Supposing Psychoanalysis

What is at stake when one supposes psychoanalysis? To suppose psychoanalysis–to hypothesize that it exists as one thing, identical to itself, self-same–would mean to disregard the divisions, conflicts, aporias, and to decide undecidables "within" psychoanalysis. To suppose psychoanalysis as a unifiable, delimitable theoretical identity is also to disregard the competitive, conflictual, and differential process by which it comes into being and sustains itself in relation to other discursive forces: to decide undecidables regarding its relation to what is "without" psychoanalysis. Yet my questioning of the supposition of psychoanalysis is also a questioning of the very boundaries that would allow for a "within" and a "without," a problematization of the notion of psychoanalysis as having secure and identifiable boundaries: an identification, a locale, an inside and outside. Moreover, to write of psychoanalysis as coming into being and sustaining itself, to assume that it is ever a simple presence in the present, or a simple re-presentation, that it is simply demarcated in opposition to other discourses, other locales, is to miss the aspect of deferral and the relatedness and imbrication of differences in the generation of any pseudo-identity–that is, to disregard the generative powers involved in what Jacques Derrida calls "différance." Among other things, to suppose psychoanalysis is to mark an inside and an outside of psychoanalysis, then to make cohesive what could only be an aporetic inside, and to make the outside separate and passive with regard to the creation of this identity. In other words, the creation of a binary–inside/outside–that constitutes a certain repression of undecidables, of différance, is at stake in the supposition of an identity "psychoanalysis." Some might argue that this supposition would be unpsychoanalytic, but this argument itself requires a supposition of psychoanalysis as essentially about the problematization of certain identities achieved via the repression of undecidables. I suppose a psychoanalysis here, on the contrary, that is very much about this kind of repression.

What is at stake when one does not suppose psychoanalysis? Without such a supposition any treatment of "psychoanalysis"–whether it be a critique, a so-called "deconstruction," or some other mode of reading–would be impossible. The stakes would be not to question the traditional suppositions of psychoanalysis as found truth. Some mode of questioning is required to disrupt these types of suppositions. While critique is a single game that simply assumes the subject position for the critic and the object position for what is being criticized, a deconstructive reading plays a double game where the subject-object positions of critique are problemetized as they are assumed. This problematization of the subject-object split subverts any simple inside/outside for both the supposed subject and the supposed object, yet even a deconstructive reading of "psychoanalysis" would be difficult, if not impossible, without the supposition of "psychoanalysis" as its simple, unified object. In his 1991 lecture "‘To Do Justice to Freud,’ The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," Derrida asks his audience to allow him to "provisionally assume that there is indeed a psychoanalysis that is a single whole: as if it were not, already in Freud, sufficiently divided to make its localization and identification more than problematic" (Der98 76-77). As always with Derrida, that the assumption is provisional is a crucial part of any double game. My provisional assumptions of "Freud" and "psychoanalysis" do not ultimately assume them as single wholes: I attempt to show here how they are irreducibly divided. But to do so, I do provisionally assume a single or basic tactic or strategy of "Freud"/"psychoanalysis" of securing a position of undividedness for himself/itself. The "Freud" and "psychoanalysis" I suppose are both "interested" in their own unity even though, in significant ways, they position themselves as the Truth of universal "division"–or "division" as castration, which is why the quotes are needed.

With respect to Derrida’s quotation above, it must also be asked to assume provisionally that there is indeed an author, a "Derrida," as subject that is single and whole, separate from the assumed object: as if he were not, already with respect to Freud and to himself, already divided to make his localization and identification more than problematic. Also, the assumed "objects" of "Freud" and "psychoanalysis" are not only divided but "within" the "author" in that he/I cannot simply step outside "Freud" in order to make it his/my object. Inasmuch as my reading becomes a critique unawares–a single game of simple insides and outsides, simple subjects and objects, repressing the irreducibility of division from my awareness–my reading becomes an example of what I am trying to disrupt in "Freud": the identitarian force or "interest" I call (op)positionality. Simply put, (op)positionality is a mode of securing a position, and therefore a subject identity, by establishing the separate identity of the object, and the subject’s mastery of that object. To whatever degree my work here is a reading in this mode, a critique, I am suspect of securing my "I," of finding myself with respect to an "object" I suppose and oppose: "Freud"/"psychoanalysis." Insofar as this mode of positioning is unavoidable, especially in the highly formalized mode of a dissertation, the question of awareness of "one’s"–the "subject’s," the "author’s"–own division, and the effect of this division on the supposed "object," becomes a crucial focal point for differentiating types of discourses, particularly between critiques and deconstructive readings. The provisional and the playing of double games becomes crucial. Some might argue, as Barnaby B. Barratt suggests in Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse, that (op)positionality and critical modes of reading that stem from this type of identitarian logic would be unpsychoanalytic. But this argument is itself dependent on a supposition of psychoanalysis as essentially about revealing identities and subjects (egos) as essentially divided. Again, this is another version of the supposition I mentioned above, and which I want to disrupt here.

