From Primary Process to Primal Phantasies

In this section I want to connect my readings of two of Weber’s arguments in The Legend of Freud to show how Freud gets further away from whatever "otherwise" aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams there might be with the "establishment" aspects of his work around the time of the Wolf Man case, specifically his metapsychological essays of 1915. My reading uses and attempts to problematize the point Weber makes that Freud’s conception of repression as "the interdiction of translation" (qtd. in Weber 44) in 1915 contradicts Freud’s conception of the primary process as a mobile textuality in The Interpretation of Dreams. I hope to show how Freud’s conception of the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams is actually more ambivalent than Weber might argue with respect to any non-original mobility of textuality. In Freud’s work of 1915, he seems unambivalently committed to an immobile text of primal phantasies (Urphantasien) and thing-presentations (Sachvorstellung), but this reading of Freud at this point in his work, which is suggested by Weber, is not as contrary to his metapsychological speculations of The Interpretation of Dreams as Weber argues. Despite my problematization of Weber’s argument, there is a definite progression in Freud’s work from ambiguity with respect to an original immobile text in The Interpretation of Dreams to his more unambiguous position of 1915. To follow this progression–the progression of the repression of the erasable trace–I will first summarize Freud’s conception of the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams while showing the paradox at the core of this conception à la Weber, but with an important variation. I will then refer to Weber’s insight regarding Freud’s unacknowledged overthrow of his theory of repression as expressed in his metapsychological essays of 1915. Freud’s "progression" is the repression of the "otherwise" irruptions to his search for a totalizing narrative grounded in a simple caput Nili: the repression of the (mnemic) trace, chance, the "scene of writing" that is not one of translation. This "progression" should be understood as a retreat away from the supposed "graphematics still to come," and a repression of what Derrida considered the "Freudian breakthrough" in the Project.

Weber’s interpretation of Freud’s passage above–"the dream-wish rises [erhebt sich] like a mushroom out of its mycelium"–points us to what Weber argues is the (non)root of the mycelium’s thallus, the (non)origin of the dream. As with his work on hysteria, Freud is often found working back toward a source or origin. Rather than the origin of hysteria, the caput Nili here is the dream-wish, or even the "unknown" of the dream-navel that is before, beneath, or behind the dream-wish. Freud’s approach to dream interpretation at times is interested in revealing the roots of the dream-wish, the simple origin, an original identity. Rarely does he leave these roots as non-roots, leaving them mysterious, and focus his attention on how the dream-wish works its way into consciousness in order to (re)construct the dreamer’s unique relationship to these universal (non)roots, which, as I noted above, is his stated purpose of dream interpretation. At other times, his interpretive goal is like that of the archeologist searching for the oldest artifact: the origin as the artifact that will give him the key to unlock the particular mystery on which he is focused at that time. And at still other times, and as Freud described in The Interpretation of Dreams (IV 277; V 610), he assumes he knows what lies within, behind, under, before, or beyond the navel of the dream, and reduces the dream-work to the translation or encryption of the latent content into its manifest form, as I will show in his interpretation of the Wolf Man’s wolf dream.

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). More specifically the issues here revolve around the question of whether there is an original identity, an immobile text, at the origin–indeed, whether there is an origin, and, according to Derrida, the "intelligibility" (18) of that origin. This intelligibility has to do with whether there is a mobile text posited at the non-origin (making the beyond of the dream-wish ultimately unknowable) or whether there is an immobile text at the origin (making this beyond simply an unknown).

