The Beyonds of Freud’s Case Work

There are profound connections between the various beyonds of Freudian theories, and their related and various (non)origins. These connections are also related to the connections Freud makes between sexuality and (dis)order. In 1896, at the height of the "seduction" theory, the origin of hysteria was a sexual trauma experienced during childhood and then activated during puberty through the deferral Freud called Nachträglichkeit. The beyond here was the repressed memory of the childhood sexual trauma and the conflict it created for the patient in developing into a mature, sexual adult–all of this being a part of the patient’s unconscious. The source of the trauma, the caput Nili, was a violence originating in the external world, and, as I’ve argued before, the chance of "external reality" was limited by Freud when he argued that this trauma was very specific: sexual abuse by an adult, and later by only the father. Freud’s source was a very specific, well-defined disruption to normal development; in a sense, it was a specific re-ordering of a known order by something also known, rather than any uncertain or messy disruption from without or within (as Freud would later theorize trauma). With this early model, there was a qualitative difference between those categorized as normal and those categorized as neurotic: the neurotics had been traumatized in this specific way. The gaps in the narratives these so-called hysterics would tell Freud were, according to Freud at that time, the product of the repression of the memories of this specific violence. The beyonds of external reality, sexuality, and the unconscious are circumscribed via Freud’s strict delimitation of the reminiscences from which the hysteric suffered, and of the unconscious and sexuality that were shaped by these reminiscences.

On September 1, 1897, Freud wrote to Fliess, "I no longer believe in my neurotica" (Mas85 264). And on the following October 15, he would write, "I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood …" (Mas85 272). The psychoanalytic orthodoxy has consistently read these epistolary passages as a simple confirmation of Freud’s abandonment of the "seduction" theory and the beginning of psychoanalysis proper, or oedipal psychoanalysis. In "The Concept of Psychical Reality and Its Traps," Rand and Torok make it abundantly clear that the transition from a memory-based theory to a fantasy-based one is not so simple, and they argue that Freud was "permanently of two minds" regarding the question of whether there was actual "seduction or fantasy" (26) at the origin of the etiology of hysteria or any other neurosis. Though I agree with Rand and Torok that the typical orthodox interpretation of these passages is simplistic and revisionist, the problems with Rand and Torok’s argument are many. These problems, however, help me to illustrate how Freud developed an even more totalizing narrative of the neuroses and of the psyche, during the time of whatRand and Torok call "the magisterial consolidation of psychoanalytic theory" around the time of World War I.

Though Rand and Torok realize that Freudian theory subverts the treatment of fantasy as simply of internal origin and memory as simply of external origin, they treat these two categories as such, at times reducing them to "false" and "true," respectively (24n). It is to Freud’s credit that he at times complicated and intertwined the two in the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams, among other places, though he too would also often reduce fantasy to "falsehood" and memory to an unmediated imprint of the subject’s experience of objective reality or "truth." Despite these common and confusing lapses, there was for Freud, when pressed, no ontogenetic memory unmarked by fantasy, and no fantasy that was not in some way the product of some kind of memory (ontogenetic or phylogenetic).

Rand and Torok interrogate Freud’s position on their question: "Is what patients say about their childhood experiences true or false?" Regardless of being stuck in what might be considered a rather unpsychoanalytic terminology, they prudently point out the importance of this question by pointing out how damaging it could be to a survivor of the Shoah for an analyst to treat his or her memories as if they were fantasies. They might also have pointed out how damaging it can be to treat fantasies as memories, though this danger is rarely discussed in certain revisionist psychoanalytic circles due to the necessary reappraisal of the extremes of the psychoanalytic orthodoxy with respect to imposing or enforcing oedipal fantasies as truth and therefore as therapeutic. After documenting Freud’s equivocation and sometimes bizarre twists of rhetoric between 1897 and 1924, Rand and Torok conclude that "[b]ecause Freud could neither reject nor accept the reality of infantile traumatic sexual events, he emphasized in 1916 the value of a hybrid concept, psychical reality, in which truth and falsehood coincided" (37). Rand and Torok’s argument breaks down when they fail to see that Freud’s conception of truth is not always or fundamentally the same as theirs–that is, truth for Freud is not the faithful representation of objective reality as Rand and Torok seem to assume it is. Moreover, they incorrectly conclude that "psychical reality is for Freud the falsification of objective or material reality" (38). This latter statement is complicated by the fact that "psychical reality" includes both the unconscious and conscious, and truth, reality, falsehood, etc., will be different with respect to both, though not always necessarily. In other words, and as Lacan emphasizes, psychic reality can be a lie and true at the same time.