From such a (supposed) Freudian perspective this argument might hold up for everything and everyone except Freud himself/psychoanalysis itself–that is, Freud/psychoanalysis reveals all other identities to be divided except for himself/itself. Herein lies a significant difference between what is signed by Derrida and what is signed by Freud: the texts signed by Freud lack a certain awareness of the irreducible division of the Freudian text, its signature, and its signator, whereas the double games of so-called "deconstruction" are the manifestation of this type of awareness. Psychoanalysis claims to be a method, a science, based on a discovery of Truth. Derrida resists deconstruction as a method since it is a mode of reading that treats every text singularly, according to its own readability: a response to the text, rather than an application of some Truth of deconstruction. We might paraphrase the pun of the title of Shoshana Felman’s book questioning applied psychoanalytic readings of literary texts, Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, and call this reading mode, this responsive (non)methodology, "reading other-wise." Following Derrida’s "Le facteur de la vérité," his reading of Jacques Lacan’s "Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’" I argue here that Freud/psychoanalysis attempts to establish himself/itself as that unity that stops the incessant sliding of the "en abyme" effects of disruptions to the simple subject-object, a simple inside/outside, caused by irreducible division. As the discoverer of the Truth of psychoanalysis, Freud positions himself as the unified subject. He is supposedly beyond the obvious en abyme effects of "the unconscious," his supposed discovery, in his self analysis. Derrida asks, "how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its birth?" (Der81 305). As the Truth discovered, psychoanalysis is established as the unified object: a strangely material-ideal object, a stereotomy, an "point de capiton" (Lacan). The self-sameness and immediacy of this "act of establishment" require the repetitive repression of the differences and endless deferrals of meaning in the creation of any signifying system: différance. Derrida calls this strangely material-ideal subject-object positioning the metaphysics of presence or logocentrism: the found "object" of psychoanalysis is part of the "object world" and the signifying system at the same time, the centering idea/matter, the idea that matters, or logos. This repression of différance is logocentric repression. We might say that the unconscious of Freud/psychoanalysis is this différance, kept out of awareness as part of the "act of establishment" of an identity, an institution, a legacy–that is, if the word "unconscious" were not so imbricated in the very identities of Freud and psychoanalysis I wish to disrupt. My use of "unconscious" under erasure can be read as an example of how "I" cannot be simply inside or outside psychoanalysis.

