"The ‘Uncanny’" and Superstition

I find it intriguing that Freud would argue that he could actively make himself open to feeling the uncanny. More evidence of his sense of mastery over this feeling–to which by definition one would be passive–lies in his later claim that the type of uncanny feeling associated with animistic beliefs does not concern repression–a process to which one is passive–but a process of "surmounting," where one would be a more active participant. Freud puts himself in the category of someone who has gotten beyond sensitivity to this feeling because he has actively rid himself of those remnants, the ghostly remains, of animistic beliefs that cause the uncanny: "anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny" (XVII 248). Perhaps Freud felt he had also "surmounted" the other type of the uncanny, which involves infantile complexes, by way of his self analysis, where Freud, via a certain activity, is able to subvert his own theory of one’s passive relation to the unconscious.

Of course, Freud’s own works, and those of his biographers, are filled with clues that, far from being insensitive to this type of feeling, Freud was acutely sensitive to them, and to the conflicts such beliefs would cause for the leader of a movement that is trying to establish itself as a science and that often must do so by fending off accusations that psychoanalysis is akin to, if not an example of, occultism. According to Jones, Freud’s "wish to believe [in occultism] fought hard with the warning to disbelieve" (Gay88 444). Jones writes the following in his most orthodox biography of Freud:

This simultaneous "acceptance and rejection" would be a form of Freudian disavowal and a similar alogic as in Freud’s conception of the fetish. Given the definitive statements he makes, such as the one above about his insensitivity to uncanny feelings, it seems that Freud actually found it quite easy to disavow his superstitious beliefs, even though he would argue at other times they were either partially true (aspects of occultism) or wholly true (telepathy). At times he would even vehemently attack superstitions, occultism, and religion as if they were the enemy in a war. According to Peter Gay, Freud’s "view of religion as the enemy was wholly shared by the first generation of psychoanalysts" (Gay88 533n), and this view was extended to superstitions and occultism. Those beliefs of Freud’s that other psychoanalysts would classify as superstitious in other people, as Freud would also do in his more secular materialist moments, might be compared with his Lamarckian mythology of phylo-"genetics": both were somewhat suppressed by Freud and the psychoanalytic orthodoxy, and both have a similar relation to science and to the issue of determinacy versus contingency–that is, both superstition and Freud’s phylo-"genetics" are ultimately deterministic beliefs.

An example of Freud’s superstitious beliefs is given in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where Freud finds a hidden meaning regarding the number 2,467, which he had written to Fliess regarding his guess at how many mistakes The Interpretation of Dreams contained. After relating the number to the retirement of a general he knew, and then the manipulation of the number of years he had until his own retirement, subtracting, then dividing … he came up with the number sixty seven, and interpreted this as a wish to have just a few more years of life–that is, not to die at age sixty two, the age his father had died, and the age he was sure he would die. Seven or so years after writing this passage in Psychopathology, Freud would begin writing "The ‘Uncanny.’" He would write over a period from when he was about fifty eight to sixty three, including this passage:

Did Freud see himself as such a hardened man, with "a special obtuseness in the matter"? Or did he see himself as a less special man, one who would be tempted to "ascribe a secret meaning"? The "lure of superstition" is not to have to speak of "chance." Freud’s quotes around "chance" suggest a certain disdain for what would be this more common sense conclusion. Freud suggests that what is difficult is not the hardening of oneself, but the acceptance of a certain fate and the "involuntary repetition" it enforces–that is, ultimately giving up a certain bad faith of having choice and of there being chance.

Fate’s lure for Freud is its determinism. For Freud, the evidence of the 2,467 example is, not necessarily the truth of Fate and related superstitious beliefs, but the proof that there is no chance in psychic reality, and that there is nothing beyond his theory of wish-fulfillment: nothing beyond the PP and its/his mastery. But Freud’s point with the number sixty in "The ‘Uncanny’" goes beyond psychic determinism. Freud wrote this essay right after the Wolf Man case where he struggled so with the contingencies of "external reality," and the problems these contingencies created for the development of his masterplot. This is not an example of unconscious fantasy filtering out other numbers (anticathexis of sorts) and investing in the one number (hypercathexis), which would be a typical psychoanalytic interpretation, if not simply a Freudian one. For the number to indicate a destined "span of life allotted to him," of course, there would have to be Fate: a cosmological determinism.

The imbrication of themes we find above–themes of a general determinism, a powerful Other that constitutes one’s fate, one’s passivity to this Other, chance, one’s connection to a parent (in this case, the father), and death–are repeated in Freud’s later essay, "Femininity," with respect to the child’s relation to the mother. Freud writes, after discussing one of the child’s early reproaches of the mother, "that it never gets over the pain of losing its mother’s breast" (XXII 122). He then claims a universality of the fantasy of being poisoned by the mother:

