscent of the unpredictable and often disconcerting appearances of memorable ‘peripheral’ characters in Kafka’s stories.
The interventions of Barnabas, the Mayor, the lawyer Herr Huld, or any of a multitude of obscurely defined persons involved in the exhaustingly fruitless pursuits of Kafka’s principal characters, inevitably condition the same perpetually unanswered question from the reader’s perspective: What are they doing here? What do they mean? Are they a positive contribution or will they bring with them ruptures and discontinuities to which the main character has to adapt? Their intervention, their apparition within a certain narrative development, is in other words indeterminate.
These peripheral figures define Kafka’s narrative precisely because of the threat of their non-directionality. Not only do they appear as either an aid or a detriment to the central character’s pursuits, but they frequently appear as both. They act as the resistance to their own effect. A well placed contact in the centre of the Castle’s opaque bureaucracy can at the same time be a detriment to effective communication.
It is precisely this contradictory ambiguity, this unanswerable what does this mean? that can be transplanted onto the status of psychoanalysis within science and philosophy. Psychoanalysis is both a vicious enemy and an indispensable companion for these domains. The ‘divided subject’ of psychoanalysis permanently dislodges and distorts the self-identical I of Cartesian philosophy, yet it also acts as a method of thought for major post-war philosophical traditions. The accusation of scientific unfalsifiability against psychoanalysis is well known, and yet the psychoanalytic ‘token’ of science is growing in popularity with, for example, the emerging field of ‘Neuropsychoanalysis’.
I recently wrote an article [The Failed Interventions of Psychoanalysis] for The Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology on precisely this heterogeneity of the ‘implication’ of psychoanalysis (its ‘successful failure’) and on the formal identity of its effect on philosophy and its effect on neuroscience. Here, however, I return to the question of the psychoanalysis-philosophy-(neuro)science relation with a focus on the work of Mark Solms.
I am not interested in the biographies of writers, and I do not intend to reproduce a detailed introduction to Mark Solms and his life. I will only mention that Solms has had, and will continue to have, a considerable influence on contemporary psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Inspired by figures such as Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio, and by a vague sympathy towards Freud, Solms is one of the principal founders of the emerging discipline of Neuropsychoanalysis, and is responsible for the recently updated Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Much of Solms’ work was dedicated to a neuroscientific study of consciousness (the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems - i.e. the neuroanatomical correlates of conscious experience and the speculative question of why consciousness exists), which drew on a generalised Freudian psychoanalysis. This ultimately culminated in Solms’ 2018 book The Hidden Spring: a Journey to the Source of Consciousness, still a crucial reference-point for emerging psychoanalysts and philosophers of neuroscience.
Consciousness is approached in this work from the perspective of sentience, already in itself a problematic exchange. One of the principal phenomenological deductions (from Husserl to Sartre) on the question of consciousness is the recognition that consciousness is the consciousness of something. In other words, consciousness necessitates its immediate suspension in the fact of its ‘positedness’ towards an object. Consciousness is therefore a propositional phenomenon, which is constituted by articulating to itself its existence in relation to an object.
Sentience, on the other hand, implies the rudimentary capacity to feel emotions. To ‘feel’, Solms argues, implies conscious experience. From a phenomenological perspective, this is an unjustified conclusion. Sentience does indeed depend upon the recognition of feelings, yet consciousness is a self-justifying function: consciousness (if it is to be understood with any relevance to human experience) is consciousness of itself. Solms’ view of consciousness may justify a neuropsychological investigation into the roots of such a narrowly-defined conscious experience, and his book is indeed impressive if consciousness and sentience are interchangeable. Yet the question of animal sentience is far less controversial than the question of animal consciousness in the reflective-propositional sense. Whether animals are conscious in the intentional sense is not the same question as if they are sentient: it is authors such as Derrida or Chesterton who tentatively approach the former question.