Freud generalizes the significance of his dream theory throughout his psychoanalytic writings, with the assumption being that what he is describing, as in the Project, is a general machine of the psyche, though this more quality-oriented (psychological) machine of The Interpretation of Dreams relies on a simple assumption of qualities, whereas the quantity-oriented machine at least attempted not to assume quality (tried to be a scientific psychology). The general operation of the Dreams-machine, as with the machine of the Project, is theorized as being divided between two processes (often referred to as "functions" in the Project): the primary and secondary processes. These processes explain the relationship between quality and quantity in these dualistic machines. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the primary process is associated with system Ucs. while the secondary one is associated with the system Pcs.-Cs. in terms of the topographical model. The economic definitions of the processes are as follows:

I will argue here that, with the secondary process, quantity or energy is not bound at first: this process is initially the unbinding of the "perceptual identity" (or "primitive hallucination" above) of the primary process, what Freud called "inhibition." As Weber points out, for the Freud of 1915, the hypercathexis of some object in the secondary process, the binding of some quality and quantity, is always the anticathexis of the perceptual identity of the primary process: a translation. Yet, I will argue, even in the earlier definition of the primary process, there is never simply freely floating psychical energy, and the secondary process is always also defined in terms of unbinding as well as binding. Eventually I hope to show that Freud’s supposedly mobile cathexes actually constitute an original identity, a proper oikos (home, economy) of original satisfaction, and that this castration-based oikos is a harbinger of Freud’s "castration-truth" masterplotting, and Lacan’s destinational linguistics, his paradoxically sliding signifiers that are also anchored.

Freud contrasted the "idea" with affect and thus formed yet another dualism of the Dreams-machine, the other important one being the pleasure and reality principles which correspond respectively to the primary and secondary processes. Lacan compares the Freudian "idea" (Vorstellung) to the signifier, but this seems to be exactly what is at issue. In other words, is the Vorstellung a quality dependent on or attached to a specific and original quantity (part of a Symbolic), or simply an arbitrary quality–that is, a signifier which is part of yet-to-be-determined system of signification. Laplanche and Pontalis’ definition above assumes both: on the one hand, "psychical energy flows freely … from one idea to another"; on the other, the "primitive hallucination," what Freud calls the "perceptual identity" (Wahrnehmungsidentität) and psychical energy, tend to recathect "the ideas attached to those satisfying experiences which are at the root of unconscious wishes." How can there be an identity between a quality and quantity when there is the free flow of quantity between whatever qualities? In other words, if the primary process is defined as mobile quantity, how can a quantity be "attached" to a specific quality? How can there be both this mobility and the tendency to "recathect" the primary hallucination–as if the cathexis of this idea could ever be broken within the "memory" of such a system of the original identity? How can there be mobility or freedom and an original identity ("perceptual identity") that determines the system? Also, what would satisfaction be prior to the primary process–that is, prior to the pleasure principle it sets up? Weber’s contrast of Freud’s 1915 assumption of an original identity for his contemporaneous theory of repression with Freud’s conception of the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams seems to decide an undecidable: Weber privileges the mobility aspect of the primary process over its identity aspect, as do Laplanche and Pontalis. The translation-repression of 1915 does not necessarily conflict with Freud’s definition of the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams, especially if the primary process is understood as being a process that is not free in terms of its "memory" of the original identity. Furthermore, Laplanche and Pontalis’ definition also suggests that the quality associated with the quantity of "those unconscious wishes" is not arbitrary (my italics), that there is some necessity, some proper original satisfaction and wish–the typical example being an image of the mother’s breast attached to the experience of satisfying hunger (though this satisfaction must be sexualized for Freud, as we shall see).

Similar to Weber’s position that there is a "secondary-process" aspect of the primary process, the binding of the "perceptual identity" (as if secondary process were synonymous with binding), I find an unbinding aspect of the secondary process that seems to suggest the mobility Freud and others associate with the primary process. The goal of the primary process, as with the "primary function" of the Project, is to get as quickly as possible to a state of zero tension. The preferred strategy of the primary process is via the primary hallucination which allows for the calling up of the mnemic image attached to the original experience of satisfaction, the "primary hallucination." Freud associated this process with the pleasure principle. The secondary process, in the interest of the organism’s survival and the "exigencies of life," defers this binding of quantity and quality, and creates a mobility of quantity–the reality principle and its inhibition and deferral. If the secondary process cannot allow for the rebinding of the perceptual identity in order for its quantity to be attached to a more reality-appropriate quality (what Freud called "thought identity" or "Denkidentität"), the secondary process must then keep the investment of quantity mobile. The mobility of cathexes, therefore, would also be a product of the secondary process.

