Freud's Masterplotting

Contrary to Cornell’s opening assumption of her essay on Lacan, this chapter argues that Freud himself does not remain "true" to the unconscious or anything else as a beyond to that over which he has mastery. Freud calls the "reality" he invents (not discovers) "psychic reality" rather than "psychic life." This "reality" and its determinism, what I am referring to as "stereotomy," following Derrida, becomes the reality that matters, to use Judith Butler’s pun–though this stereotomy, like Lacan’s phallus, is oddly material-ideal. "Reality," what Freud called "external reality," was actually never considered the home or oikos from which to speculate on a beyond; on the contrary, "reality" is an aspect of the traditional psychoanalytic beyond, or one of the beyonds, of consciousness or the ego (these two not being synonymous and their differences significant). "External reality," according to Freud, is full of chance, which thus makes the type of mastery Freud is interested in achieving impossible with this type of reality, and therefore it is rarely his "object." I hope to show that the determinism of Freud’s "psychic reality," extending as it does beyond the bounds of ontogeny into phylogeny, also extends beyond the bounds of some constructed "inside" and eclipses the chance of the corresponding "outside" by reducing "external reality" to the organizing principles of psychic reality. Thus Freud essentially moves toward creating a totality of psychic reality, which is therefore much more than just "another reality." Though many contemporary theorists praise Freud for subverting the inside-outside dichotomy, they should recognize that the most forceful and repeated way he does this is by totalizing his stereotomy of oedipal determinism. This is the Freud to whom Lacan returns, to whom Lacan is faithful with his subversion of the inside-outside dichotomy via his phallogo-phonocentric theory of language and the unconscious. With what I call "establishment" psychoanalysis, the traditional beyonds of psychoanalysis–the unconscious, reality, the death drive, and repetition–all end up slaves to the mastery of what Derrida refers to as the "PP" (Der87a), a combination of the pleasure principle and Freud the grandfather (pépé) of the psychoanalytic legacy–indeed, they become even more slave-like than Derrida argues. The question remains–suggesting what is at stake with psychoanalysis and its beyonds–whether an "otherwise" psychoanalysis can be "found" within psychoanalysis yet beyond the "establishment"? Who or what finds it? To whom or what is the finder indebted?

Cornell’s essay, despite what I believe is some confusion at the start, ends up insightfully showing how "Lacan fails to adequately address the alterity of the real" by ultimately rooting "the real in the meaning of the symbolic" (142). In this respect, my argument here is similar to Cornell’s, but with respect to Freud rather than to Lacan. Cornell decides that psychoanalysis is essentially about a Jenseits of a Derridean type of "radical alterity" (141)–a psychoanalysis that respects the otherness of the Other–when, as this project hopes to show, psychoanalysis seems to be quite undecidable with respect to its "otherwise-ness," and, if were to favor any one decision, it would be quite the contrary to Cornell’s. Cornell therefore reads Lacan’s return to Freud as fundamentally a betrayal of Freud, whereas I read his return as being true (no quotes) to the dominant Freud. Unlike Cornell, I don’t put quotes around "truth" because being faithful to Freud, keeping fidelity, is all about truth and a "certain linguistics" of truth and ontology. The move of authorizing one’s Derridean project by claiming allegiance to the true psychoanalysis is particularly evident in Barratt’s works, Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing and Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse. For Barratt, psychoanalysis is fundamentally "eine psychologie der Verdrängung" (Bar84 65), and the repression here is essentially one that splits the subject, creating what he calls in the latter book, "contradictoriness" (Bar93 38). Though I wish Freudian theory had unambivalently embraced something akin to Barratt’s "contradictoriness," it seems, among other problems of such a reading of Freud and such an appeal for legitimacy (the proper legatee, the rightful heir), that a decision has been made about what I consider to be the undecidable of Freudian repression: with Barratt we are not talking about the repression of 1915 where one (original) identity is not allowed translation into another identity, but a repression that constitutes a division of radical alterity–that is, something closer to the rather vague theory of repression of Freud’s early psychoanalytic work, or a theory of repression that might come out of a patchwork of Freudian theories, or aspects of them. As I argue below, Barratt’s conception of Freudian repression is a repetition of Derrida’s privileging of an otherwise repression in his reading of Freudian theory, a type of repression that has little to do with an "interdiction of translation." In fact, Barratt’s debt is more to Derrida than to Freud. It is a possible case of deconstruction finding itself when psychoanalysis is found, but one that doesn’t problematize the finding/found/finder according to "itself" or the finding, etc., en abyme. Barratt seems to find a paradoxical deconstructive truth when he finds psychoanalysis.

