Disturbing Psychoanalytic Origins

What does psychoanalysis risk by being logocentric? Is there any other kind of psychoanalysis? Can there be an-other kind, a non-logocentric psychoanalysis, an "other-wise" psychoanalysis? Can psychoanalysis afford not to assume that it masters the truth it supposedly finds and is? Psychoanalysis as truth must master especially itself, and then all other. Can it afford not to assume that it has a privileged access to this truth and the totality it implies? How can it master this truth, itself, if this truth is the division of self? As I argue in chapter two, one way is to repress how this truth applies to itself, to repress how the found disrupts trust in the finding and founder. Self-analysis as repression: a (non)origin since this repression would be required to attain this truth. Doesn’t the unconscious as, not a self-absence, but a self-différance–a deferral, dispersal, dissemination of the self–obliterate the possibility of self-presence? Yet the self-present founder is the primary figure of the orthodox myth: Freud’s self-presence is the result of a successful self-analysis, where it seems all of the Es (Other) was transformed into Ich (Same), his "hysteria" cured. Through the inspiration of genius, so the myth goes, Freud is able to simply step outside of the truth that he supposedly founded, achieve a self-presence uncorrupted by the unconscious forces he supposedly discovers, and he is then able to perceive this truth (himself, his unconscious, psychoanalysis) without distortion, without transference or resistance. He is thus able to be the founding father of psychoanalysis, a primal father as in Totem and Taboo, with his legatees establishing institutes with reportable training analyses that supposedly assure the reproduction of this founding perception in the form of the proper paternal transference. I cite Derrida’s question again, "how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its birth?" (Der81 305).

Or, turning the question above around, can psychoanalysis be anything but otherwise than logocentric since what is supposedly found disrupts the possibility of finding? Does Freud take seriously the unconscious as what Barratt calls an "otherwise other"? In chapter three, I argue that Freud does not sustain the fragments of conceptualizations that might constitute theorizing the unconscious in terms of something totally other, an "otherwise other," or Other, but that he consistently reduces its origin ultimately to a simple presence (with respect to a "specific" absence, a lack that has its place) that he then treats as oikos, home and economy (the logic of lack). Yet does not the unconscious, the traditional "object" of psychoanalysis, supposedly the site of unreason, promote a "logic" where contradiction is tolerated? Can the unconscious be both the site of unreason and the validating center for psychoanalysis’s logocentrism, the center of the logos, the site of the organizing principle of reason, of the finding of the truth found? Building on the disturbances of psychoanalytic myths of origins in chapters two and three, I attempt to show in chapter four, "Freud’s Masterplotting," that there is a progression in Freudian theory, one repressed by the psychoanalytic orthodoxy and others, where the ego transforms from the site of order to the site of disorder and contradiction, and its beyond–the unconscious, and then the id–transforms from the site of disorder and contradiction to the site of a priori order. I will show that this progression is connected to the ascendancy of Freud’s plotting of his master narratives of human kind, and the descendancy in his interest in etiologies of neurosis and cure.

Is a logocentric psychoanalysis contradicted if the truth that it finds/is found is posited as the unconscious as the site of unreason? Is it contradicted if this truth is posited as the truth of Freud’s Oedipus complex? "Unreason" could be construed, and is construed by Freud, as the absence of reason. I will argue that Oedipus is construed as that Truth whose repression allows for reason, and therefore Oedipus can be conceptualized as the unreason (phallic absence) that allows for reason (transcendental phallic presence): the lack which assures the place of the phallus, "castration-truth." In this way, Oedipus as the truth of the unconscious secures the totality of psychoanalysis as truth that establishes reason and therefore goes beyond reason. Freud’s supposed discovery, the truth he supposedly found, is therefore prior to reason. Because this "prior to" is also a beyond, Lacan positions himself as within but also beyond reason or his Symbolic. He calls himself both an hysteric and a mystic. But the "prior to" does not really work for Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis: his structures are outside of time, transcendent more than synchronic. In chapter four, I will attempt to show that the origins that Freud developed with respect to his dominant masterplot of the war years are also more transcendent and structural in this way, even though he uses the diachronic term "genetic" to describe them. Freud’s "before" becomes a "beyond" and then a type of "always already." I argue that he pushes his origins beyond the ontogenetic and "into" an "always already" he calls "phylogenetic." I will attempt to show how Freud posits the truth he discovered as Oedipus in terms of this "always already" phylo-"genesis," and that the "uneasily contained elements" (Derrida) of Freudian theory were consistently employed theoretically to sustain this truth as the truth beyond reason, the truth that supposedly secures reason and science. Like Lacan’s Symbolic, this structure becomes a totality as what is Other to it–for Lacan the Real–is reduced to the absence of the structure. For Freud, any potential Other, all the beyonds he considers, are ultimately reduced to the absence of the structure of his masterplot: gaps in the narrative or "trauma."

Specifically the "logic" of oedipal and logocentric Freudian theory positions the truth Freud found as the "Urphantasien," the oedipal "origin of origins" (Bro84 276), the primal fantasies of the primal scene, castration, and seduction, which Laplanche and Pontalis equate with the Oedipus complex: "The universality of these [primal fantasy] structures should be related to the universality that Freud accords to the Oedipus complex as a nuclear complex whose structuring a priori role he often stressed" (Lap67 333na ). Primal fantasies, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, are "[t]ypical phantasy structures … which psychoanalysis reveals to be responsible for the organization of phantasy life, regardless of personal experiences of different subjects; according to Freud, the universality of these phantasies is explained by the fact that they constitute a phylogenetically transmitted inheritance" (Lap67 331). Freud posited these structures at the same time that he held that the unconscious was the site of unreason that could tolerate contradiction. One wonders how these structures, these a priori organizing principles of the unconscious, could tolerate contradiction, and, as theorized, they could not. Freud argues in his 1918 addendum to the Wolf Man case that they supercede any conflict with anything ontogenetic. Thus we have the makings of an aporia with respect to what truth psychoanalysis finds and to what truth it is founded on: the oedipal unconscious versus the unconscious of contradiction, that which secures the Same or reason versus that which is radically other to reason. I will also show how Freud’s phylo"genetic" "origin of origins" conflicts with his foundation, his origin of psychoanalytic authority: the differentiation of the normal and the neurotic, or the answering of the question, "whence the neurosis?," via a cure and an etiology based on that cure. Many readers of Freudian theory have repressed the significance of phylo"genetics" for Freud, including the readers of Freud I am concerned with here. The "mainstyle" psychoanalysis I suppose is one that takes seriously Freud’s oedipal masterplot, and this focus will differentiate me to different degrees from these other readers of Freud who attempt to take seriously the ethical imperative to be "otherwise."

The primal phantasies naturalize "castration-truth" as the center of its logic, its oikos (home and economy). According to Derrida, "castration-truth" is "the very antidote for fragmentation" since "that which is missing from its place has in castration a fixed central place, freed from all substitution (Der87a 441). With Lacan, Freud’s primal fantasies are transformed into an inevitably phallocentric language: the Symbolic. According to Derrida, the absence of the penis-phallus sets in place the phallogocentric signifying chain of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the destination at which all sliding arrives: "truth-unveiled-woman-castration-shame" (Der87a 416) or simply "castration-truth." This absence, he argues, is "that which contracts itself (stricture of the ring) in order to bring the phallus, the signifier, the letter, or the fetish back into their oikos, their familiar dwelling, their proper place" (Der87a 441).

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