What concerns me, however, is not Solms’ understanding of consciousness, but rather his use and understanding of Freud and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is, as I have insisted, a constitutively precarious field. It defines itself by the relations it maintains to philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, theology etc. It problematises an already defined field, and introduces discrepancies and irregularities where previously there was a sense of unequivocal agreement.
Solms recognises aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis in his neuroscientific research on consciousness (for example on the role of the cortex in dreams and feelings, or on the mechanisms of cognitive information exchange), yet it seems that this use of Freud relies on a convenient misrecognition of Freud’s basic insights regarding the constitution of pleasure and the drives.
The neuropsychoanalytic picture painted by Solms is of a consciousness-sentience which originates in our struggle for pleasurable and against unpleasurable feelings, and in response to which behavioural adaptations are employed. The unconscious is depicted in a simple, naturalist way, as that information which contributes to emotive survival behaviour yet which despite its influence is not present to consciousness. The drive is the subjective representation of instincts for survival - representations which accord with the pleasure-seeking ground (or logic) of human consciousness. The picture may be simple enough by itself, but it is on these two points, pleasure and the drive, that Solms’ use of Freud should be criticised.
The drive - the ‘link’ between psychoanalysis and neuroscience - acts only as a link for Solms insofar as it is purged of the paradoxical status which it was assigned by Freud. We seek pleasure, and avoid non-pleasure - this evolutionary principle eventually comes to account for Solms’ view of human consciousness, or human subjectivity. Yet the true Freudian drive is not a ‘survivalist’ drive, despite the vulgar insistence of Ego Psychology. It is not a remnant of evolutionary instincts which seek pleasure and avoid pain or non-pleasure. The novelty of the Freudian drive (Trieb) is its absolute separation from instinct (Instinkt) - it acts as the negative moment, the discrepant excess, of any Darwinian register.
The drives are initially separated (most famously in 1914) into self-preservative vs sexual, in which the drive for sexual enjoyment is detrimental for self-preservation. In 1920, the division of the drive is placed between life and death. Laplanche would eventually demonstrate that the death drive is itself in service of the sexual drive, since sexuality is always its own sublimation - it exists towards a point which marks the ‘end’ of the subject itself, that which is constitutively unassimilable to the subject. Ultimately, without a longer excursion into the conceptual development of the drive in Freud’s writings, the clear emphasis is that the drive is not a self-identical reproduction of our primitive instinct for survival. The drive is, in the Nietzschean sense, all too human - it rejects its substantial ground and acts as the paradoxical moment of human projects which cannot be assimilated to a purely survivalist logic.
This very drive is a testament to the profoundly un-natural forms of subjective projects, and their paradoxical obfuscation of a convenient pain-pleasure divide. The drive emerges in response to an inarticulable loss - the primary repression (Urverdrängung) of an object or idea that was never conscious. This ‘non-object’ which conditions the existence of the drive, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, is an idealised, sublime object which would have simultaneously satisfied both our erotic and our self-preservative needs, and can thus only be framed as a mere retrospective fantasy, a virtual point of reference which is subjectively unutterable and structurally untenable.
At its core, the drive is directed towards that which does not exist. The ground of the drive is in this sense a purely speculative Hegelian formula - it is the negation (for Freud, the verdrängung) of a non-existent something. A negation of nothingness which reverts into an indefinite movement of assimilating that which cannot be articulated. The drive, in the Freudian sense, has no object. Its limit point is constitutively excluded from the coordinates of the drive. Every pleasure is, therefore, an instance of displeasure. Every enjoyment of an object is a testament to the inadequacy and insufficiency of the enjoyed object. Here we have what is most important in Freud’s understanding of pleasure, and what is most clearly missing in Solms’ neuropsychoanalytic account: enjoyment is founded upon a subjective failure - enjoyment is in its very act an inverted non-enjoyment. Therefore a simple evolutionary pleasure-displeasure divide cannot account for the contradictory engagements of the psychoanalytic subject.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud speaks of the paradox of a phobia which covers a more general lack, an emptiness which threatens the basic functionality of the subject. The example Freud gives is of a phobia of crossing the street. A naïve analyst may wish to remove this symptom, believing that if this symptom disappears, we will return to, or unearth, the possibility of a functioning subject. Freud instead insists that, remove the symptom and you remove the capacity of the subject even to articulate a problem, even if this problem is not ‘the real thing’. The phobia is an illusory problematic with a necessary function, allowing something to be articulated as dysfunctional in the face of a more persistent nothingness.
