Freud and Lac(k)an

Part of the very early relation to the mother is a "pleasure" or affective intensity that would go beyond the pleasure principle. Lacan would call this intense affective intensity "jouissance." He would call "jouissance" any such intensity beyond pain or pleasure, anything beyond the "(un)pleasure" principle and contrary to the edict of the ego’s principle of constancy to feel as little pain and pleasure as possible. Lacan associates the jouissance of this supposed early dyadic oneness with das Ding and objet a, the hub and cause of desire respectively. Lacan argues that to go "beyond the pleasure principle" in order to experience jouissance would be closer to the experience of pain, since one’s desire can only circle around das Ding: to actually achieve it would mean one would no longer be one, separated from the mother: one would no longer exist, as with "woman"; one would not be supported by the "bedrock" of "the repudiation of femininity." Much as with Freud, the secret behind Lacan’s abstractions here is the significance of the mother’s role in phallic identity-positioning. The paradoxical pleasure-unpleasure of Freud’s uncanny, which is weighted toward horror and the fear of extreme unpleasure, could be read as being related to Lacan’s conception of jouissance, and therefore with the objet a, das Ding, and the intensity of the mother-infant oneness. If the uncanny is the return of this primitive time of "identification" with the mother–the quotes are intended to note that identification requires a simple subject-object split–then many of Freud’s examples of the uncanny begin to take on new significance in relation to the mother: telepathy, magical thinking, the omnipotence of thoughts, primitive beliefs, "phantasies of intra-uterine experiences," the fulfillment of every wish, the effacement of reality and the imaginary (the oneness being imaginary), and even reminders of death. The pleasure-unpleasure for all of them could all be associated with the jouissance of this oneness, its intensity that goes beyond the pleasure principle and the oneness of this "dyad."

When we consider the process of subjectification in the mirror stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis with respect to the importance of this earlier "identification," Freud’s examples of the uncanny as related to doubling, automatons, ghosts, mutilated bodies (fragmentation versus wholeness), positioning, the effacement of reality and the imaginary (the ego ideal of the whole body being an effacement of the infant’s actual experience of the body), and "secret injurious powers" (the mirror stage, according to Lacan, gives rise to aggression towards the image), among others, also take on a new significance. Inasmuch as the nascent ego can experience this process of individuation, it would be terrifying and painful at the same time it might also be pleasurable: the ontogenetic origin. Whatever terror and pain there might be, from whatever "memory" might exist from a "before" of the origin of the individuated ego, would be caused by having the jouissance of oneness with the mother taken away–which Lacan, faithfully following Freud, reduces to castration. But Lacan also associates this original oneness with castration. The pleasure of individuation, according to Lacan, would be caused by leaving behind what Lacan refers to as a state of fragmentation and utter dependence, and which he associates with castration: fragmented body ego. Individuation here would be a making-whole of the (always male) bodily ego. Once again denying the importance of the mother and privileging the pleasure of phallic individuation, Lacan privileges the pleasure here and calls this moment when the infant is able to recognize itself as a subject and the mother as an object a "jubilant" moment (Lac77a 2)–that is, when the (always male) infant recognizes the image as "himself," when "he" identifies with it, with its phallic completeness, he feels joy. What happens to the castration of the infant being separated from the mother of which Freud so often writes?

Lacan argues that this identification, this moment of self-positioning, leads to a sense of mastery, including self-mastery, and eventually mastery over the mother, a prefiguring of her repudiation in the resolution of the Oedipus complex. This could be read as the origin of the phallic pleasure principle and its self-posting of letters that always arrive at their destination. Paradoxically, this origin would be one of castration, as Freud formulates it: separation from the mother as castration. It seems both sides of the individuation process are castration: "trauma"-structure. Lacan’s notion of the "jubilant" moment represses the necessary ambivalence of this origin, and privileges phallic individuation. The early identification of the "infant" (subjectivity being especially problematic at a pre-individuation point) would be with an ego ideal, a prefiguring of the super-ego, which, according to what I would call a secret logic of Freudian theory, would be a bodily Gestalt ultimately grounded in the mother-infant oneness. Given that the nascent identification of the mirror stage is based on the repudiation of the mother-infant oneness, the phallic Gestalt of the Oedipus complex would to a large degree depend on keeping this original Gestalt and its intensities secret. The mother-infant Gestalt would be based on a repudiation of difference and chance, which Lacan calls fragmentation and ultimately reduces to castration. The oedipal Gestalt would also be based on the repudiation of the (identification with the) mother as a female, and therefore the absence to the presence of this phallic Gestalt, the other against which the One is established.