Rand and Torok’s argument, however, is particularly off with respect to truth, which they treat simplistically and as if it could ever be extra-tropological. Psychic truth for Freud is less the correct representation of reality, one type of correspondence theory, as it is the correct representation of the beyond of the unconscious–another beyond, and another type of correspondence theory. The truth of psychic reality, not external reality, is what is privileged by Freud. It is consistently the object of his studies. Lacan is helpful here as he treats deception and lies as evidence of the truth (Lac77b 139-140). The Freudian and Lacanian truth is supposedly unbearable, traumatic even, and this is why it is repressed by consciousness. It is not that trauma is a "face to face" with something totally other, but an encounter with a truth of some sense: the supposedly castrating truth of castration. Rand and Torok wonder "what provoked Freud’s choice of the term reality (even if psychical) to designate what, in the same lecture, he keeps calling invented stories, fictions, falsehood, and falsified memories" (38). For Freud, the reality and truth of psychic reality is more "real" than material reality, and yet Freud falls into the same problematic equation of truth and reality as he tries to present his theories as scientific, not being able to come to terms with the consequences of his "otherwise" moments on truth and science. He avoids problematizing his own position with respect to this "truth," and asking questions regarding what is at stake when the object is the split subject and with the mise en abyme of any analytic or theoretical endeavor given this split. In other words, psychic truth-reality is more true for Freud than material truth-reality (whatever this might be):

Freud’s unilateral focus on psychic reality, and his negation of the importance of "external reality" suggests that he would extend this ethos beyond the world of the neurosis to the world in general. Besides not fully appreciating or acknowledging the potential mise en abyme quality of his endeavor–as Derrida asks, "how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its birth?" (Der87a 305)–Freud makes the mistake here of assuming a "material reality" that would not also include a psychic reality, or psychic processing. In other words, Freud assumes an imprint-type memory contradicting his previous work on memory. What is significant here, however, is that "reality" can and should be read as "truth" and should be associated with the psychical world. This reading helps us understand the earlier chapter in Lecture XXIII, where Freud writes, "we should equate phantasy and reality and not bother to begin with whether the childhood experiences under examination are the one or the other" (XVI 368). For Freud, fantasies represent the truth of sexuality in the context of psychic reality. This seems to be an answer of "both" to Rand and Torok’s question–"Is what patients say about their childhood experiences true or false?"–though understandably they would find this answer unsatisfying.

And neither should this answer satisfy us. But the problem seems to me to be less the answer, more the question, and what would constitute satisfaction. Rand and Torok, like Freud, trip over the terms of their question. Another way of addressing what is at stake with Freud’s concept of psychic reality is to approach it with respect to how this concept relates to the changing horizons of what "lies" beyond this type of reality, especially with respect to the issue of chance. I read Freud’s statement from Lecture XXIII above as saying that psychic reality and fantasy represent a truth that overrides anything that might happen in "material reality" or "external reality"–that is, anything that might include chance, according to Freud’s inside (detreminism)/outside (chance) binary. If for Freud the only "beyond" of psychic reality is external reality, this would mean that psychic reality would in effect be a deterministic totality since external reality doesn’t "really" "matter." The other beyonds of this reality might be what lies beyond the navel of the dream, the death instinct, and/or repetition, and what follows attempts to show how Freud–especially the Freud of the Wolf Man case, the Introductory Lectures, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety–attempts to tie all of these "beyonds" together and define them in terms of the truth of psychic reality. This reading of the war-years and later Freud focuses on his attempt to create a system, a totality that connects origins and teleologies, in the form of a narrative, what Peter Brooks calls "Freud’s Masterplot" in his essay by that name.

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