Filling Gaps

The "shreds and patches" are references to two lines in Heine’s "Die Heimkehr," which Freud cites in full at the beginning of his final "New Introductory Lecture" in 1933: "Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus." Strachey translates these lines as follows: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe" (ibid.). Whereas our nightcaps and dressing-gowns bring us comfort during sleep, secondary revision is that which brings us comfort after we awake, that which transforms the "absurdity and disconnectedness" of the primary processes as experienced in dreams into what is an "intelligible experience" for the awake consciousness. The "primary revision" would be the dreamwork of the dream, the condensation and displacement of the primary processes: the "dissimulating function" which allows the ideational material–which would otherwise remain unconscious–to slip by the sleeping censors of consciousness. Secondary revision is thus a re-establishment of consciousness, its corresponding sense of self, and their censors after they have been vulnerable to the disruptive forces of the unconscious material during sleep.

The unconscious is thus theorized here by Freud as being a locus of disruptive forces with respect to consciousness, forces radically other to consciousness and its systems. Freud also associates the unconscious with "the gaps in the structure of the universe," gaps which cannot be filled despite the systematic "pretensions" of "phobosophers" or anyone else:

System making therefore can have a defensive quality, and, in Levinasian terms, an unethical quality inasmuch as it attempts to move toward totality by reducing what is totally other to the system’s logic–that is, inasmuch as it denies the necessity for partiality, provisionality, and openness as a system, and inasmuch as it denies the irreducibility of division as a unity. Following Freud, Weber makes the connection explicit between theory (speculations, system making) and narcissism:

Thus there is something "phobosophic" and narcissistic, if not unpsychoanalytic, about theorizing in general, if that which is opposed to the ego, that against which it organizes itself–"the" unconscious, the id, or that which simply happens–is posited as that which cannot be organized in terms of the ego, that which resists theory, that which is radically other to intelligible wholes, coherent meaning, sense, organization. "For speculation," Weber continues, "which Freud associates with narcissism, systematization, and secondary revision, would be a form of thought ill-suited to ‘judge unconscious material’ inasmuch as it is driven precisely to deny the influence of its own unconscious" (14). Hence Freud’s criticism of Adlerian theory: "The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a ‘system’--which psychoanalysis was careful to avoid becoming" (XIV 50). I will argue in later chapters that the year Freud made this statement, 1914, he was on the verge of making the move toward primal phantasies as the basis of his masterplotting, his ultimate system based on "castration-truth." With this system, the identity of Narcissus and Oedipus is established.

Freud decries all system making that is different from his own, and yet, there are moments when Freud approaches taking seriously his own criticisms of "phobosophie." In "Resistances," Derrida discusses one of these moments in a note Freud makes to his interpretation of the Irma dream in The Interpretation of Dreams where "Freud confesses a feeling, a premonition (Ich ahne, he writes)" (4) that "something exceeds [his] analysis" (5):

Towards the end of The Interpretation of Dreams Freud reiterates this point:

These might be the dream-thoughts that take detour and never return to some notion of the proper destination–one might say an adestinational theory of the unconscious. This would make the "unknown" the "unknowable." Freud seems to be arguing that the system-making of philosophy will necessarily be incomplete due to "the unknown" of the most entangled roots of the unconscious, and that any attempt to create a unity, eine Weltanschauung, as Freud says, is similar to the folly of secondary revision: a projection of the need for unity. It would seem that we have a Freud here that demands that certain holes or gaps remain unfilled: open spaces.

Yet, Derrida argues, "Freud seems to have no doubts that this hidden thing has a sense," that "the secret" (4) is unknown but not unknowable, and that the open spaces are gaps where a certain presence is missing from its place. For Freud, if the interpreter could do the impossible and accomplish just the right unraveling of the tangle of dream-thoughts, and follow all the myriad detours, sense could be made of the dream:

We might argue that Freud becomes split regarding the sense of the navel of the dream into two Freuds: one is the Freud of the inaccessible secret, the unknown as exceeding the analysis, but as ultimately knowable and "homogeneous to the order of the analyzable"; and the second is the Freud, not of the unplumbable unknown, or not-yet-known, but of the unplumbable and therefore unknowable, the abyssal. One Freud would be of system-making grounded in truth; the other would recognize that all systems will fall short of a totality and have spaces open up within due to the irreducibility of the Other to the Same. I will argue that there is little evidence of this latter Freud, and abundant evidence of former. Moreover, what is the not-yet-known for Freud here becomes that which grounds all of his later theory.

Both Weber and Derrida draw attention to the maternal connections of Freud’s navel metaphor. As will be even more the case as the "castration-truth" system of oedipal psychoanalysis develops, the center of the structure, its navel, will be associated with an absence (the "unknown") related to woman, the absence of woman, and the mother’s absence (as in the fort/da game of Beyond the Pleasure Principle). At one point in his treatment of this note to the Irma dream, Weber argues that the navel of the dream would not necessarily be a site of destabilizing mystery:

The question of Freud’s "navel of the dream" becomes: is it a "gap" that can be filled by discovering the correct sense that would then correspond to this dream’s truth, or an infinity of ever-returning spaces that do not allow for a totality, a system (something that simply happens)? And what is the relationship ofthese gaps/spaces to the mother, femininity, and woman?