As Cornell argues, Lacan represses the otherwise Freud, but he does so, contrary to Cornell’s argument, by continuing the trend in Freudian theory to reappropriate those Freudian elements that can only be uneasily contained by logocentric repression to "the Freudian cause" and the determinism of a Symbolic. What Cornell calls the "crude fix-it" therapies of many contemporary schools of psychoanalysis with names that unreflectively use terms like "self," "subjectivity," and "ego," reveal an allegiance with the teleology, essentialism, ego-centrism, and drive toward totality of what I will argue is the "mainstyle" of Freudian theory during and after the war years. In other words, it is difficult for these concepts of "self," "subjectivity," "ego" to escape their roots of simple self-reflection, simple identity, completeness, cohesion, and agency. Though Lacan subverts traditional notions of self, subject, and ego by making the linguistic turn in a structuralist mode, Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis based on a logic of lack, centered as it is on its specific absence of "castration-truth," represses whatever "uneasily contained elements" of Freudian theory there might have been–those elements that might have lent themselves to a "logic" of dissemination–making Lacan’s return to the "mainstyle" Freud a faithful one. Like Cornell and Barratt, Lacan essentializes Freud according to one pole of the mobile-immobile axis of (non)origins I have constructed here, though his reduction is the opposite of the others. Weber and Derrida seem to possess a similar position with respect to this axis, though they both seem to give more weight to the establishment aspects of Freudian theory than does either Barratt or Cornell. Both Weber and Derrida recognize the dominance of the establishment Freud, but read aspects of his theory as at least suggesting what Derrida calls a "scene of writing" of différance. I argue below that, for both, their readings of Freud seem to be largely influenced by their unambiguous readings of what I find to be a more ambiguous, if not paradoxical, fundamental concept of Freudian theory: the primary process. As I argued with Weber before, Derrida at times decides the undecidable essence of Freud’s take on the primary process as being one of mobile cathexes rather than original identity ("perceptual identity" and "original experience of satisfaction"). Thus Weber and Derrida, I argue, seem to give Freud too much "credit" for being "otherwise." My position, which is ironic given my Derridean critique of Lacan that follows, is closer to what I read as Lacan’s position (albeit an unwitting one) with respect to this axis: I read Freud as being more true to an ontotheological discourse of truth, an oedipal totality, than the Freuds I read in the readings of Weber and Derrida–that is, Freud is for the most part true to a truth to which Lacan faithfully returns.

I have tried to show in previous chapters that the establishment Freud has been evident even in Freud’s most "otherwise" moments–that is, moments that do posit a division of radical alterity, and don’t posit an Other that is merely other, merely a variation of more of the Same. What makes Freud so difficult is that there are also "otherwise" aspects to his most "establishment" works. Cornell writes that "psychoanalysis begins with the differentiation of unconscious from conscious objects" and qualifies this claim with "simply put." He may have moments at the beginning of his theorizing, but, as I try to show here and in previous chapters, even those moments are "disrupted" with consoling cohesion of system and origins of identity. Freud wrestles with many differentiations, and at times the unconscious does seem quite "otherwise" from consciousness, especially with respect to its timelessness, its overdetermination, its supposed a-logic that allows for contradictions to exist side by side, and its mobile cathexes. When discussing the "navel of the dream" there are, as Weber makes clear, hints that Freud might see the mycelium of the mushroom as something, not just unknown, but unknowable: potentially beyond theory and even Freud’s speculations. As with the unconscious he describes, however, his theorizing contains contradictions side by side, and these "otherwise" tendencies are made at best undecidable as they are linked to the universal Oedipus complex Freud posits as his caput Nili, which is ultimately his origin of the psyche and a rather detailed description of the roots of the mushrooms and the stuff of his mycelium. Timelessness accomodates a phylo-"genetic" pre-origin, overdetermination is better translated as deeper determination or higher determination, and the "contradictoriness" accomodates a center of absence, where what is Other is reduced to a simple other and (op)positionality, and what I later call the "trauma"-castration trope. What might have been the unknowable is later what is merely uncomfortably known by civilized individuals and therefore hidden from themselves: Freudian theory potentially spans from a radical division between potentially radical alterities, to a minor split between incompatible identities. The split subject of the later Freud is more the latter: not radically split.

With Freud’s Oedipus, psychoanalysis becomes more the master of the beyond than that "science" that extols and warns about the powers and mysteries of the beyond. Indeed, it becomes a mode of fix-it therapy where cure is brought about via the revelation of the predetermined truth of the unconscious: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden." There is nothing radically different about the id in this "establishment" system, and cure is merely a process of colonization of the id by the ego. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Freud even seems to change his mind about what is for many his Copernican breakthrough regarding the relative power of the id and that of the ego:

Here the pleasure principle seems to be in league with the ego, rather than its adversary, which suggests that, for the older Freud, the mobile cathexes we might associate with the pleasure principle and the id are no longer privileged over the original perceptual identity when confronted with the undecidable of the primary processes. In other words, and as I show below, the theories of the Freud of the mid-twenties justify the name "ego psychology," which was chosen by his American legatees to represent their form of psychoanalysis.