The mobility of the dream is dream-work or distortion (Entstellt), whereas the mobility of the primary-secondary progression is one of deferral and appropriation to reality. Therefore, the analogy between the mobility of dreams and the mobility of the primary-secondary progression, it seems, would be problematic, unless distortion and appropriation could be the same in some way. Ironically, Freud’s definition of the mobility of the primary-secondary progression is exactly the same as the definition of dream-work: comprised mostly of condensation and displacement. The dream-wish is the input to the dream process, and the manifest content is the ego syntonic output. Could the perceptual identity be seen as the input to the primary-secondary progression, and the thought identity be seen as the Pcs.-syntonic variation of the perceptual identity that both allows for dealing with the "exigencies of life" and the discharge of at least part of the original quantity, just as the manifest content is an ego-syntonic compromise form of the dream-wish? Regarding Freud’s 1915 theories of primal repression and primal phantasies, this equation of distortion and appropriation can be made, as I hope to make clear below. The question becomes whether the identities in question, as inputs or outputs to the various systems in question, can be said to be arbitrary, whether chance is a part of the origins and mobility of these systems and processes.

One thing can be said simply regarding the arbitrariness of the primary process: if the inhibition of the primary process by the secondary process is necessary to the secondary process, the perceptual identity would necessarily be an identity inappropriate to reality. With the primary-secondary progression, we have two identities: percept ual and thought. The former is proper with respect to the pleasure principle, while the latter is proper with respect to the reality principle. That the former is necessarily improper with respect to the latter suggests that the perceptual identity is not arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, there would be some chance of it ending up proper to reality, making inhibition unnecessary.

The paradoxes and problems of Freud’s definition of the primary and secondary processes in The Interpretation of Dreams leave me with many questions. Did Freud conceive of the quality of the perceptual identity as being arbitrary? Did he conceive of the mobility of the primary process, which must succeed the establishment of the perceptual identity, as also preceding it? In other words, did he posit an original identity between the original satisfaction and the quality associated with it? How could there be an identity between them? Did Freud conceive of this "identity" as some proper, original correspondence between quantity and quality? Where does the distortion occur in the primary-secondary progression? Is it part of the primary or secondary process, or both? And why? Is it necessary? Why would the original experience of satisfaction and the quality associated with it necessarily be Pcs.-Cs. dystonic? In other words, why would the pleasure principle necessarily be different than the reality principle? Why is inhibition (repression) required when we seem to be dealing with a progression between one identity and another? Why is there necessarily a split subject with such a progression?

Weber points out that the primary question of "Freud’s differentiation of the psychic apparatus into primary and secondary processes" is "how is libidinal energy bound to representations?" Weber connects this question of binding to the concept of inhibition. Freud at times used the term "inhibition" in the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams as synonymous with "repression" during his discussion of the primary and secondary processes. Yet "inhibition" was not only used, as Weber suggests, to ward off the binding of the perceptual identity in order to allow for the binding of the thought identity of the secondary process, which leads to Weber’s association of inhibition with the stabilization of cathexes. Inhibition should not be seen as "necessary for the stability of cathexes" (Web82 38) since Freud also uses it–as in the case of warding off "hostile mnemic images" (I 324)–as an explanation of how the psyche destabilizes cathexes in order to avoid unpleasure. Weber’s argument is that what is primary "is the notion of inhibition as the necessary condition of cathexis," and that this sets up the primary process as a "theoretical fiction" since the notion of primacy of inhibition is paradoxical: an origin of inhibition always requires something before the origin to inhibit. Weber concludes that Freud’s definition of the primary process is therefore an undecidable in terms of an origin and essence:

Weber’s argument, though complicated by a questionable equation of inhibition and cathexis stabilization–would Freud argue that inhibition is original?–still points to a valuable reading of Freud’s primary process. Freud’s aporetic and ambiguous definition of the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams both opens spaces for "otherwise" readings and sets up the potential to establish an immobile text at the origin. Weber’s reading of this definition privileges the mobility of cathexis rather than original "self-identical objects" in the form of perceptual identities. He reads Freud on the margins–The Legend of Freud–but this reading is incomplete with respect to a central term, "inhibition," which is not just about stabilization of cathexes, and is not original for Freud who posits the "original experience of satisfaction" or perceptual identity as original. If not a clear "shift in conceptualization, from terms that designate self-identical objects, to those that signal irreducible conflict," Weber’s insight is important in that it opens up the possibility that Freud was struggling between these two "positions"–between original immobile texts and the irreducibility of mobile textuality, the latter being more a non-position. I would argue that this struggle, if there was one, had more to do with Freud’s paradoxical definition of the primary process in terms of both a mobility of cathexes and a perceptual identity at the origin, the ending, and throughout the primary process in the form of a "memory" of that process. This supposed struggle seems to be, in general terms, about Freud’s desire to theorize the system Ucs. as both a site of irreducible movement and tolerant of contradiction (the navel of the dream as the unknowable) and the site of a truth, or Truth, he has found (the navel of the dream as the unknown secret). "Castration-truth" creates a pseudo-combination of these two "positions" by transforming the "unknowable" of the former into a "specific" absence: it is a pseudo-combination because the transformation radically changes the former non-positionality into a simple oppositionality. "Castration-truth" transforms what is potentially radically other into a totality of (op)positionality.

In the next section of The Legend of Freud, "Repression," Weber introduces another crucial argument with regard to the struggle regarding the "essence" of the primary process (whether it has an essence) and shows how Freud tries to resolve it in 1915 by committing to the side of original immobility. Weber argues that Freud’s earlier genetic explanations of repression and the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams get trapped by circularity in definitions of a process that assumes an impossible origin that both sets up the process and also contains it: "… to explain repression, Freud posits (setzt) an origin in which it [repression] has already taken place: the constitution of a store of memories, excluded from consciousness ‘from the very first’" (Web82 42). I argue (mostly in the next chapter) that Freud’s solution to this supposed circularity is to posit a phylo-"genetic" "before" for an ontogenetic origin. This "solution," however, has wide-ranging and unacknowledged, if not disavowed, consequences for Freud’s Dream-machine. As both Derrida (Der78 226) and Weber (Web82 43ff.) make clear, Freud’s 1915 attempt to get beyond this circularity by positing an original repression in terms of a certain "fixation" rather than a process of repression cancels out the possibility of defining the primary process strictly in terms of mobile cathexes, a possibility to which both Derrida and Weber seemed attracted to the point of both not taking into consideration the importance of phylogenesis for Freud and the relationship of phylogenesis to Freud’s understanding of the primary process. Freud writes in his 1915 essay, "Repression":

The "solution" of primal repression answers the question of "Freud’s differentiation of the psychic apparatus into primary and secondary processes"–"how is libidinal energy bound to representations?"–with an a priori "fixation" or binding of quantity and quality. This supposed "solution" cancels out the possibility of any undecidability with regard to mobile and immobile texts, origins and non-origins. Though Freud never explicitly theorized the connection between these two "primal" conceptions, lost is any conception of the perceptual identity as arbitrary with the notion of primal phantasies that logically accompanies primal repression. Furthermore, the source of the quality of the "fixation" no longer includes any input from the ontogenetic world and therefore cancels out the chance Freud associates with the external world of ontogenetics (I return to this issue in the next chapter).