A useful comparison to this is found in Freud’s Dora case, where the self-contradictory ‘enjoyment of non-pleasure’ becomes unavoidable, or where we cannot simply hope to extract and neutralise a dysfunction. A bricklayer who earns his living by using by physical labour may, one day, suffer some accident where he becomes physically disabled, and finds himself unable to work and earn a living. At first, this is a condition which he would likely wish to immediately reverse, so that he can work again. After some time, he would no longer be capable of providing for himself, finding himself dependent on other people (or in Freud’s example, earning his living as a beggar). He trades a life of work for one of leisure, depending on the care and support of friends, family, or strangers. With some luck, the man would eventually find all of his needs met by others, without the requirement of his earning any of his means of existence. If, after several years, a magical cure came, which offered a return to full physical health and to once again work with his hands, Freud insists that we should not be surprised if this cure is rejected. “The very thing which in the first instance threw him out of employment has become his source of income: he lives by his disablement. If that is taken from him he may become totally helpless” (Freud, 1905a, p.44). The man has found a functional existence, a deviated enjoyment, in his incapacity – a return to physical health would not be a neutral return to his initial state of independence, but the arrival of a new state of insecurity and lack of provision by others. The man would not be his ‘old self’, but would face a new destructive emptiness, in this removal of his condition.
The symptom is a necessary compromise formation – its obverse is not psychological health or structural stability, but non-compromise. The step from symptom to non-symptom is a step from irrationality or, as Sebastian Gardner isolates as the key of psychoanalysis, from self-deceit towards absolute negativity or catastrophe, to an inarticulable, real (as Lacan calls it) rupture in the internal stability of subjecthood – a step from a mediated compromise-structure to irreparable de-structuration. Sexual enjoyment is, for Freud and Lacan, precisely such a paradox, it is its own compromise formation, it distorts a fundamental lack, enabling function precisely by functioning ineffectively and indirectly. Sexuality is already its own distortion, a reactive sublimation ‘in itself’.
To understand this position, it is necessary to see sexuality as emerging from the impossibility of a ‘natural relation’, it is an enjoyment of a failed relation, a deformed enjoyment derived from an impossible natural enjoyment – there is no ‘natural sexuality’, but sexuality as such is a reactive compromise against an impasse in the formation of subjecthood. Lacan famously insists that il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (there is no sexual relation). This can be framed according to the absolute impasse (what Freud termed the Oedipus complex) out of which the sexual drive is installed, in order understand the false category of nature in psychoanalysis.
In his Three Essays, Freud describes the eventual, yet arduous, achievement of genital sexuality (of an adult sexual drive). We do not begin our lives with a fully constituted sexual drive or libido, but are rather exposed to contingencies and limitations according to which sexuality is eventually articulated. Prior to the sexual drive, there is a diffuse, fragmented multiplicity of partial sexual ‘intensities’, incomplete and ephemeral excess excitations which are coupled to the pleasure of feeding, drinking, being taken care of etc. In its pre-genital phase, sexuality is a non-autonomous addendum, an excess of enigmatic enjoyment lodged in the shadow of alimentary satisfaction. What maintains this proto-sexual excitation – of desire in its purely imaginary register (as Lacan would say), unmediated by the social structures – is the mother. Whilst the child depends upon the mother for survival, it also depends upon her for ‘something else’, an obscure imaginary x of enjoyment, that is not wholly reducible to a need for survival. For Freud, the relationship of unstructured, immediate enjoyment between mother and child eventually collapses. This collapse is conditioned by the disruption of the Father (for Lacan, the Father is a metaphorical position, a representative of the symbolic-social structures which the child must submit to). Any sexual relation in its un-mediated, ‘pure’ state is exposed as in itself impossible. The task of the sexual drive is to ground itself in, to enjoy, precisely this constitutive lack of enjoyment.