The "otherwise" moments of Freud’s theory, seemingly more concentrated and left more open in his early works such as the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams, do not, indeed cannot, constitute some semblance of a "mainstyle" of psychoanalysis without betraying much of this older Freud’s, the psychoanalytic Freud’s work. Despite Freud’s railings against philosophers and their systems, their cosmologies, what Freud refers to as a Weltanschauung, the "establishment" Freud constructs quite a Weltanschauung, which essentially negates these previous otherwise moments–though Freud doesn’t acknowledge this, whence the complexity of reading him, especially his later works: he rarely, if ever, simply abandons a theory. There seems to even be a progression of his work–or regression away from the limit that constitutes a beyond, or a retreat away from some supposed "graphematics still to come"–toward the securing of this Weltanschauung against any disruptions, especially the "internal" disruptions of previous moments, earlier "uneasy elements": like an ego attempting to bind unbound and disruptive quantity. Any reading of Freud’s works becomes complicated by the asystematicity with which Freud makes his progression towards this system–often using asystematicity to obfuscate what are "clearly" disruptions to his progression, to rationalize the effects of the irreducibility of division for any totalizing "act of establishment." Derrida’s otherwise legendary respect of context fails him at moments in "To Speculate–on ‘Freud’" when he doesn’t take into consideration the aspects of this progression that occurred between the Project and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida’s two focal texts of Freudian theory besides The Interpretation of Dreams. For example, and as I will argue below, Derrida privileges a type of repression more in harmony with the The Interpretation of Dreams over the more contemporaneous, and radically different translation repression of 1915 in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which I believe in some way accounts for his "finding" Freud to be more "otherwise" than I "find" him.

The Jenseit of Freud’s early theorizing is called the unconscious, and the topographic model lends itself to a single line of demarcation. The question, "beyond to what?," becomes more complex with the introduction of the economic model, especially since the two models do not lend themselves to any simple superimposition: for example, the system Pcs.-Cs. is certainly wholly part of the ego, but the ego is largely unconscious. In The Ego and the Id, Freud argues for three beyonds of the ego: external reality, the superego, and the id (XIX 57). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the pleasure principle is the focus, even though it is usually associated by Freud and his followers with what was originally considered the Jenseit: the unconscious and the id. In other words, what was considered the essential principle of the unconscious, the pleasure principle, and therefore of the beyond of consciousness, was now that which required another beyond, another dividing line. In this sense, the pleasure principle seems to be a stable and known thing to Freud, which suggests that the beyond would be something not known: again, we return to the question of the nature of something beyond being unknown versus unknowable, and, as Derrida argues, whether psychoanalytic reason is hermeneutic reason.

As I touch on above, Freud complicates matters more when the pleasure principle is associated with, put in the service of, the ego via its signal of unpleasure. Here the confusion of what constitutes a beyond, what is the relationship of this beyond to the ego (indications of reality) and to the id, and what is dominant with respect to the ego and the id (the w and the y system), are all revisited. What follows does not try to decide where to place the proper lines of demarcation with respect to either the topographic or economic models, or with respect to an oikos and a beyond, or whether the ego or the id is the dominant "agency." Instead I intend to show, following Derrida, how the establishment Freud does not "always [return] us to the problematic of Jenseits, the other side," but rather works toward creating a totality based on original identities of a priori bound quantity and quality, the original cathexes that constitute not only an invariable ontogenetic origin, but a phylogenetic truth and teleology. Proper placement of a horizon or boundary is not an issue without a beyond. In "Speculate," Derrida shows that Freud never commits to (posits, positions) a beyond of the pleasure principle, and that the compulsion to repeat and the unbinding Freud associates with the death drive–certainly candidates for a beyond, and possible evidence of something "totally other," as Derrida makes clear–are mastered through Freud’s own fort/da of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: hypothesized as a beyond (fort!) only to be taken back and incorporated into his PP totality (da!). Even trauma in the form of some kind of violence coming from the "outside," what might have been the chance of "external reality" flooding and overwhelming the deterministic stereotomy of this psychic reality, is posited as a returning and reduced to castration, the centering absence that structures his stereotomy of psychic reality, and the origin and end of his masterplot. All possible beyonds, all chance, all evidence of something totally other that might prevent the mastery of the PP, are mastered and incorporated by the PP.