What is at stake here seems to be the status of (psychoanalytic) knowledge and the very nature of the unconscious: whether it has a nature and whether that nature can be expressed in a form that might be meaningful. Discussing related issues, Derrida states matter-of-factly in Resistance of Psychoanalysis that what is at stake "are sense and truth" (18). In "Le facteur de la vérité," Derrida argues that Lacan treats the navel simply as a fillable gap. According to Lacan, "[w]hat Freud calls the navel–the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre … is simply, like the same anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken" (Lac77b 23). Lacan’s interest in what Derrida calls "the gap and the carved-out localization of the umbilical hole" (Der96 11) is a repetition of the "castration-truth" Derrida finds to be the basis of Lacan’s reading of "The Purloined Letter," and of Lacan’s "destinational" theory of language. More simply, Lacan’s rendering of the navel as a center reveals his penchant for idealist structures with centers. It is a philosophy or "phobosophie" that "fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches," but Lacan fills it with a supposedly material and, at the same time, indivisible letter, what I call a material-ideal letter. Again the question becomes: how well does Lacan read Freud? Or does psychoanalysis itself, despite Freud’s criticisms of philosophers, attempt to be a Weltanschauung?

Freud’s transformation of open spaces into specific absences, and making these absences the center of a grand system, begins with his treatment of hysterics and ends with the "castration-truth" of psychoanalysis proper. In "A Fragment of a Case of Hysteria," Freud’s 1901 case commonly known as the Dora case, Freud states clearly that "[n]o one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door" (VII 115). At this point in his theorizing, the gaps in hysterical narratives are the locks supposedly unlocked by Freud’s, and later Lacan’s, phallic keys. When Dora recounts her narrative of being assaulted by Herr K. at fourteen, the absence of Dora’s desire for Herr K.’s advances is for Freud a telltale bit of the "unconscious disingenuousness" (17) that leaves "gaps unfilled" (16) in the narratives of hysterics. Effecting an abreaction, according to the Freud of the Dora case, would supposedly require a catharsis of the repressed ideational content via its dialogical reconstruction from the analysand’s free associations and the analyst’s interpretations. Freud, however, does not report filling this supposed gap in Dora’s narrative with a reconstruction that is at all dialogical. Rather, Freud, as he often does, employs his own associations: "I believe that during the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member against her body" (30). Freud’s primary key to the supposed hysteria of his female patients up to and including Dora, the absent presence of every gap, is often an "erect member," which he uses to know his patients, to penetrate their unconscious desires.

The hysteric with her gaps ready to be filled by the phallocentric master narratives of Freudian theory provides the initial small-"o" other. Freud assumes a position of the narrative totality from whence he can see gaps. Later, this position would be one of a masterplot, a metapsychology, rather than an etiological narrative totality. Freud’s initial system is based on cure, etiological, and provides thefoundation of truth on which psychoanalysis is supposedly based. Psychoanalysis proper would be theorized according to the terms of universal fantasies rather than the traumatic memories from which hysterics supposedly suffered during the "seduction" theory: "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences" (II 7). Supposedly, Freud was right about the truth he found, but, he would later rationalize, this truth was in the form of universal fantasies rather than traumatic memories. Freud’s movement from his system of filling gaps in phallic narratives to the "castration-truth" of totalizing masterplots is complicated by a question that ultimately remains unanswered by Freud after the movement: whence the neurosis? Though Freud’s theorization, treatment, and cure of hysteria are supposedly the authoritative foundation of psychoanalytic truth, Freud would argue in The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis finds "no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life" (V 373). Freud thus clearly differentiates a nascent psychoanalysis proper from his earlier etiology of hysteria here. The latter posited a structural difference between hysteria, one form of neurosis, and normalcy: the hysteric, according to the Freud of around 1895 and 1896, suffered from the pathogenic repression of traumatic memories of incestuous violence, whereas the normal female did not. The Freud of the Dora case, written as an addendum to The Interpretation of Dreams, had no clear etiology: this Freud could not answer, "whence the neurosis?," and he avoided answering the question in this mere "fragment of an analysis."

One of the dominant themes in my study is the possibility of chance in Freud’s system making. During the "seduction" theory, the difference between neurotic and normal development was dependent on the chance occurrence of the rape, molestation, or "seduction." In this sense, trauma, chance, and memory are clearly linked in the answering of the question, "whence the neurosis?" Freud’s initial truth, his supposed "discovery," is the answering of this question as part of a more general question of cure and the nature of the unconscious. Narratives as etiologies, chance as part of that narrative, answering the question, and cure are all the basis of establishing this truth. In one of his last essays, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud argues that the way psychoanalysis has come to understand the nature of resistance means that cure is hard to come by. But cure is supposedly how psychoanalysis came to understand the nature of resistance. What Freud is doing in this essay written in 1938, the year before the year of his death, and forty-three years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, is privileging metapsychology (metanarratives) over technique (etiologies, cure) as the central concern of his theorizing and forgetting that all of his appeals to the authority in his metapsychology are ultimately based on cure. I return to the theme of chance in chapter three, and again in chapter five, where I link it to the (non)position of woman in mainstyle psychoanalysis.

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