The transition of the mother from the blissful mother of oneness to the imaginary-symbolic-lacking mother that incites aggression (she threatens castration) is figured from an oedipal position as the transition from the phallic mother (the repressed basis of the oedipal Gestalt identity) to the castrated (castrating) mother: thus the subject of the Symbolic is born of the Law of the Father. This figuration of the mother reduces "her" to the central absence of phallic economy or heim. Every definition and every example Freud gives of the uncanny is in harmony with a definition of the uncanny according to this economy and their phallic figurations of the mother as secret (phallic mother) and opposite (abject castrated-castrating mother). The mother and the Other are simultaneously reduced to more of the phallic Same via Freud’s treatment of the uncanny in these terms. Again, one secret of "The ‘Uncanny,’" and of psychoanalysis in general, is the great importance of what Freud referred to as "Minoan-Mycean" (XXI 226) layer of the bedrock of infancy; and this "bedrock" of the mother-infant monad/dyad, hidden behind the oedipal construction of the phallic mother (which must be repudiated in order for phallic individuation to occur), itself hides something totally other behind it: the mise en abyme of something like jouissance, of "experience" prior to an ego, prior to any kind of individuation, any kind of subject-object experience. The "archeologist of the mind" tended to see the deepest layers in terms of his androcentric and patriarchal themes of Totem and Taboo, and not in terms of an all-powerful figure of the mother, and especially not an all-powerful "(dis)figure(ing)" of différance.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is very much the legitimate legatee of "The ‘Uncanny’" with respect to three profound and related themes: the effacement of the importance of woman, the reduction of (sexual) difference to identity via castration (really the same as the first theme), and the reduction of literature to psychoanalytic truth. For example, with respect to all of these themes, "The ‘Uncanny’" prefigures Lacan’s "Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’" Derrida shows that Lacan reduces Poe’s text to his destinational linguistics where the proper destination of the phallic and mysteriously material-ideal letter is with the Queen (woman as phallus), her secret (the loss of her penis-phallus-letter; her wandering desire or womb) is kept, and her position in relation to the king maintained (proper arrival). It is interesting to note that the secret of the letter is "hidden" in a most heimlich place: in the Minister’s home, and Dupin immediately looks to the loins of the woman-shaped mantle. The hiding place is so heimlich it becomes unheimlich; it also recalls female genitals, and the letter a phallic lost object. The letter’s eventual arrival sets everything right, and, according to Lacan, it must happen this way: it is destiny, the nature of language. Lack has its proper place.

Literature–which is traditionally figured as the female other to phallic psychoanalysis, science, and philosophy–is reduced to "castration-truth" by both Lacan and Freud. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, and science attempt to erect a firm position, whereas with literature and its numerous vehicles for effecting "uncanny" displacements, one never knows where one stands. As Lacan effaces the narration of Poe’s tale, and treats Dupin as the (Lacanian) analyst, Freud reduces the function of the author to that of the analyst in "The ‘Uncanny.’" Like a proper analyst, the "success" of Freud’s literary author depends on divining methods of getting beyond the resistances of the reader-analysand in order to produce a catharsis of the repressed in the form of an uncanny feeling (XVII 250). Freud even uses the term "recalcitrance" with respect to the literary reader at this point in "The ‘Uncanny,’" much as he had in his description of a patient in the dream of Irma’s injection in The Interpretation of Dreams. That which displaces (literature) is reduced to the terms of what seeks a fixed place (Freud’s science or "analysis").

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