Cornell–like Barratt, Weber, myself, among others represented here–reads psychoanalysis in a mode influenced by Derrida and deconstruction. Like Barratt, Smith, and Kerrigan, Cornell supposes a psychoanalysis that is fundamentally akin to deconstruction, one that calls upon its legatees to be "true" to the beyond of the unconscious. This is how she finds psychoanalysis, and, in the interest of a ghostly inheritance, I repeat Derrida:

Here we "find" the dissimulated mise en abyme, and dissimulation of the dissimulation (Weber), of the self-addressed and self-posted post card, the "post" as the repetitive "act of establishment" (Barratt) of any identitarian institution. If psychoanalysis finds itself when it is found, it must be a transcendental truth that is found and informs the finding. Thus it would seem that one can only be true (again, no quotes) to psychoanalysis by reducing the beyond (what is to be found) to more of the same (what informs the finding), as Lacan does. Ultimately what is at stake here is not only the "truth" of psychoanalysis–is it a discourse of truth? a totality? a teleology? the mapping of destiny? an ontotheology?–but also truth itself, as Derrida suggests in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. An extension of this issue of psychoanalytic truth is whether one can be "true" (quotes required) to psychoanalysis by being "true" to a beyond of radical alterity (what Cornell criticizes Lacan for not doing)? Is there a psychoanalysis of the beyond, an otherwise psychoanalysis, eine andere Psychoanalyse, to which I can/should be "true" in a mode that pays respects to, for example, Levinas and Derrida? Is there a way to speculate on such a psychoanalysis without risking a play at (self)mastery, fort/da: to speculate, on "Anders"? To find myself in eine andere Psychoanalyse? To find myself by playing "fort!" with Freud? By posting psychoanalysis? Can there be a psychoanalysis, a partial, non-totalitarian psychoanalysis, that informs the finding but does not predetermine what is found? That respects the otherness of the other? And, if not, does an adestinational "posting" of psychoanalysis help? And what are the problems with such a posting? Such epochal thinking that supposes psychoanalysis and denies any ghostly inheritances? Wouldn’t a post(al)-psychoanalysis be oxymoronic, if not a form of Haraway’s "ironic allies"? Can one avoid fort/da games and discourses (an oikos and oikonomia) of truth and mastery as one establishes one('s relationship to a certain family, genealogy, and legacy of discourses) via writing?

Derrida seems at times ambiguous on the issue of whether there is something like an "otherwise" psychoanalysis to be "found" in Freudian theory, and unambiguous at other times. The opening of "Freud and the Scene of Writing," I repeat, is suggestive with respect to the complexity of his position on this issue. He explains his work on psychoanalysis preceding "Scene" as,

Despite this reticence, he does find more hopeful moments of Freudian theory with respect to his complex ethos:

Supposedly, some of the concepts that belong to "the system of logocentric repression" of the written trace overlap or harbor "elements" which "can only uneasily be contained" within the closure of that system. These elements, however, could not constitute a system, an a-systematic system, or a "mainstyle" to which one should remain "true" (quotations pointing to the abyssal effects of such an a-system on truth), and neither could they constitute a "Freud," as with my "otherwise Freud." The question of the "otherwise-ness" of psychoanalysis concerns the "historical originality" of the Freudian breakthrough--indeed, whether there is a breakthrough: "If the Freudian breakthrough has an historical originality, this originality is not due to its peaceful coexistence or theoretical complicity with this linguistics, at least in its congenital phonologism" (ibid.). For Derrida, it seems clear, whatever breakthrough there might be would be something that disrupted notions of truth and the types of discourses on which these notions rely, rather than a discovery of some truth that would legitimate a "certain" legacy (Lacan) or one that is not so certain (Barratt et al.). For Lacan and his phonologistic linguistics, a discourse of truth, a "negative theology" (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) of "castration-truth" (Derrida), the Freudian breakthrough was Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its relationship to lack, a discovery which seemed to lack only Lacan’s systematic misreading of Saussure’s linguistics. Here castration becomes the primary mode of logocentric repression, where the metaphysics of presence/absence is the basis of a hom(m)osexual cosmology. For Barratt, Cornell, and others, being "true" (quotations necessary) to Freud is being "true" to a beyond that complicates truth and its discourses. Despite being in debt to these thinkers (and, yes, maybe because of it), I see this legacy and its claim to legitimacy as a contradictory position with respect to discourses of truth, and the product of deciding undecidables of Freudian theory, if not of a misreading of Freud that stems from privileging "uneasy elements" of his theory that were negated by subsequent aspects of his theory that were more than mere elements. In sum, much is at stake, and the stakes are interdependent: logocentricism, phallocentrism, a Jenseit, language, partiality versus totality, truth, (non)origins, essentialism, determinism, chance, their relationship to Freudian discourse, how to read Freud, and whether the Freudian scene of writing is one of translation or différance, immobile or mobile texts, lack or dissemination.

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