Both mobility and chance would be further excluded from the theory of repression posited in Freud’s other major metapsychological essay of 1915, "The Unconscious." Weber argues that Freud in 1915 has returned to a theory of repression that preceded his speculations on the primary process in the Project: what he called in a letter to Fliess "the interdiction of translation." It may be the case that Freud never fully left this theory of repression and that Weber sees this as a return because of his privileging of the mobile-cathexes definition of the primary process to the point of excluding Freud’s consistent focus on the original identity of the primary process, even in The Interpretation of Dreams. In "The Unconscious," Freud’s conception of repression resolves some of the struggles of a primary process that is simultaneously mobile and fixed, but it does so by creating other problems:

The quantity of the original cathexes of the primary process cannot be mobile, and the quality cannot be arbitrary or ontogenetically mnemic: as Weber argues, the language of the "authentic" cathexes of "objects" is contrary to one of mobile cathexes of representations. The language of objective authenticity wipes out the possibility that the "perceptual identity" could have been arbitrary, even though this arbitrariness had also been, paradoxically, part of Freud’s original definition. This passage also disregards the fact that Freud never theorized perception independent of the pleasure principle: he writes of simple "objects." Thing-presentations (Sachvorstellung), the new original identity of Freud’s dualistic progression of 1915, seem to be predetermined cathexes as established in primal repression, therefore not requiring perception for the acquisition of the quality aspect of the original cathexes. A phylo-"genetic" "perception"/"memory" would fit as a replacement to "objects" above–that is, if the pleasure principle could be thought of in terms of this phylo-"genetics," as I will argue it must be.

Freud’s 1915 resolution of the struggle between immobile origins and the mobility of non-origins is simply to repress any possibility of the latter. This resolution wipes out whatever possibility for original mobility or chance there might have been and any potentially otherwise space due to paradox and struggle. The translation of the 1915 progression from thing- to word-presentation (Wortvorstellung) is some kind of encryption or distortion (Entstellung) similar to dream-work, but the theme of authenticity is common to both Vorstellungen, which is certainly foreign to any reading of The Interpretation of Dreams in terms of the arbitrariness of dream-wishes or any potential mobility associated with dream-work (distortion). Freud’s language of authenticity is especially odd given that Freud associates it with both the system Ucs. and the system Pcs.-Cs: as Laplanche and Pontalis argue, "the distinction between [thing- and word-presentations] has an essential topographical importance to Freud" (448). In other words, with the topography of thing- and word-presentations, combined with a metapsychology grounded in primary repression, there seems to be little room for any radical splitting of the subject and arbitrariness of cathexes, and no room for "primary" mobility or chance. Though perceptual and thought identities–and the corresponding primary and secondary processes–are all referred to in construction of the 1915 psychic machine, the mechanics of this machine cancel out the possibility of essential (non-essentialist) elements of the prior definitions of these identities and processes. Of course, translation requires a certain mobility of cathexis, which would correspond to a "certain linguistics" of a proper detour. These earlier definitions, as I have argued above, were problematic and even paradoxical. Though lacking a clear "scene of writing" of mobile texts–perhaps even more immobile than the "scene" of the Project–these definitional problems and paradoxes potentially allowed space for the play of something "otherwise." When phylogenetics is taken seriously, the metapsychology of 1915 avoids becoming irreducibly conflicted and paradoxical due to its dependence on these previous "elements." The result is that, with respect to the psychic machine of 1915, there seems to be little opening of any playful space due to the pervasive identitarian logic and the language of authenticity that is common to both sides of the division of this metapsychology.

As I will further support in the next chapter, the Freudian truth and sense of 1915, in the realms of Sachvorstellung and Wortvorstellung, seem to be predetermined in a Freudian Platonism–one that hearkens back to the "biologically determined" "wishful ideas" and "identities" introduced into the Project to account for the ori gins of the mechanism, and these origins relations to "external reality" and its chance (see I 360-61). The unknown of the dream, the source of the dream-wish, seems, if not already known, certainly knowable. In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Derrida argues that this was true in The Interpretation of Dreams, contrary to Weber’s reading of the "navel of the dream" that focuses on the undecidability of straddling and the non-roots of the thallus. For Derrida, the "navel of the dream" had a sense for Freud; it was an unknown, and not an unknowable: