Overdetermination and Chance

Which Freud might this be? Is Freudian theory consistent with the quotations from Freud above? This passage is part of an odd introduction to Derrida’s essay, "My Chances/Mes Chances," since Smith and Kerrigan’s Freud is a Freud that embraces chance, and Derrida mostly focuses on a Freud of strict psychic determinism: the one of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life who proclaims that "[n]othing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined" (VI 242). In fact, Derrida writes about at least two Freuds: one Freud allows for the co-implication of chance and determinism, whereas the other bars any such co-implication within the psychic realm. However, the dominant Freud of Derrida’s essay–indeed, the dominant Freud in general–is the Freud that wants "to efface the appearance of chance" (17). Smith and Kerrigan seem to want to recognize only a supposed otherwise Freud, as if psychoanalysis had always been otherwise, had always been "taking chances" like deconstruction.

The marginalized, repressed, or avoided fragments of the otherwise Freud, however, must be understood in relation to the establishment Freud, as I hope to do here. According to Derrida, these differing collections of "elements" of Freudian theory–those that are more or less easily contained by logocentric repression–are a factor of a certain demarcation made by Freud himself:

This Freudian stereotomy ontologizes a limit between outside and inside where the properties are different in terms of their relationship to chance. In Psychopathology, Freud writes that he "believe[s] in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events" (VI 257). When Freud writes, "we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance" in his study of da Vinci (XI), he is referring only to this "external (real) chance." Psychical events, according to Freud, are never accidental, but follow "the law and necessity of nature" (XI 137). Unlike the chance-filled outside, there is no chance on the inside.

Psychical determinism might seem to conflict with two basic psychoanalytic tenants: overdetermination and overinterpretation. Overdetermination is first used when Freud is grappling with theories of hysteria and the significance of psychical causes versus organic determinants. Eventually Freud uses "overdetermined" interchangeably with "unconscious" since any manifest formation, such as a symptom, would be said to have always had latent determinants, if not manifest ones too. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis use the following for their primary definition of "Over-Determination, Multiple Determination":

Are these the only ways to understand overdetermination? What is the difference between a and b? If the "determining factors" of definition a are "causes," what would be the "determining factors" of definition b? The "elements"? Both the "causes" of a and the "elements" of b are multiple, but these "elements" are meaningless without the organization of the "sequences." These "sequences" are also multiple in that they are arranged hierarchically in terms of "level of interpretation." The multiple levels allow for multiple interpretations, even interpretations that conflict: overinterpretation.

With this compounding multiplicity, it is hard to imagine that Freud insists on psychical determinism. Contrary to Smith and Kerrigan’s assertion that "overdetermination and chance are always co-implicated," there is a profound difference between Freud’s multiplicity and overdetermination and whatever related Derridean concepts there might be (the nonconcept of "différance," Derrida argues, has little to do with indeterminacy or polysemy). Quite clearly, Smith and Kerrigan’s claim regarding the co-implication of overdetermination and chance is contradicted by Freud’s insistence on both overdetermination and determinism being characteristics of the psyche. Derrida’s system of language embraces chance, whereas Freud’s psychical system "effaces" it, as Derrida argues. Freud’s overinterpretation, however, would seem to work against any determinate logic, and it suggests that the "unconscious elements" involved might be undecidables like Derrida’s pharmakon. Overinterpretation would also create space for opposing interpretations, never allowing for a final interpretation: undecidability. Psychical determinism and overinterpretation would seem to be incompatible: if conflicting interpretations are equally valid, then the meaning of any one element would necessarily be the product of chance.

Compatibility between psychical determinism and overinterpretation, however, could be achieved if each level of interpretation corresponded to some level of the psyche. In fact, each Freudian level of psychical meaning has a specific logic appropriate to it. Furthermore, the hierarchical (archeological) metaphor suggests a vertical relationship of interpretation to truth, as Laplanche and Pontalis argue:

The "unconscious formation" thus has a meaning with multiple sources, fanning out like a tree’s root system–but then this system begins to converge at some point, and, as it goes deeper, it becomes like a mirror image of the root system across a horizontal line, converging until it reaches one point at the deepest level, what Freud would later call "the bedrock." Laplanche and Pontalis translate "über" as "deeper" here. Paradoxically, it seems that, for Freud, the deeper one goes, the higher the truth–which makes the translation of "Über-" of "Überdeterminierung" as "multiple" problematic, and the more common translation of "above" or "higher than" more fitting. In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Derrida notes that Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, points out

In fact, "multiple" or "many" is not a definition of "über-" given in Langenscheidt’s New College German Dictionary. The establishment Freud’s fixation on singular sources as the truth of the unconscious puts the emphasis on "Determinierung" rather than "über-," as the Freud of psychic determinism would have it. Moreover, psychical determinism in terms of this truth would seem to cancel out the validity of multiple interpretations if they were conflicting. If each interpretation, however, is appropriate to a specific level, and, if these levels have conflicting logics, then there is a possibility for overinterpretation and psychical determinism to be co-implicated. The question becomes: does the deepest level, the bedrock, have a conflicting logic for Freud? Does it tolerate conflict or multiplicity? Is it essentially defined by, as Barratt argues, "contradictoriness" (Bar93 35).

There is often a curious focus on condensation–though rarely any mention of displacement, if any–when the topic of overdetermination and overinterpretation comes up in psychoanalytic circles, especially in relation to the primary processes. While a single unconscious formation may refer back to myriad "prior" unconscious formations, there is still a sense that these references could maintain a certain core signification–that is, within a singular complex of formations (e.g., Oedipus), or with respect to a certain overriding truth (e.g., "castration-truth"). Defining overdetermination and overinterpretation in terms of condensation, therefore, does not necessarily preclude defining the "über" of both as "deeper." With displacement, however, the signifier can only be arbitrary. In other words, condensation works vertically, whereas displacement works horizontally. The verticality of condensation does not necessarily conflict with a combination of overdetermination and psychic determinism, whereas the horizontality of displacement necessarily does conflict with such a combination: displacement or dissemination necessarily introduces chance.

The mostly vertical metaphor of roots I used before is inadequate to take displacement into account. The primary vertical metaphor used by Freud, the navel, does not allow for either condensation or displacement in any direct way. Condensation demands a vertical metaphor that narrows as it comes up from the deep, whereas the navel does the opposite. In the following passage, Freud mixes three metaphors–the navel, mushrooms, and one more like my root metaphor:

Though the metaphors of networks, branches, meshwork, and mushroom roots all suggest an interpretation of the "über" of Überdeterminierung and Überdeutung as certainly multiple and potentially deeper here ("branch out in every direction"), Freud consistently refers to the source of dream thoughts as coming from below. As the archeologist digs deeper, Freud’s search is often in terms of a singular source or reservoir from whence the dream thought originated, as with Freud’s caput Nili metaphor. Regardless, this passage does leave us with the question of the source(s) of dream thoughts as singular versus multiple and the relation of the determination of the psychic system to either the singular or multiple source(s). Another problem or question that stems from the above quotation concerns how interpretations supposedly never have any definite endings: is there an ultimate source in Freud’s determinism, or does the multiplicity turn into an infinity. Certainly Freud’s many conclusive interpretations in his case studies and elsewhere treat the source of the dream material under consideration as having an ending discovered by Freud.

The mushroom of Freud’s quotation above seems to line up with the manifest dream-thought, while the dream-wish is a product of a deeper meshwork. The navel, however, seems to suggest a deeper level than even the meshwork, or the branches/roots (the network of branches seems to be analogous to the meshwork of roots, both leading to the "world of [dream]thoughts"). This level of "the unknown" is underneath other levels, but seems to determine (psychic determinism) the different meanings (overinterpretation) of the various parts of the meshwork and the mushrooms that grow out of it–that is, it seems to determine both wishes and thoughts. Whether we have a multiple determination Freud, and one who allows for chance or not, seems to be more dependent on the relationship of this deepest level to the other levels, than the multiplicity within the level of the network/meshwork. A related question would be whether "the unknown," what Derrida calls the "inaccessible secret," is ultimately knowable, whether it is "full of sense" (Der98 4). How one answers this question will determine whether "psychoanalytic reason" constitutes a "hermeneutic reason" (ibid.)–that is, whether "the unknown" constitutes a truth that psychoanalysis reveals by going deeper with its interpretations. We are left with the question of whether Freud saw the navel as leading to a secret, to secrets, or to something totally otherwise, and, if sense is found there, whether this secret or these secrets are inaccessible because of their multitude and endlessness, or because of some other cause related to the nature of this secret. For now, suffice it to way, if the relationship of this deepest level, this "bedrock," is like every other use Freud makes of archeological metaphors, then this truth (or these truths) would also be the very foundation of psychic determinism, what Lacan calls "the Freudian cause"–definite and singular.

I argue here that Freud consistently moves more toward a determinist foundational truth as his theorizing progresses with time. Contrary to the Freud of Smith and Kerrigan’s introduction, a Freud of chance whom they ally with Derrida, the dominant Freud in Derrida’s essay, and in psychoanalysis in general, is a superstitious (or even paranoid) Freud–that is, a Freud who does not believe in chance and who sees sense everywhere he looks:

Paranoia could also be considered a form of a "hermeneutic compulsion." Derrida’s "‘normal’ psychoanalysis" is similar to my establishment Freud, and Derrida’s reminder that Freud "says it explicitly," that he does not believe in psychical chance, suggests that the "inaccessible secret" constitutes a truth of sense at "the bedrock" for Freud.

I have attempted here to problematize Freud’s use of the term "overdetermined," which is commonly read as multiple determination and associated with chance. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, "the essential precondition of over-interpretation is to be found in over-determination," which would thus suggest that overdetermination would include chance, since multiple interpretations require a certain undecidability of signifiers. But Freud consistently effaces chance in the psychical realm with his strict division of inside (determinism) and outside (chance), and his circumscription of a singular cause and origin. Freud’s idée fixe with regard to seeing the psyche archeologically permits a possible way of theorizing overinterpretation that does not allow for chance–that is, translating Freud’s "über" in these cases as deeper. The different levels of Freud’s metaphor point to a single source at the deepest level, thus we end up with the identity of multiple and singular determinations in "normal" psychoanalysis. Under the entry for "hermeneutics" in The Columbia Dictionary of Literary and Cultural Criticism, at the "heart of all hermeneutic enterprises is the presupposition that a text, whether legal, religious, historical, or literary, contains a determinate meaning, whose recovery, whether possible or not, is the goal of interpretation" (133). Freud’s "hermeneutic compulsion" thus does the double job of effacing chance while presupposing a determinate meaning and determining a first cause at the deepest level, this "bedrock."

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