First of all, Freud would often claim the truth of what he had formerly posited as a children’s theory, as he did with castration. Freud associates truth with what is archaic and primitive. Another example would be the childhood belief in "the omnipotence of thought" and Freud’s belief in telepathy (see Freud’s essay, "Psychoanalysis and Telepathy" (XVIII)). What I want to draw attention to here, however, is the imbrication for Freud of animistic beliefs and the mother, and of science and the father: Freud’s gendering of belief systems. As Freud argues, believing in Fate, in a Destiny where there is no chance, would be a primitive belief of "Man/man." Science, on the other hand, teaches chance; it is a mature belief system one hopefully grows into. As one must do with one’s connection to the mother, one must "surmount" animistic beliefs. Soon after the passage above, Freud argues that the "wish to get the longed-for penis" may be sublimated by a woman in the form of a capacity "to carry on an intellectual profession" (XXII 125). Clearly the sciences and intellectualism, and therefore a belief in chance, are associated for Freud with masculinity and by extension with the father, whereas an animistic and primitive belief in determinism is associated with the primitive or archaic connection with the mother and by extension with femininity.

Like Derrida’s reading of Plato’s undecidable use of "pharmakon" as poison/cure, determinism is the poison/nourishment of the mother’s milk–though we might wonder why Freud strangely claims that all poison is nourishment. The poison of determinism for Freud is the separation it causes from the position of masculine science; the nourishment is the potential sense of mastery it provides. Here, from a phallocentric perspective, the figures of both parents are simultaneously "phallic" and castrating. As Plato wrote about the dangers of writing–needing writing itself, and its metaphors, to further his phonocentric and logocentric beliefs–Freud at times disparages the determinism of superstition as he works hard to create a masterplot of totalizing cause and effect. Freud’s repeated return to the themes of the occult and telepathy can be read as Freud trying to have the "nourishment" of both animistic beliefs (determinism) and the "nourishment" of science (the legitimate, masculine authority), the nourishment of both the mother and the father, without the poison of either: femininity/primitiveness and chance, respectively. Freud would associate death with both poisons. He was like a man with two gods: one maternal and one paternal. But both are viewed from a phallocentric position, and in fact the phallic mother might be a compromise figuration of such a conflicted belief.

The connections between the uncanny, superstition, chance, difference, and the figure of woman are revealed in Freud’s treatment of disavowal as a simultaneous belief-disbelief, as the primary defense mechanism of the fetishist against "external reality." Freud’s relationship to superstition and the uncanny can be seen as an example of the "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" (XXIII), according to his 1938 essay title, and concerns the disavowal of perception. The phallic archetype of "perception" here is the perception of the "reality" of woman’s castration. A secret of Freud’s 1938 essay is that splitting is the defense of (op)positionality in the "face to face" with an Other that is irreducible to a One via twos, threes, absences, presences, theses, antitheses, or the kind of Aufhebung Hegel defined as preserving both the thesis and antithesis, rather than negating either or both. This is the type of Aufhebung the fetishist tries to realize: a preservation of both the phallic mother and the mother of castration (castrated and therefore potentially castrating). The fetishist cannot decide between giving up the jouissance the oedipally individuated subject might associate with the former (being One with Fate or God) or the possibility of the position of scientific master the latter holds out as lure through the reduction of woman to castration-truth where lack has its place (the hom(m)osexual One). We might say that there are three demons under the employ of psychoanalysis: "external reality," ontogeny, and woman. With the determinism of Fate associated with the phallic mother, the chance of "external reality" cannot disrupt the movement toward the totality of the masterplot. The phallic mother, however, is a mother, and therefore does not allow for a simply masculine position of power. With a masterplot based on primal narratives free of all-powerful mother figures, it can position a masculine One. But this masterplot lacks the cosmological determinism of an "external reality" where ontogeny is determined by Fate: it contains the chance of what is figured from a phallocentric perspective as paternal science. Freudian psychoanalysis attempts to reduce what is totally other and full of contingency to (op)positionality and determinism via the trope of castration. Behind the "three demons" mentioned above is the Other, even though these three demons to the One are also employed as dissimulators: they all are the products of idealist binaries. Chance is rarely if ever used by Freud, and yet it haunts psychoanalysis.

Ironically, Freud’s work is full of the very animistic beliefs he claims to have surmounted: for example, the omnipotence of thought (privileging of psychical reality, the truth of telepathy) and what he calls the displacement of the symbol for the thing itself. The latter is especially evident in Freud’s treatment of castration as a reality. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the splitting of the ego of disavowal concerns "the primary defense consisting of a radical repudiation and the notion that such a mechanism bears specifically upon the reality of castration" (Lap67 119).

Or we might ask: what is Freud disavowing when he refuses to see the non-reality of castration? For Lacan, psychosis is the product of foreclosure: a radical repudiation of the truth of castration and the reality it founds. Laplanche and Pontalis begin to ask the questions that subvert this castration truth, but seem incapable of seeing the idea that "woman is castrated" as a projection of the "hom(m)osexuality" of psychoanalysis, and itself a disavowal of difference beyond (op)positionality. Castration is the disavowal of sexual difference, and here I mean sexual difference beyond the traditional binary of male/female. In other words, this binary of "sexual difference" is itself a disavowal of difference, a reduction of something totally other to an idealized binary. Freud’s reduction of what is totally other to man/woman is then followed by a reduction of woman to castration, so we are left with two (op)positions (having/not having) of One sex: hom(m)osexuality.