Though "Freud" (op)poses himself as subject to the object of psychoanalysis, there is also a unity of subject and object here, which sends the phenomenology "en abyme": "When one finds it, it is psychoanalysis itself, supposedly, that finds itself" (ibid.). One doesn’t just find oneself with respect to the object, but in the object. (Op)positionality, as a mode of stabilizing the dizzying movement of différance, is itself unstable: the unification of "Freud" is "discovered" through the discovery of the Truth of the unconscious, "psychoanalysis," which "then" "sutures" (Miller) the "Freud" who was previously divided between his conscious and unconscious self, which "then" allows the unified "Freud" to discover psychoanalysis unencumbered by his own division.… This process of "positioning" beyond (op)positioning, where the subject and object are no longer opposed in a simple phenomenology, which moves toward a totality of the Self via Truth, an identity of subject and object, I call, following Derrida, "self-posting," where the self sends itself a post of its own identity. For Lacan in "The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter," as Derrida argues in "Le facteur de la vérité," posts always arrive at their destination. For Derrida, there is always the chance that something otherwise could happen. For Lacan, the Truth of psychoanalysis is the Truth of a destinational linguistics: "Quand elle trouve, à supposer, elle se trouve–quelque chose." The sending (envoi) of the post, which is supposedly identical with the self-sender, in fact reveals the presence of something totally other that causes the sending. Derrida reads Lacan as positing the truth as "something" found, and a cause of the "eternal return" (Nietzsche): a destinational linguistics based on a theory of the postal system without a dead letter office. For Derrida, the "eternal return" cannot be reduced to a thing or a transcendental structure centered on an absence or a veiled presence (the phallus as an always already absent presence)–a negative theology (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) or a "Negative Concord" (Kermode)–but is something radically other, which subverts ontology (conceptions of thingness, centers, structures) and Lacan’s synchronic transcendent structures: a (non)origin of repetition and an adestinational postal system. That letters are repetitively sent and may end up in the dead letter office suggests the system is related to and part of something totally other.

Lacan stresses the detour the letter takes, the division its detour signifies. But this detour is quite specific, and it is necessary in order to allow for the proper return. Division is reduced to presence/absence where the absence is always the absence of a very specific presence. Psychoanalysis à la Lacan and Lacan himself are unified in the truth of the proper detour of the letter, the proper division. Derrida calls this truth "castration-truth" (Der81 441). The metaphysics of presence, the logocentrism of Lacanian psychoanalysis is phallogocentrism, where the material-ideal letter is the penis-phallus. Castration as the proper division, the proper detour of the letter, reduces the binary of male/female to one-sex system in terms of presence/absence of the phallus: male/not-male. The not-male secures the phallus as transcendental Truth by reducing division to an absence, or lack. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to Derrida, "[s]omething is missing from its place, but the lack is never missing from it" (Der81 441). The "something" that psychoanalysis finds when it finds itself is lack as the "central place," the familiar locale, and also the center of a structural system, a logic of lack: what Derrida refers to as the psychoanalytic oikos, where the Greek word suggests both home and economy. This lack signifies the transcendence of the phallus and therefore its uncastratability. According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "the ultimate effect of the Lacanian strategy thus turns out to be a surprising but vigorous repetition of negative theology" (Nan92 xviii).

For Derrida, division is that which disrupts the concept of truth by disrupting the signifying system that might support such a concept. "Dissemination" is one word Derrida uses with respect to irreducible division: dis-semination as not allowing for a stable semantics, which is supposedly the spawn (semen) of phallic truth. The spreading and dispersal of seeds suggested by dissemination suggest the dispersal of meaning of différance, the disruption of any economy, any logic. No "central place" of absence, no castration home, is allowed by dissemination: "the lack does not have its place in dissemination" (Der81 441). Following Derrida’s reading of Lacan, this project contrasts a logic of lack with a "logic" of dissemination with respect to Freud. Is Freud another "facteur de la vérité" of a destinational postal system? Is Freudian theory based on "castration-truth," where "Femininity is the Truth (of) castration" (Der81 442)? Like Lacan, who positions himself as the mystic who has mastered the cosmology of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary or "RSI," Freud often positions himself as undivided, in possession of the whole story, properly analyzed.

In chapter two, "Problematizing Hysteria and the Origins of Psychoanalysis," I explore how the theme of Freud’s lack of awareness of the irreducibility of division, and how division would apply to oneself and one’s theories, is reflected in the large role his self-analysis plays in his claims to have access to truth and in the orthodox origin myths of psychoanalysis which he invented and fostered. Freud, the undivided subject, the subject that "sutures" his own division–that is, cures the "hysteria" that marks this division–supposedly discovers Freud/psychoanalysis. He/it is found, a solid whole, a stereotomy, a something. The something Freud initially finds are gaps in narratives, which he fills first with phallic memories of "seduction" and then later with fantasies of phallic wholeness when "hysteria" is replaced by "femininity" as the privileged object and "gaps" are replaced by "castration" as the lack that secures the oikos of Truth. Freud secures an undivided, phallic subject position by creating an object of lack: the hysteric and her narratives full of gaps. I will explore in chapter two whether Freud’s writing on so-called "hysteria" is an example of what Barratt calls the "phenomenology of fucking": "the operation of ‘I’ as the (aggressing or aggressed) subject of (phallo)logocentric discourse" (Bar93 150). Foreshadowing the "castration-truth" of psychoanalysis proper, the division of the object, the so-called hysteric, was reduced to a specific absence, a specific gap. I argue that the phenomenology is a sort of mixture of (op)positionality and self-posting, and is ultimately unstable because it depends on cure: as with woman in Freud’s later theory, the so-called hysteric exists as gap to be filled and as what must disappear as cured.