Through Freud, and with the help of Lacan, the ‘deviated’ fetishist object relation is located as central to sexuality. Sexuality emerges from the fact that its enjoyment is reactive, disrupted, perverse, in the face of an originary failed enjoyment. Behind a deviated sexuality lies not sexuality ‘as it really is’, but the simply lack of any natural sexual relation. For Lacan, as seen most clearly in his essay on the Freudian Trieb (drive or, in French, pulsion; 1966) sexuality is quite simply a mode of enjoying the fact itself of an inherently impossible enjoyment, a practice deployed around finding a reconstructed and perverse pleasure, through a parallax, indirect approach, to an indefinitely displaced lack or nothingness. The ‘non-enjoyment’ out of which sexual enjoyment is capable of emerging, is in its essence the category of ‘the natural’ applied to sexual relations. A natural sexual relation is inherently oxymoronic, a self-contradictory concept where the natural is speculated upon from the perspective of its impossibility, or from the perspective of a sexuality that constitutively rejects such a category of nature.
Lacan’s poignant (and controversial) statement regarding the falsity of nature (of natural enjoyment) in the domain of sexuality is that il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (there is no sexual relation). At its ground, sexuality is a deviation from an ideal that does not exist, structured not by the immanence of unity between man and woman, but by the deferring and self-contradictory pathways of desire carved out by the imperfect symbolic register in which sexuality is unavoidably articulated. We should be cautious of doctrines, whether Reichian, Deleuzean, or those at home in various anti-psychiatric narratives, stressing the revolutionary, anti-repressive quality of a ‘pure’ sexuality (an uncoded, de-territorialising sexuality, acting against the signifying structures of the State or of repressive apparatuses, as Deleuze and Guattari would characterise it in Capitalism and Schizophrenia) – these stress a certain immanent, liberating, rhizomatic sexuality as ‘pure’, and a counter-point to a historically conditioned repressed sexuality. A command is felt from these corners to ‘liberate sexuality’. However to ‘liberate’ sexuality, to open it up to a multiplicity of forms of enjoyment, is in fact to further alienate it from the paradox that lies at its ground (that of a fundamental failed enjoyment, an impasse constitutive of the symptomatic excess enjoyment of sexuality). We are not ‘freed’ in our discourse on sexuality by pretending to be more tolerant of it, but more lost in how it is that the sexual relation is both a means to and barrier against enjoyment. Sexuality is ‘coded’ in itself - it is its own deviation. Removing its structural-symbolic contingency would simultaneously the possible coordinates of sexuality as such.
Ultimately, the psychoanalytic subject is not divided into the priorities of pleasure and pain. The Freudian insight is that pleasure is radically heterogenous - it is an unstable practice which is articulated from the perspective of a fundamental non-pleasure. Psychoanalysis deals with these precise paradoxes of human projects: it is not a question of seeking what is pleasurable, but of recognising a kernel of alienated, uncanny discomfort in the Symbolically pleasant. Why might a man love his wife to the point of being impotent when he means to sleep with her? Why might a woman be so devoted to her children that she seemingly ignores or abandons them? These are the questions that psychoanalysis intends to resolve. Psychoanalysis locates non-identity and disparity in the fabric of the everyday, it discerns contradictions and irregularities where we previously thought ourselves most at home.
There is no sexual relation because there is no such thing as sexual enjoyment. Enjoyment entertains an ineradicable fidelity to the disappointment and horror of its ground. Mark Solms fails to recognise this paradox central to the psychoanalytic subject - he does not see that pleasure is its own negation, that the symptom acts as a point of inverted enjoyment, and that it is from an inarticulable negative that symbolic identities are (imperfectly) constructed. Instead, he conceived pleasure from its untenable evolutionary concept, from the idea that ‘pleasure is nothing but pleasure’.
Neuropsychoanalysis is a valuable project, this cannot be denied. It has the potential to recognise in the Freudian intervention its effective indeterminacy, and its weight for any domain to which it is applied, in this case neuroscience. Ever since his Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895, Freud’s relation to neuroscience is of great importance, and Solms is right to resist the integration of psychoanalysis to radical breakthroughs in contemporary neuropsychology. Yet for this conjunction of neuroscience and psychoanalysis to satisfy its respective fields, it cannot be forced to compromise on either of them. It must avow the radical contingency and constitutively self-contradictory moments from which basic coordinates such as pleasure, drive, and action arise. As I argued in my article, it is only where the extremes of psychoanalysis and neuroscience touch that their fruitful integration will be glimpsed as a possible theoretical engagement.
I found myself enjoying (uh hm) your article very much, as it is well-written, witty and polemical. You seem to have a writing style that is both simple and difficult and that demands the reader to spend time with it, which was exactly what I did. It took me four goes to finish it, each starting from the beginning and pushing toward 20%, then 50%, then 80% and finally 100%. I have learned much from your article and I agree with your main point. As I have not read Mark Solms (haven’t mustered the interest yet), my comments will only focus on what I have understood from your essay. The first point is: I am not sure I agree with your statement that [psychoanalysis] ‘defines itself by the relations it maintains to philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, theology, etc. It problematises an already defined field, and introduces discrepancies and irregularities where previously there was a sense of unequivocal agreement.’ Aside from the fact that the experts from these various fields would not agree with the ‘unequivocal agreement’, this definition does not mention the Unconscious, which is briefly touched upon somewhere later, so I wonder if you have written about it before. For me, psychoanalysis is defined by its interest in the Unconscious. And it is in the Unconscious we find the emptiness, the lack and the void. It is also because of the Unconscious, the psyche becomes something infinite. The definition of psychoanalysis in relation to other disciplines reminds me of teleology instead. It seems to me to be more of an unintended (or unconscious?) effect of PSA. Exactly because PSA’s emphasis on the Ucs, it carves out an infinite space that would inevitably clash with other disciplines. My second comment or question is: when talking about the drive, what exactly do we refer to? What I mean is, should we use the singular form ‘the drive’ to designate something diffuse and undifferentiated, or should we use the plural from ‘the drives’ to make space for self-preservative, sexual, or even life and death? I honestly don’t know but found myself a bit confused. It has never been very clear how sexuality arises from this primordial soup. Even Laplanche proposes the ‘propping up’ theory, it still is a ‘enigma’ for him and for me. Later on, you talk about how sexuality emerges. But to really think about it, how does it happen? Why? Not from a biological, Darwinian perspective, but from a psychoanalytic perspective? Why there is a need for it especially human sexuality is notoriously non-productive most of the time. I do think it has something to do with the originary object and its refusal to be assimilated by the subject. My third comment concerns your statement ‘Every pleasure is an instance of displeasure. Every enjoyment of an object is a testament to the inadequacy and insufficiency of the enjoyed object. Enjoyment is founded upon a subjective failure — enjoyment is in its very act an inverted non-enjoyment.’ It makes me wonder, does this conclusion presupposes that we human beings are deeply entangled in our own self-phenomena and are unable to be open to the absolute otherness, which presents both the possibility of terror but also pleasure? Is it possible that one can mature enough to find some pleasure in otherness to compensate for this foundational paradox? All in all, I find your article deeply thought-provoking and rich in references, and I appreciate your profound insights.