Lacan’s introduction of foreclosure and his definition of the Real in terms of woman and God in Encore belies the rigidness of the "castration-truth" of his psychoanalysis: in many ways, he takes this logic of lack to its end. Lacan’s psychotic lacks the "anchoring point" that stops the supposed sliding of signifiersin the Symbolic, but then reduces this sliding and its "chaos" to a specific absence "related to a conceivable presence": "trauma"-structure. Lacan’s position, however, is clearly one of disavowal trying to maintain an Aufhebung that preserves mutually exclusive opposites since the Symbolic is both fixed as the law of the father and in motion as the maternal other. Freud’s position is also consistently one of disavowal with respect to sexual difference, superstition, and contingency–and, by extension, the uncanny. His disavowal, and the subsequent splitting of the PP, concerns his own position in relation to these themes. Castration logic is necessarily doubly split with relation to woman: "she" is both present (as (op)positional other) and absent (with respect to the One of hom(m)osexuality). She is "~~Woman~~" (Encore), but this should be read differently than Derrida’s use of erasure, where the term has a use within logocentrism and under erasure. Derrida’s erasure attempts to acknowledge différance and the necessity of "logo-phonocentrism":

The line through the Lacanian "~~Woman~~," on the contrary, is part of this dissimulation and censorship of the text and its différance. What I am trying to argue here is that this line, as with Derrida’s erasure, requires a double reading, but the difference is that the double and aporetic reading of Derrida’s erasure is between the (op)positionalities of binaries and différance, rather than between the presence and absence of one pole of the assumed-natural binary: they are at different levels of the triple (self-)deception, and radically different with respect to awareness of the irreducibility of division and its applicability to their own project. In other words, Derrida’s erasures are intended to be done without dissimulation, or with as little as possible, whereas Lacan’s "~~Woman~~" requires a logic of disavowal with respect to the division of the Lacanian project. Derrida’s erasures denote a double game, whereas Lacan’s erasure of "Woman" is the primary trope employed to establish a single game of "castration-truth"–and this supposedly singular game is actually divided, as any totalitarian game would be due to the irreducibility of division. The "Woman" must be a "hysteric" in Lacanian psychoanalysis: she must be divided with respect to existence.

The phallic mother is the fetishist’s compromise figure, the perverse ego ideal. From an oedipal position, however, this figure is psychotic: it threatens the patrocentrism of oedipal positionality based on the male/female binary and is therefore still associated with castration with respect to the oedipal One this binary serves–that is, even though the phallic mother is intended to nullify the very issue of castration. The phallic mother short-circuits the actual phallic function by mixing the two poles of the binary, which constitutes "her" form of castration for the oedipal One. Though it attempts to deal with castration, the "problem" of the One, the phallic mother subverts the very binary foundation that castration "solves" by providing an identity-difference term. The fetishist’s "solution" subverts the "solution" of the oedipal One by subverting the binary of male/female, which thus makes the fetishist seem psychotic to the oedipal subject. The difference between the oedipal One and the fetishist is that the former relies on the logic of lack and the actual phallic function to achieve his position (or her (non)position), whereas the fetishist relies on a logic of disavowal with respect to castration. The oedipal One and the actual phallic function, however, also rely on a logic of disavowal, but with respect to the presence and absence of woman, rather than the presence or absence of the maternal phallus. Despite these differences, both positions suffer from a splitting of the ego since both rely on a logic of disavowal: "solutions." Whereas the phallic mother is a non-solution because it disrupts "castration-truth," the "hysteric" and "~~Woman~~" are two similar, if not the same, "solutions" of "castration-truth" and the disavowal of the irreducibility of division. When Lacan mourns the loss of traditional hysterics, he is mourning the version of this "solution" that exists.

The phallic mother is a psychotic and destabilizing figure within an oedipal patriarchy, and therefore cannot be the ideal of Freud’s masterplot. The lure of this figure, however, is the lure of an even more totalizing masterplot than that which can be had within the oedipal "solution." Freud associates this "solution" with science and its acceptance of chance, and this chance provides the limit of what the masterplot can master, the limit of the PP: chance as what is beyond the PP. The animistic beliefs of superstition, associated with the primitive of Man/man, and therefore with the mother, and the Gestalt of the mother-infant monad/dyad, combine with the phallocentrism of Freud’s oedipal patriarchy to make the phallic mother a figure combining phallic totality and maternal totality. Freud’s fantasy of combining occultism and psychoanalysis can be construed as a fantasy of absolute mastery with no loss: like a fetishist’s fantasy of total determinism, with no loss, but one that is ultimately split along the dividing line of a disavowal. Another way of conceptualizing this dividing line is with respect to the subject-object split required in the logic of phallic mastery, and the mise en abyme of what appears as a fusion with the mother from an oedipal position–accepting the truth of "animistic beliefs" as regressing back into fusion with the mother. Jouissance would be both the pleasure of the "oceanic feeling" of such a "(dis)solution" and the terror of falling into the void. From a phallic position, such a fall would be a castration, a death.

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