One question I want to privilege in this study is whether Freudian theory can get beyond its phallocentrism–that is, what, if anything, remains of Freudian theory once Derrida’s project is accomplished: "the Freudian concept of trace must be radicalized and extracted from the metaphysics of presence which still retains it" (Der78 229)? Is Freud’s logocentrism the same as his phallocentrism: phallogocentrism? Since Barratt’s book lacks an entry in its index for anything related to Oedipus–the expanded oikos of castration-truth–and his book sets forth a general metapsychology of sorts, it seems that he would answer yes to this query, and his theory of "genitality" reflects an attempt at such a distancing from phallocentrism while remaining "within" his supposed psychoanalysis. Barratt suggests that Freud’s phallocentrism, the oedipal aspects of psychoanalysis, are in fact a betrayal of what is essential about psychoanalysis. Certainly Derrida has shown that one cannot simply step outside the metaphysics of presence of logocentrism. In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida argues for the necessity of "lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it" (111). But is phallocentrism unavoidable? Since the Freud I suppose here is one of "castration-truth" and the logic of lack–arguing that Freud, like Lacan, is a "facteur de la vérité" of a phallocentric and destinational postal system–I conclude that little would remain of Freudian theory to constitute a radical spirit of Freud if its oikos lost its privileged place. Barratt’s Freud represents something closer to what I wish Freud would be, rather than how I actually read him. To "suppose" is not only to assume or to hypothesize, but to suspect too.

The function of "castration-truth" is to theorize division in terms of what secures identity. Phallocentrism, therefore, is the mode of logocentrism of psychoanalysis in its Lacanian mode, as Derrida argues, and in its Freudian mode, as I argue here. The Lacanian "phallic function," according to Bruce Fink, author of The Lacanian Subject, "is the function that institutes lack" (103). In Lacan’s own words, the "phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire" (Lac77b 287). Since Lacanian desire is never in relation to an object but to lack, the joining point or "point de capiton" of desire to the logos would be a "mark" of lack. The phallus is that magical signifier/mark, the letter, that sets the Symbolic in motion but also keeps it centered enough to write "Symbolic" with a capitol "S."

One central question for me here is how well does Lacan read Freud? How faithful is Lacan’s return to Freud? I argue that Lacan’s "phallic function" can be generalized and theorized as what I call the "actual phallic function," another way of naming phallogocentrism and its one-sex self-posting, what I will later call, co-opting Irigaray’s pun, "hom(m)osexuality," which Lacan attempts to address in Encore (Lac98 84). The series of acts of self-posting constituting the actual phallic function comprise what I call a "triple (self-)deception": the first deception is the dissimulation of difference and chance behind the binarism of Man/Woman (dissimulating the Other), the second is the dissimulation of the significance of woman’s role in establishing the identity of man (dissimulating the other), and the third is the dissimulation of all previous dissimulations. With the actual phallic function, as with Derrida’s conception of phallogocentrism, presence is established by reducing the Other to absence, binary difference is effaced by erecting one term (the phallus) to identify difference, the binary is always already a hierarchy, and these processes are naturalized via the repression of repression and the supplementarity of what remains. I argue that Lacan’s phallogocentrism suggests a faithful return to Freud since Freud consistently reverts to the "actual phallic function" in his theorizing. I argue in chapter three, "(Un)Easily Contained Elements," that many of the concepts of psychoanalysis that are traditionally read as the "otherwise" elements of psychoanalysis–for example, overdetermination, free-association, memory, and the primary process–either are actually more dependent or related to "castration-truth," or are simply not as "otherwise," as previously thought.

next —>